Describing in 1798 how well she “bore” her first shower, Elizabeth Drinker, wife of a well-to-do Quaker merchant, records that she had not been “wett all over att once, for 28 years past.” This illustrates the amazing fact that, over the course of just a few generations, washing went from being an “occasional and haphazard routine of a small segment of the population to a regular practice of the large bulk of the people” (Bushman R and Bushman C, “The early history of cleanliness in America,” Journal of American History, 74(4), 1988: pp1213-38 – this quote p. 1214).
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