Women are slightly better at hand-washing than men. Here’s one theory for why.
The job of hygiene gatekeeper came somewhat naturally to Victorian women and their daughters, who were used to the expectation that they’d be the moral instructors of their households, but it could still be an unpleasant one. Tomes read correspondence between home economists and women who wrote that older family members mocked them for their new ideas, and refused to stop sharing spoons and plates with their babies or chewing bites of food before giving them to the infants.
The legacy of homemakers’ germ anxiety persisted in the commercial sphere, where ads for cleaning products have kept the fearA lot of this history can look kind of mockable, from a distance, because the advice sounds frantic, and some of it didn’t wear well. Sewer gas was not, contra Victorian belief, the cause of everyone’s maladies; library books didn’t need to bebetween borrowers; clothing cannot transmit yellow fever; dark rooms don’t breed germs any more than sunlit ones do.
Over time, what Tomes calls the “institutionalization of germ protection” fixed many of the problems homemakers in the early 20century had been taught to control by dint of hypervigilance, obsessive cleaning, and meticulous consumer choice. By World War II, we had better hospitals, better municipal services, and more regulated food production to fall back upon.
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