How cleanliness sat down next to godliness

by Doctor Science

I've been on a Dutch painting of the Golden Age kick recently, so I dug out Simon Schama's The Embarrassment of Riches and was noodling around in it, looking especially at how women's lives and work were portrayed.

The most distinctive aspect of Dutch women's work was the constant cleaning:

The spick-and-span towns shone from hours of tireless sweeping, scrubbing, scraping, burnishing, mapping, rubbing and washing. They made an embarrassing contrast to the porridge of filth and ordure that slopped over the cobbles of most other European cities in the seventeenth century. "The beauty and cleanliness of the streets are so extraordinary," ran an English account, "that Persons of all ranks do not scruple, but even seem to take pleasure in walking them." [p 375]

Streets so clean you'd want to walk there, wow.

The Little Street by Vermeer. A small Delft side-street occupied by people of no particular wealth, but cleaner than any but the grandest locations elsewhere in Europe. I don't know if Japanese side-streets were this clean yet.

Schama seems to feel that Dutch cleanliness was part of their Protestant drive for godliness and purity, that it was an attempt to enact rules similar to those in Leviticus Chapters 11-15, which proscribe various things or actions as "unclean". For the Dutch to be the new Chosen People, they too had to strictly separate the pure from the impure, the clean from the unclean.

I was not very happy with Schama's explanation, because it overlooks how very much *work* the Dutch put into cleanliness, and how very consistent they were about it. Dutch preachers' sermons about the evils of drink and other excess were not followed especially consistently, after all, even though they didn't call for all that much effort on the part of believers. Dutch levels of cleanliness, on the other hand, required an enormous, relentless commitment of time and energy by a large part of the population. This is not the kind of habit that forms easily and quickly, and people won't keep it up unless there's an ongoing pressure or incentive that makes it seem worthwhile.

Schama's book came out in 1987, so I went to The Google to see what the current state of historical thinking might be. Bingo:

A Land of Milk and Butter: The Economic Origins of Cleanliness in the Dutch Golden Age by Bas van Bavel and Oscar Gelderblom of the University of Utrecht.

This painting of a Barn Interior with a Maid Churning Butter by Govert Dircksz. Camphuysen appears to show a mechanical churner, or at least a device for amplifying or easing the tedious up-and-down motion needed to work a conventional churn. I've wasted a lot of time looking, but I can't find any reference or other picture of a similar device in Europe before the 19th century. Historians of technology, the ball is in your court.

Bavel and Gelderblom's analysis goes like this:

• starting around 1400, many small farmers in the Holland region had a few cows to produced cheese or butter for the market
• butter was made by the women of the household: mother, daughters, maidservants
• before refrigeration and pasteurization, making any dairy product was a race against time, because (as we all know) milk spoils rapidly
• cheese gets around the spoiling problem by being deliberately "spoiled" as quickly as possible, prompted to begin fermentation into a storable form
• Butter is much more fragile: unpasteurized butter has a shelf life of about 10 days, even when (as was universal) the milk is slightly soured or "cultured" during the couple of days between when the cow was milked and when the butter was finally made.
• though it was centuries before the germ theory, dairy farmers already knew that the cleaner everything used in the milking and butter-making process was, the more likely it was that the butter would be good-tasting and would last long enough to be transported, sold, and used. Unless there was a reliable market for butter, keeping everything scrupulously clean probably wasn't worth the effort, but once the market was there, that effort would pay off even for small-scale producers
• Dutch butter-making was described in Martin Schoock's Tractatus de Butyro (1664):

  The women, he wrote, used separate tools for the various stages of production. They thoroughly cleaned their churns and rinsed them with cold water before churning. When butter was removed from the kegs it was transferred into well-washed wooden tubs. The women, he reported, then carefully washed their hands before they began to knead the butter. The cleanest women thought cold water was not good enough to remove all dirt, so they used hot water. Furthermore, it was general
  practice to dry the wooden pails and tubs before using them -- not by exposing them to
  the sun, but rather with heat from fires made by burning straw or bean pods.

  In other words, the containers were partially sterilized, not just wiped out or air-dried.
• Bavel and Gelderblom estimate that by 1500 fully half of all Dutch households (and thus, Dutch women) engaged in dairying, and up to a third of urban households had one or two cows.
• In the later 16th and 17th century dairy farms became larger and thus fewer households were involved, but hygienic customs didn't fall away. Many farm girls, formerly milkmaids, moved to the towns and became maidservants, where they still handled large quantities of dairy products in the kitchen. The habits of cleanliness become part of a general culture.
• the only other butter-producing area in Europe where much of the population was engaged in dairying for the market was (part of) Switzerland. "So, it is perhaps no coincidence that Switzerland was one of the few European regions that also acquired a reputation for cleanliness", Bavel and Gelderblom observe.

An illustration from The Cow Who Fell in the Canal by Phyllis Krasilovsky, illustrated by Peter Spier. A charming story with lots going on each picture, so the adult has something to look at when reading the book for the 349th time. Source.

Neither Schama nor Bavel & Gelderblom talk about why Dutch cleanliness continued to be such a pervasive cultural characteristic for so long, becoming if anything stronger with time. It was often described as a "mania", and there's definitely a kind of OCD quality to the scrupulousness with which Dutch women cleaned everything around them, even the sidewalks in front of their houses. The human effort involved was enormous and unrelenting; what made everyone agree it was worthwhile? Remember, this was before the Germ Theory, and in a period when the rest of Europe was often pretty squalid. It would be interesting to see if Dutch cleanliness had any effect on Dutch health, but certainly the connection wasn't obvious at the time.

One thing that has been IMHO overlooked is that this level of cleaning is a way for women to compete with each other. It's a form of conspicuous consumption: it takes a lot of resources (servants, especially), which means money, and it *is* conspicuous: Dutch women were especially scrupulous to clean their front steps and hallway, so that passers-by could see at a glance who was ahead in the housewife competition. Preachers said that cleanliness was aligned with godliness, so women could say that they were merely working to be as godly as possible -- but I don't think there was much of humility in it. They were practicing Extreme Cleaning, and because so much of it was publicly visible they could rank each other's performance to an exacting degree.

Women's work can be confined to the home and supposedly restricted in scope, yet still be as forthright a display of wealth, hierarchy and social dominance as any potlatch. Human beings are like that.

Vermeer's Milkmaid, of course.

Comments

[liberal japonicus]

Neat stuff. I always thought that the Dutch cleaniness was more of an areal feature rather than a particular attribute of the Dutch, but my explanation might be skewed on account of two particularly fanatical (in terms of cleaniness) German girlfriends.

I also recall that the Dutch (and all foreign observers) at Dejima were rather impressed/amazed at Japanese cleanliness, but I don't recall a difference between Dutch comments (something along the lines of "wow, they are as clean as us") and comments of other foreigners.

Speaking of cleanliness, my daughter has recently gotten into hair braiding, so we were on the interwubs and we followed a link to Polish plait (which you should only click on if you aren't eating). Pretty stomach churning, so one could argue that the Dutch had a relatively low bar on all this.

[Doctor Science]

Actually, lj, at this period (at least) travellers all reported that Dutch women kept their houses much cleaner than they did their bodies.

One thing that struck me, reading that book about Japan's Medieval Population, was that the Japanese cleanliness thing didn't really get going much before the Dutch arrived.

I don't know to what extent non-samurai Japanese cleaned their houses scrupulously at different historical periods. Women (Japanese and gaijin) living in Japan report that competitive cleaning is definitely a thing, nowadays, and that there are many, many opportunities for housewives, especially mothers, to have what biologists call "dominance displays".

[Laura Koerbeer]

Wasn't there a sort of competitve cleaning thing here in the US in the fifties? All those housewives buying gadgets for cleaning and cooking? That's the impression oe gets from ads of that era: housewives achievig fulfullment from the operation of the new vaccum cleaner etc.

[liberal japonicus]

Yes, I remember that thread, but my point was how the Dutch viewed the Japanese in comparison to themselves rather than implying that the Japanese had always been clean freaks. so point about Dutch women is interesting. For Buddhist funerals, one washes the body as a more formal part of the ritual, I think, but I don't know what the dea is with western funeral rites.

The high low separation is particularly profound in Japan, so I wouldn't be surprised if there were a big difference in house cleaning, though now, house cleaning is a full contact sport.

I'd also be interested to know what your research turns up about the starting point in terms of time of Dutch cleanliness. The Americans (rather late arrivals, obviously,) were suitably impressed by Japanese cleanliness, but felt that co-ed baths were essentially lascivious behavior, which made for interesting 'well, they are clean, but isn't it kind of dirty' comments.

[Doctor Science]

Laura:

That was certainly what they were pushing, but it didn't completely work IMHO because it was too hard for housewives to monitor each other. I think one reason the Dutch cleaning mania got so pervasive was that it included the front steps, sidewalk, and front hall, so it was *really* easy to tell who was slacking.

[CharlesWT]

[...]
...Umm Maha suddenly looked awed, "But isn't your freezer clean? Haven't you began with the Eid cleaning?!" I froze as I heard the words and peered around at my mother. She was looking uncomfortable- no we hadn't started with the 'Eid cleaning', but how do you say that to the Martha Stewart of Baghdad?

Yes, Umm Maha is the Martha Stewart of Baghdad- I defy anyone who can show me a neighbor with a cleaner driveway. Her whole house is spotless… rain, shine or cluster bombs. Her kids are always groomed and ironed. Their car, while old and dented, is spotless. She's always the first one to make the Eid kilaycha. She's the first one who is out of the door and washing down the house, the car, the driveway and the TREES after an infamous Iraqi dust storm. She's the neighbor who will know the latest cleaning fads (like using talcum powder to get out oil stains), and the one who'll be chasing the stray cats away from the garbage bins with (what else?) a broom.
[...]
Eid Mubarek...

[Doctor Science]

hm. I may not have closed the italics quite properly, CharlesWT, but at least I closed them.

[CharlesWT]

My apologies for the open tag.

Your post and the comments reminded me of the Iraqi blogger and her neighbor who kept her home spotless and shamed her neighbors into keeping their homes cleaner and neater. I think there may have been other postings in which the neighborhood housewives feared the neighbor crossing their threshold and casting a critical eye about their homes.

[Hartmut]

Prussia (or what would become Prussia) tried to import the Dutch ways with mixed success (starting with the Grand Elector). Friedrich Wilhelm I. got mocked mercilessly for his authoritarian attempts in this direction by other aristocrats. He even exchanged the furniture to make cleaning easier and came up with washing timetables (when, which body part, with or without soap etc.).

[Snarki, child of Loki]

Someday I hope to convince my family to suspend the furniture by cables from the ceiling, so that one can vacuum under them easily, and keep the floor very clean.

So far, they just give me a funny look every time I bring up the subject.

[CharlesWT]

Such furniture is available if you ever convince them.

[JJonker]

The competitive thing still seems to run to this day. One of my Dutch wife's few failings is an almost obsessive need to completely clean the house (irrespective of other commitments and time pressures) when a female Dutch friend is expected to visit us in London. Dutchmen and Englishwomen merit a minor pre-clean and Englishmen rate no special activity. My Dutch mother and mother-in-law are the same, with a similar hierarchy of effort.

[Porlock Junior]

Well, I'll be durned. It's just as they always said: Cleanliness is next to godliness, and blessed are the cheesemakers!