Helping the poor emerge from "urban barbarism to civic civilization": public bathhouses in America, 1890-1915.

In an era when the luxury of private bathrooms had not yet been made widely available to the masses, local charities and municipal governments worked feverishly to construct public bathhouses. Reformers, including city officials, engineers, physicians, and members of the clergy, increased the number of public bath facilities across America from a mere six in 1894 to 49 by 1904. The urban poor took tens of millions of showers at the turn of the century as a result. What the poor may not have realized, however, is that the reformers of the Progressive Era had in mind a form of social engineering. Bathing, they argued, not only assisted in the containment of disease; it also served to instill upper-middle class values of self-respect, morality, and citizenship into the life and practice of the poor.