The USA, predominantly rural, was not as badly affected by the epidemics that had devastated so much of urbanizing Europe in the nineteenth century, and therefore its civic water systems were slower to develop. Where epidemics did occur, water improvements generally swiftly followed. A wave of yellow fever swept Philadelphia in the 1790s, and the city became a pioneer in water supply on the continent. A hundred years later, many American cities had municipal water supplies, although that did not necessarily mean that the water was piped. More typically, cities stored water in tanks and delivered it by wagon to individual houses: across the country, more than three-quarters of all households still had no running water, and those that did were almost entirely urban. Most rural houses had no running water until after World War II.
Many cities also managed without civic sewage systems. Instead, waste disposal was a matter of private enterprise, with householders paying contractors to empty their cesspits. Rural areas had even more makeshift arrangements, or none. In the south, slave quarters rarely had privies, nor did most small farmhouses. Many people simply emptied their waste out of the windows or doors. It is unclear how many households had lavatories connected to the mains – higher charges were levied on those households, and so there may well have been a level of under-reporting – but as late as 1890, in Muncie, Indiana, a city of 11,000 people, fewer than two dozen houses contained bathrooms that included a bath and lavatory. Given the rarity of piped water, it is unsurprising that ‘washing’ usually only referred to the face and hands, and soap was not necessarily part of the procedure: scrubbing with a rough towel was considered sufficient to remove the dirt.
In rural districts, fortunate householders could rely on nearby wells or streams; others simply had to walk long distances. The weight of water combined with the quantity needed for even minimal health made multiple daily journeys inevitable. In 1886, a North Carolina house was located just 55 metres away from a spring. But it took ten trips daily to provide enough water for the household, nearly four kilometres a week, half of that burdened by heavy pails. The centrality of water-collection in daily life may be judged from the fact that, while many poorer nineteenth-century households possessed almost no furnishings or technology by today’s standards, they tended to own and use many, and many different types of, specialized containers for carrying water. Buckets and pails were ubiquitous, as were smaller jugs, pans and other less specialized implements. Many districts also had their own distinct equipment. In Aberystwyth, in Wales, in the eighteenth century, women balanced large pitchers on their heads. In the nineteenth century in Surrey, women walked inside hoops that distributed the weight of the hanging pails, called stoups, more evenly. In the north of England, skiels were tub-shaped containers, wider at the bottom than the top, with a single long wooden stave for a handle. In Orkney, water tubs were hung from sticks and carried between two women on their shoulders.
The quantity of water a household consumed was thus dependent not only on what was available, but on the strength of the women (it was almost always women, or children) who carried it, and the amount of time they were able to give to the task. It frequently took several hours to reach the front of a queue at a public pump in many nineteenth-century English cities, a wait that might lie somewhere between difficult and impossible for women who worked twelve- to fourteen-hour days. Consumption therefore had almost nothing to do with how much water was available; it had everything to do with how much manpower and time each family had to carry the water. Where possible, most houses owned a rainwater butt, but the run-off from a small house averaged little more than 10 litres a head per day for a household of five. In Paris by the end of the eighteenth century, the average consumption of water for all purposes was 5 litres per person per day, which weighs just under 5 kilograms; in Glasgow in the 1850s, it was as little as 3.73 litres per head per day. (The minimum recommendation for health today is 54.6 litres per head per day and average use in England and Wales is between 133 and 154 litres per head per day.) And as there were rarely any drains in working-class housing, everything except the drinking water had to be carried out again to be disposed of.
Little had changed by the early twentieth century. In much of urban and suburban USA, new houses for all but the most impoverished were now being built with running water, and even bathrooms. But older houses were not widely upgraded: back in Muncie, as late as 1925, a quarter of the houses had no running water, and a third were still not connected to the sewers. Britain was little different. At the start of the twentieth century, half of Scottish houses had no running water, and yet many of these were still more than a kilometre away from a regular water supply. Half the working-class housing in London in 1934 had no water supply, the residents relying on outside standpipes, while in the countryside a third of the population had no access to piped water even at the end of World War II. Ireland had less still: over 90 per cent of rural households in Ulster had no piped water as the 1950s began.
For as with lighting, technological development did not follow a linear progression, with one improvement succeeding another. At any one time, a variety of systems of water supply coexisted. The wealthier could select the most advanced if they chose, while many might still have no access, and others only partial access, whether through careful planning, happenstance (plumbing in housing provided by an employer, say) or sheer good fortune. And what today would be considered the minimum requirements were not necessarily a priority to those at the time who had the means to choose. In Muncie, in the first two decades of the twentieth century, twenty-one of the twenty-six families who owned a car had no bathroom.
Piped water was in itself a great convenience, but it altered more than merely hygiene. Cooking had been moving from multi-functional rooms to dedicated spaces, kitchens, long before the kitchen range appeared: ranges merely speeded up a process that was already under way. New bathroom technology, by contrast, provoked an entirely new development in room use. Until running water arrived, washing was something that might take place anywhere in the house: in Britain, at the household’s single sink, often located in the scullery or kitchen, or in a tin bath that could be moved as convenience dictated; in the USA, in New England it was more commonly in the lean-to at the rear, or in the south in a detached kitchen, or in the west outdoors at the pump or a well. In the nineteenth century, the middle classes had turned washing from something done in public spaces to something done in private areas of the house, by confining it almost entirely to bedrooms. Furthermore, where possible, each family member was allocated a ewer and basin of his or her own. Now those living in technologically advanced houses could take this further. A range of hitherto disparate water and cleaning activities, which had taken place across the household, were gathered together in a new space, the bathroom, creating in effect a Frankfurt kitchen for sanitary activities. Manufacturers introduced householders to the ‘suite’: a sink, bath and lavatory, typically all in white, and designed to be plumbed in together not just in one room, but along one wall, with standardized fittings produced, in the USA, by the eponymous American Standard company.
Water, sewage, gas, electricity – these technologies connected the house to the networks of modern life around them, and they also enforced standardization on them. Builders now had to use pipes of a fixed size, and, eventually, to conform to new safety regulations, to wiring of a specific type installed in accordance with legislation. Initially water and waste pipes, breaching the nineteenth-century ideal that houses were ‘castles’, separate from the world about them, were seen by many less as a welcome way of moving dirt away from and out of the house, and more as a troubling innovation that allowed public dirt to enter private homes. An 1877 book intended to guide British householders through the new world of sanitary improvement warned: ‘There are a “thousand gates to death!” Few are wider, or open more readily’ than those that permitted ‘noxious gases’ or ‘bad air from drains’ to enter the house. It was not only waste pipes. Any feature that physically connected
the house to the outside was seen to bring danger. Many householders turned the gas supply off at the mains every night in the same way that they bolted the doors and closed the shutters, isolating the house from the outside world, pulling up the drawbridge. It took time for the convenience of waste disposal, of water – both its arrival by tap, and its disposal by drain – of light at the flick of a switch, to outweigh such fears. The dissemination of the knowledge of germ theory of disease helped, as did new legislation that established basic safety standards for plumbing, wiring, gas lighting and heating systems. Defying Pitt’s certitude of a century earlier, the government was now absolutely obliged to enter the ‘poor man’s cottage’, in pursuit of dangerous wiring.
By the twentieth century, these very technologies, and the legislation relating to them, came to be seen, not so much as invasions of privacy, as the very means to promote it. And this renewed sense of privacy, of withdrawal from the world, in turn encouraged a raft of new purchases for the home to make it even more a place of refuge. These were a new type of commodity, however. They were purchased on the market, as bedding, or curtains, or kitchen units had long been. And, like parlour furniture, they conferred status on their possessors. But unlike these objects, the new goods could not be physically displayed. They were intangibles, what might be termed invisible commodities, and they included hygiene, nutrition, health, transportation, even tidiness and space. By the late nineteenth century, and gathering pace into the twentieth, these invisible commodities joined earlier items of display: all now were used to confirm the status of the household.
The display of possessions had always been moderated by social attitudes. The choice of goods, and how those goods were presented, were as important as the objects themselves. One of the purposes of good housekeeping, advice manuals and public opinion had long agreed, was to enable families to live within their means. Were a household’s decorations and furnishings appropriate for the income and class of their owners? Too showy, too expensive, or too frugal, too modest? Either was a serious error. Display above one’s financial level was a clear indication of profligacy in the wife, and the husband’s ignorance or lack of control; below one’s income, of insufficient ability to navigate the social world. Thrift was not a matter of saving regardless of income, but of judging exactly the right amount of spending, indicating that the family was a good financial proposition: if more money were available (if the husband were to expand his business, gain more clients, or more credit), the wife and children would be able to adapt to the increased status. These judgements were not passed only on those lower down the social scale. In colonial America, houses represented the colony’s survival, ultimately its success, yet John Ratcliffe, briefly the president of Jamestown colony, was described as ‘sillie’ for having built ‘an vnnecessarie pallas in the woods’, a ‘thing needlesse’. ‘Silly’ in the seventeenth century still retained some of its older meaning, naïve, lacking in judgement, but by now it also meant foolish. It was ‘needlesse’, unimportant expenditure that was condemned: not whether someone had the wherewithal to buy something, or use something, but whether what was bought or used was appropriate for that person’s status. Three hundred years later, such an attitude had been well learned by the German child shocked to discover that his grandfather spread his breakfast Zwieback with butter: ‘We had been told that whoever did this, would be put in prison’.
At times, painting made a direct connection between thrift and household happiness. In the Netherlands banketjestukken, paintings of ‘little banquets’, were popular in the 1620s and 1630s, promoting in still-life form the pleasures of sufficiency over excess: a herring, a piece of fruit, or bread and cheese on an earthenware dish, alongside those markers of domestic prosperity and felicity, clean napkins and shining pewter. In eighteenth-century Britain, painters produced a different kind of homage to thrift. As the commodity market exploded, genre-painters immortalized householders in the best, public, rooms of their new houses, resplendent in new silks and velvets, sitting behind new porcelain tea sets. Yet we now know that these paintings frequently did not depict reality, which was of rooms filled, even crowded, with many possessions. Instead they depict almost puritanically bare imaginary rooms, with, as the highlight, just one or two exquisite items of luxury consumption: a sort of super-consumption of restraint (see plate section, no. 31).
The promotion of thrift even as the number of commodities available, and affordable, increased vertiginously as the nineteenth century progressed, endowed the choice of objects with a moral dimension. Magazines assessed the attractions of many of the consumer goods available to their readers, but instead of presenting them as purchases that would cement status or bring pleasure, they gave the acquisition a moral dimension. Commodities might be described as an ‘important agent in the education of life’, suggesting that a family would be improved merely by living with it.
The perfect home was filled with objects that were neither too expensive, nor too cheap, too stylish, nor too old-fashioned. Equally, poor selection could take an otherwise ordinary family and make it into one that was simply not respectable: the husband unsuitable for promotion, the children dubious marriage-partners. Well into the second half of the twentieth century, the difference between respectable and not-respectable working-class households ‘concern only household economy, which is largely the wives’ affair’, and was measured by whether the family ate off a bare table or used a cloth, or used china dishes or tin, had ‘cooked meals, clean clothes’ or managed without owing money to the local tradesmen, a list that slides almost imperceptibly from purchased goods to the intangible, invisible commodities of nutrition, hygiene and thrift.
For much of the nineteenth century the miasma theory of disease transmission – that illnesses bred in decomposing matter and were then spread through droplets carried in the air in the form of a mist, or miasma – was generally accepted. At mid-century, in the Surrey countryside, life expectancy for men was forty-five years; in London, thirty-seven years; and in industrial, overcrowded Liverpool, just twenty-six. (Once the very high child-mortality rates are filtered out, an adult who reached the age of twenty-one could expect to live longer, but the relative differences between town and country remained.) The germ theory of disease, and the knowledge that cholera and typhus were water-borne, won widespread acceptance only slowly in the second half of the century. In 1854, Dr John Snow had identified the source of a localized outbreak of cholera as the contaminated water from a single pump in one street in Soho. But while he was persuasive enough that the parish officers disabled that particular pump, more generally, the miasma theory continued to hold sway. Fortunately, the civic authorities’ campaign to eradicate miasmas led them to adopt the same strategies that would have been the case had germ theory been more generally accepted: improvements to the water supply. During the Mexican–American war of 1846–8, for every death in battle, six soldiers died from disease. By the time of the Civil War in the 1860s, the army had instituted a Sanitary Commission, and deaths had fallen to three deaths by disease for every two in battle.
The campaigns against miasmas turned cleanliness from being a status indicator to being a health issue. And, in the eyes of popular opinion, the central role in this new campaign was to be played by the woman of the house. Housekeeping was no longer a simple matter of keeping the family clean, providing sufficient water to drink. While housewives had always been responsible for food allocation, ensuring that those who needed scarce resources received most, this was no longer enough: meals now had to be nutritionally balanced. Refrigeration, transport, and new methods of food preservation and processing had improved access for many to foods that, in previous centuries, had been unavailable to almost everyone, whether for seasonal or geographical reasons. Fresh fruit and vegetables could now be transported hundreds of kilometres far more cheaply; or tinned and purchased at any time of year; meat could be frozen and transported thousands of miles. And so preventing diseases of nutritional deficiency, su
ch as rickets, pellagra or scurvy, as well as more routine illnesses, became another task for the middle-class housewife. It was she, and not providence, who had now become responsible for what the president of the British Medical Association referred to, in the 1880s, as ‘domestically produced health’.
Yet for the working classes, as well as those who were outright impoverished, good nutrition was an unimaginable luxury, and most continued to eat according to much older patterns, with very different diets in winter and summer. In winter, there was little apart from root vegetables, cabbage, apples, corn or rice pudding or bread, and a few preserved vegetables, in America, most commonly stewed tomatoes; in northern Europe, pickled cabbage or cucumbers; in Britain, little more than onions. Those who could hunt, or who could afford it, ate meat as well. During the ‘hungry gap’, the period when the winter root crops had been exhausted, but the spring vegetables had not yet arrived, the already limited winter diet contracted still further, and many suffered from what was known as ‘spring sickness’, which tonics promised to cure, along with everything from boils, scurvy, scrofula and eczema, even as they ‘purified’ the blood, or the liver, or, more vaguely, helped with conditions such as ‘sluggishness’ or ‘general debility’. The enormously popular Morison’s Pills at mid-century promised more: ‘Morison’s Pills Cure All Curable Diseases’. But all tonics were, in reality, simply attempts to ameliorate the results of poor diet, in particular the widespread lack of fresh fruit and vegetables.
For until the twentieth century, the housewife who was seasonally occupied in bottling or preserving fruit and vegetables (called canning in the USA) was yet another mythical construct. The cost and availability of sugar and the jars, as well as the cost of the fuel, and the amount of time required, put jam- and pickle-making out of reach for many who were low paid or who worked in low-cash economies. Vegetables and fruit were for the most part dried, or simply stored in a dark, cool place. (Books from the nineteenth century did give instructions for all types of preserving, but so do cookbooks today, and only a small minority of people actually do it.) World War I, and its ‘victory gardens’, promoted home preserving as ‘a patriotic duty’ on both sides of the conflict (‘We Can: Can Vegetables and the Kaiser Too’) just as the invention of the pressure cooker and the ever-decreasing price of sugar and glass put this type of food preservation within the reach of many more. As more women withdrew from the labour market, they began to have the time too. Even then, it was a realistic task only for the at least modestly prosperous, or the rural: the urban working classes could not spare the time, had no access to the fruit and vegetables, and little space to store the finished product.
The Making of Home Page 24