BACK TO EVE

Greymouth Evening Star, 15 January 1925, Page 2

BACK TO EVE

HYGIENIC BARBARISM ■ “When Thoreau immortalised the anonymous old woman who lived under a hill (and jf she’s not dead, she’s living there still) he opened, a vista into' universal history that has matiy whimsical aspects,” says the “Atlantic Monthly.”' “The comparative hygienic habits of this old Woman and her predecessors are an aspect that can be treated with delicacy perhaps and still make the inquiry piquant. If this old woman wqre a hundred years bld qnd touched hands with another who lived a century before her, and so on back to Mother Eve, there would be only sixty, all in a row. Your great-grandmother, were she a hundred, back to Eve is a respectable' party of only sixty old women. Not an unusual tea party, Thoreau says, but their gossip would be universal history, their customs a most enlightened insight into- evolution, and their costumes a study in vogue such as no museum has ever attempted.

“It is shocking to think that of these ■ sixty old ladies, only three of them could ever have used soap. The old woman who nursed Columbus was the fourth. She took a bath. in the summer without a detergent, and rubbed her skin with a coarse flaxen towel. The twentieth was Cleopatra, whose bath is no mystery in technique or detail.

’ “There is a popular impression that the essence of her bath was' soap. Essential oils were used in the rite, but the ' cleansing agent was fine white sand applied by her maids. She came clean by erasure. The makers of abrasives have more right to Cleopatra than the makers of' soap. Helen of Troy was the thirtieth, but neither history, legend or art has revealed the secret of her perfection, beauty, or hygienic ceremony. Susanna’s bath was composed of the elements of surprise and delight. “But to returif to your great-grand-mother. Allow that she could procure and did use soap, .and maybe so her great-grandmother. Further back than that, thpugh they indexed themselves in the Modern Age, they ■were hygienic barbarians. Gradually the use of soap has become general, or nearly so, and Liebig says that a nation’s degree of civilisation may be judged by the amount of soap it consumes. Our present generation in America consumes more soap than any people in the world. Our use of cosmetics is • increasing at almost the same rate, and it is interesting to relate soap to in their historical origins.”