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Chasing Dirt - The American Pursuit of Cleanliness (Paperback, New Ed) Loot Price: R1,170
Discovery Miles 11 700
Chasing Dirt - The American Pursuit of Cleanliness (Paperback, New Ed): Suellen Hoy

Chasing Dirt - The American Pursuit of Cleanliness (Paperback, New Ed)

Suellen Hoy

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Loot Price R1,170 Discovery Miles 11 700 | Repayment Terms: R110 pm x 12*

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A nosedive into the American obsession with cleanliness that explains how this middle-class attitude was formed. Although social reformers had crusaded for better sanitation in the first half of the 19th century, it was the Civil War that impelled America on the road to cleanliness, asserts Hoy, coauthor of From Dublin to New Orleans (not reviewed). Quoting liberally from contemporary sources to give a sense of time and place, she concludes that it was the desire to cut death rates in army camps that spurred creation of the US Sanitary Commission. British experience in the Crimean War had strongly suggested that sanitation was essential to the survival of troops, and by the Civil War's end military personnel and civilians alike had absorbed the lesson that dirt was linked to sickness. In subsequent decades, periodic outbreaks of cholera, yellow fever, and typhoid drove home the message. Hoy depicts settlement workers in the big cities teaching immigrants - the "great unwashed" from the European countryside - that cleanliness was the American way. Middle-class social reformers directed similar efforts at African-Americans moving to northern cities from the rural south; cleanliness was seen as the way to assimilation and acceptance. In the 20th century, soap manufacturers and their advertising agents joined with educators and health officials in promoting hygiene as the key to success, and according to Hoy the message was irresistible. The author sees America's quest for cleanliness as peaking in the 1950s, when women still had the time and the means to pursue it. Today, she states, the dirt theory of disease has been replaced by more scientific explanations, busy working women care less about spotless households, and factors other than a whiter-than-white shirt are seen as essential to financial success. Occasionally repetitious and overly detailed, but in toto a spirited account of changing American mores. (Kirkus Reviews)
0he American pursuit of cleanliness has often been described as a national obsession. Hoy traces how Americans became this way. She stresses the influence of women, the recognition of the need to fight disease, and the way cleanliness became an American middle class obsession in the late 19th and 20th centuries.

General

Imprint: Oxford UniversityPress
Country of origin: United States
Release date: October 1996
First published: October 1996
Authors: Suellen Hoy
Dimensions: 204 x 135 x 15mm (L x W x T)
Format: Paperback
Pages: 272
Edition: New Ed
ISBN-13: 978-0-19-511128-6
Categories: Books > Social sciences > Sociology, social studies > General
Books > Reference & Interdisciplinary > Interdisciplinary studies > Cultural studies > General
Books > Medicine > General issues > Public health & preventive medicine > Personal & public health > General
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LSN: 0-19-511128-1
Barcode: 9780195111286

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