Vixens of the Victorian Age
Onion juice, whale poop and vinegar baths — the odd beauty tricks of 19th century women on the prowl Unmentionable The Victorian Lady’s Guide to Sex, Marriage, and Manners
IT’S easy to romanticize the past, especially the Victorian era. It’s been given so much Hollywood gilding in films such as “The Portrait of a Lady” and “The Age of Innocence,” depicting it as a time of great civility, manners and grace. In fact, it was anything but. Author and pop historian Therese Oneill once dreamed about life as an aristocrat of the Victorian age, stepping into a hoop skirt and gliding across a ballroom. But then, curiosity got the better of her, and she found herself wondering: How did women use the bathroom in those things? And did the Victorians have toilet paper? The result of her research is “Unmentionable: The Victorian Lady’s Guide to Sex, Marriage, and Manners.” As Oneill writes, it was a time when even the most elegant lady wore crotchless undergarments so she could easily squat over a bedpan without having to lift up pounds upon pounds of clothing. To clean herself up, she used old newspapers, leaves or corncobs.
Oneill is an eager tour guide: “You’ll arrive in the 19 century in the guise of a young woman of some wealth, European descent and living in either America or Western Europe,” she writes.
Oneill has good reason for placing her reader in the company of the upper crust; unlike her less fortunate peers, a lady of status would have time to think about matters beyond survival. These matters — such as hygiene, beauty and relationships — would dominate a well-heeled woman’s pre- and postmarital life. She would go to the doctor, read women’s magazines, peruse advertisements and become fluent in the finer points of etiquette, all with the goal of making herself presentable to the opposite sex.
This was an uphill task. As Oneill is keen to point out, the Victorian era was a decidedly filthy period in Western history, when public sanitation hadn’t caught up with the major mechanical advances brought on by the Industrial Revolution.
That’s one detail those tantalizing Hollywood period pieces invariably leave out: the smell.
“There’s no such thing as ‘fresh air’ in the larger cities,” Oneill writes. “Every home and business needs energy, so you must burn something, like wood or coal . . . the result is the soot and smoke of hundreds of thousands of fires saturating the sky.”
The cities reeked of sulfur, and thank goodness for that, because it covered another malodorous problem: the streets and rivers all overflowed with a sloppy mix of rainwa- ter, animal and human waste. “By 1860, the Thames, for instance, was visited by thousands of tons of fecal matter every day from all the pipes and runoffs that emptied into it. Imagine the smell on a hot day.”
There’s the smell and then there’s the resulting contagion. This water harbored all manner of diseases, everything from typhoid to cholera.
LIVING in such conditions, proper hygiene was essential. But the details of what constituted proper hygiene for women were hotly debated, mostly among male doctors who weighed the moral risks (good, god-fearing women, washing themselves, naked!) against the physical rewards (general cleanliness).
Baths in which the body was fully submerged in water were recommended as a salve against the dust that settled from head to toe the moment an urban-dwelling woman walked outside. Once or twice a month, she might indulge in a lukewarm soak; lukewarm, because unnecessarily hot and cold temperatures were both believed to cause health problems from rashes to insanity.
During the weeks between baths, the Victorian lady would wash off with a sponge soaked in cool water and vinegar. Sitz baths, in which a woman sat down in a shallow dish of water, were also common.
She rarely washed her hair, as the process was involved and not terribly pleasant. Women were advised to dilute pure ammonia in warm water and then massage it through the scalp and hair, like modern shampoo. But as Oneill points out, working with ammonia was quite a bit more dangerous than getting a few drops of lather in the eyes. “Ammonia becomes highly corrosive when reacting to water, which would probably be very effective at stripping hair of grime. Also skin of
its superfluous top few layers.”
If a woman was skeptical of the ammonia treatment, she could always reach for the alternative: onion juice. It didn’t necessarily work to cleanse the hair of grease, but it was believed, at least by some, to make tresses long and shiny.
Of course, onion juice stinks. As did a woman’s clothes — she never, ever washed her gowns, because the fabrics and embellishments were just too fragile. So she only scrubbed her white linen or cotton (crotchless) undergarments. There was no deodorant, let alone disposable razors, so some women placed half-moon-shaped “dress shields” between their clothes and their hairy, sweaty armpits.
But really, the most surefire way for a lady to deal with body odor was to wear perfume — a lot of it. The most popular scent was ambergris, made from fluid retrieved from a dead sperm whale’s intestines.
Even if a Victorian hardly bathed and doused herself in fermented whale poop on the regular, she could still have the appearance of flawless skin. That’s because she had access to cosmetics with a secret ingredient: lead. The process of “face enameling” removed imperfections; in Oneill’s words, “the result would be rejuvenated, smooth skin whose pores were clogged with both a youthful vivacity and a lethal mineral imbalance.”
Those unlucky to be born with freckles were advised to rinse their faces in lemon juice or, in more stubborn cases, to rub the skin with carbolic acid, or sit in the sun until the freckles burned off. And if premature wrinkles resulted from these harsh so-called cures, young women might look to the habits of their older relatives and drape their faces with thin slices of raw beef before bed. Sleeping with any animal fat on the skin — sheep’s fat, veal, lard — was thought to restore youthful suppleness and beauty.
THE ideal woman’s face was like the ideal woman’s body: perfectly, pleasingly plump. Not heavy, mind you — overweight women were instructed to drink their water with lemon, and if that didn’t do the trick, to take weightloss drugs. Unfortunately, those often contained life-threatening ingredients like arsenic, strychnine, cocaine and — believe it or not — tapeworm larvae. Skinny women didn’t have an easy time of it either. They were told to lie still, as often as possible, in dim light, “avoid[ing]all anxiety and endeavoring to feel indifferent to every sensation,” as one book recommended. Presumably, all of this was worth it if a woman ultimately made the right match. To accomplish this, she was schooled in the nuanced art of flirting, in which drawing a handker- chief across her face meant “I love you” and biting the tip of her glove was unmistakable code for “go away.” Of course, a lady was warned to use this secret language judiciously, as a woman caught engaged in the art of flirting at all might be dismissed as a “slattern.”
Men were also counseled to take great care when selecting a lifelong mate. A woman’s body told a story: Very small waists were a red flag, a sign that the woman in question had weak organs and an overly delicate constitution. Being total physical opposites from one’s spouse was considered a good sign. If a man was dark-haired, he was told he should select a blond bride; if his complexion was ruddy, an olive-skinned, cool-tempered girl was suggested.
ONCE married, a woman had any number of duties, from keeping the house in order to entertaining guests to bearing children. Legally, she was her husband’s property, and young wives were warned against the various infractions that might lead to marital discord. Being a slob, an unenthusiastic cook, or a bad listener were all grounds for a husband’s displeasure. But the biggest transgression — worse even than aging or gaining weight — was the condition of being a “scold.”
A scold was a woman who, whether overtly or otherwise, made her unhappiness obvious. She was the killjoy who disagreed with her husband or wanted to change him, taking issue, for instance, with his habit of visiting prostitutes on the way home from work. In the Victorian era, a good woman was supposed to turn the other beef-fats-licked cheek to her spouse’s casual infidelities. And, in truth, her unhappiness probably wasn’t her cheating husband’s fault anyway.
More likely, it had to do with her empty womb. “Try to imagine your uterus as a highly strung, frantic woman . . . she can’t stand being bored. She wants challenges! She wants work to do,” Oneill writes.
After all, the womb at this time is the wellspring of the most terrible female diagnosis: hysteria. So, perhaps it made sense that the answer to a vast range of lesser problems was to go to the source and keep the anxious uterus occupied, literally. As Oneill discovered, even the wealthiest Victorian woman would have spent a very short period of her life dancing in gilded ballrooms with eligible young men.
The rest of her days? She would have been just as the good doctor prescribed: pregnant.