Public baths

FelixArchives, Archives municipales d'Anvers, GP#4010, Installation de baignade de la piscine urbaine de la Veldstraat, 1934

The overlooked health provision of public baths retraces for us the history of body hygiene and the inequalities it portends.

   Overlooked, eclipsed by the expansion of the bathroom at the turn of the 50s-70s, the public health provision of public baths offers none the less precious indicators for a history of body hygiene. Aimed through pricing – the lowest possible – at the broadest possible population they tell of the cleanliness of ordinary bodies, marked throughout the 19th and 20th century by significant inequalities. A cleanliness that excluded some – or in any case proved more favourable to well healed males. Inside public baths, class and gender divided and discriminated.

   Ever since the return in favour of “virtuous water” by the end of the 18th century, the public baths would represent a way for municipalities, urban for the most part, to address the question of the hygiene and cleanliness of the poor – and beyond. Indeed, Koch and Pasteur’s oft-mentioned discoveries around micro-organisms had brought about a change of perspective regarding bodily cleanliness. This fresh awareness of germs and their role in the transmission of diseases, shifted concerns from the environment to individuals. It introduced the idea that illness is caused by the proliferation of micro-organisms, the propagation of which can be prevented notably, nay essentially, by body hygiene. Thereafter a wholly novel importance is granted to bathing. Washing, and the means to that end, coalesce in the notion of personal health. In an industrial and bourgeois 19th century’s moral and economic rationale, popular hygiene also went hand in hand with the preservation of the labour force, of the workers’ moral character and of social peace.

   Thenceforward, following the 1842 English model pioneered in Liverpool, most European then American cities would set up public bath houses, that is places where bathtubs and later showers were set up and made available to the populace, each uniquely peculiar to its locality. Nevertheless, several features characterise this type of outfit’s operations throughout Europe and North America, notably their social and gendered inequalities.

   Socially to start with, different bathtub types and different rates between shower and bath defined the spaces. Before showers were brought in, the differences between the types of bathtubs were significant and the gap in terms of comfort huge. In first class: heating, plusher fittings and personal management of the water. In second class: bathtub ready-filled with no option to adjust water quantity or temperature, no heating and minimal fittings. Upon the advent of the “bain-douche”, the difference would apply to the two setups.

   The ‘bain-douche’, what we today call a shower, was devised in the French custodial context by doctor Merry Delabost in 1872. It was later improved by Oscar Lassar, a German dermatologist. Saving time, space and water, it promptly became the preferred setup for the popular sanitary conveniences. In the showers of public baths, time got shorter, the body position upright. These differences between bathtub types, and the more so between bath and shower, bear out what is granted a person and their body according to their social status and financial means. To the rich, the comforts of a private bathroom, a luxurious, voluptuous, expansive space; to the less affluent, access to a public bath; to the poorest, a timed shower, its temperature and space prescribed, thereby denying the latter the opportunity to experience hygiene as a form of wellbeing and relaxation.

   Gender issues also impinged on public baths, which proved, as it were, always less accessible to women; the number of cubicles set aside for them and their time allocation were less important than those assigned to men. Women’s constrained access to bathhouses hark back, beyond these practicalities, to a whole array of “micro-discriminations” read as “micro-disincentives”: timeslots clashing with housework, visibility in the public space through bath attendance… For all that it falls to women to attend to order and cleanliness, the access to the facilities deemed, as late as the 50s, the most modern in terms of personal hygiene, were partly denied them. For some years to come, they would have to settle for a bowl of water in the kitchen.

   Throughout the cubicles of 19th and 20th century public baths, the individual relation to the body and to hygiene took shape. Scientific theories on disease transmission, political decision-making, even the choice of the cubicle’s closing system, this vast set of factors would shape common cleanliness. Public baths embody, as ever, the social and gendered inequalities attached to our societies and their sanitary provisions.

Read more in the dictionary : Patient associations

Read the paper in french : Bains publics