Oh, this is vintage Truth v. Myth.
How often you hear the lives of people in olden times completely subverted by some tour guide, narrator, or instructor claiming that they never took baths. I was once taken on a tour of a historical house where the tour guide informed us that in the 19th century, country people simply sewed themselves into their one-piece long underwear for the winter, never took it off, and so never bathed (or, apparently, used the bathroom).
These stories imply that people living before the 20th century, be it 1800 or 1800 BCE, were gross and somehow completely accepting of torrid personal filth. It’s condescending, to say the least.
So okay. Time to look this over.
Let’s think about the American colonies in 1750. If you lived then, you were most likely living on a small family farm. The house had four rooms: kitchen, two bedrooms, parlor. Your family lived there, let’s say six people, and let’s say you had two extra workers living in.
When would you take a bath? You are busy working from sunup to sundown. How would you take a bath? You would need someone to help you, by heating water over the fire and minding it so it didn’t get too hot, then carrying it into the parlor, since there wouldn’t be room to set up a tub in the busy kitchen. So now two people are taken off their vital chores to set up and to take a bath. It will take several pails of water to even half-fill the tub, so someone will have to go to the well to get a lot of water (three people now involved in the bath). It takes a while to get and to heat all that water, so you’ll have to set aside about an hour.
The parlor is in use, too, and people are constantly coming in and going out, so privacy is nil. You have to be willing to have everyone see you naked. And if it’s not summer, then it’s going to be freezing in the parlor as you bathe. Once the bath is over, you need at least two people to help haul the tub outside and dump it out.
Now we get an idea of why people in colonial times didn’t take a lot of baths. But they were, of course, very clean, because they washed up at the wash basin.
In the bedroom was a pitcher and a bowl and a towel, and soap. You stripped to the waist and washed your upper body, then put your shirt back on and stripped off (or lifted your underskirt) to wash your lower body. Voila! Simple, fast, easy, private, and clean. You could wash off at the wash basin several times a day if you wanted.
So no, people in colonial times didn’t take a lot of baths. But that doesn’t mean they simply didn’t notice or care about odor or dirt, and were content to be filthy. These are your ancestors, you know! It behooves us to cut them the same slack we cut ourselves, and to think outside of our life-of-easy-appliances-and-running-hot-water boxes.
The Historic Present 
I took a tour of Patrick Henry’s house (with his first wife) and the tour guide said they took baths once or twice a year. The main reason being because they thought baths mad you sick. One of the reasons the women wore hair bonnets is so lice wouldn’t fall into whatever they were working on.
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Hello! Thanks for commenting. Yes, the gist is that tub baths were impractical and I’ll bet you would blame any cold you got on shivering in that tub in the basically unheated room. But no tub baths doesn’t mean dirty people, thank goodness.
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This line right here, “It takes a while to get and to heat all that water, so you’ll have to set aside about an hour.” that you were imagining and had little to no clue, no research, or piratical application.
such nonsense you have written
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Hello Julia; could you define “piratical application”? Otherwise, we stick by the statement that getting 4-5 gallons of water from a well and heating that cold water over a fire for a bath would take at least an hour.
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People have been washing & bathing for thousands of years even in houses with just one room.
Although there was always work to do, there was also plenty of time for non work related activities, such as bathing.
By using stones placed in the fire anyone could get hot water in seconds at any time of the day.
This is how people have been doing it since prehistoric times.
So say I’m on a farm in 1750 and I want a bath.
I’d have it in the kitchen at a time when there’s nobody there, it’s not busy all day.
Or I’d have a bath in a room with a fireplace.
I put a tub down, not a big one to submerse in, a low one for just a hip bath will do, you can fill it with just a few buckets.
Most farms are near water sources, wells often near houses.
You fill the tub with this cold water and you put hot firestones in the last bucket, this almost instantly makes that water VERY hot, boiling even.
That’s enough to make the rest of the water warm.
If you don’t use the firestone technique you just place a cauldron over the fire, it often hangs there anyway because hot water is often handy to have.
You don’t need to mind it, it doesn’t matter if it gets too hot, you just pour it in the tub and add cold water if needed.
I’ve bathed like this, took me minutes to prepare.
And in larger communities you of course had bath houses or other bathing facilities offered as a service, generally quite affordable.
Just like in medieval Europe certain industries such as bakeries, used their ovens to also heat water.
And then there was of course also just bathing in local rivers & ponds.
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