What's Laundry Got to do With it?: Caring for the Body in the 19th Century United States

Speaker: Kathleen M. Brown, Professor of History, University of Pennsylvania; Recorded September 18, 2014 - The author of Foul Bodies: Cleanliness in Early America imagined what body care and hygiene may have been like in the Wadsworth-Longfellow House. Nineteenth century Americans were not the first people to read the body for telltale signs of virtue or moral weakness, but they came to these judgments in the context of new standards and practices of body care. Kathleen Brown is a historian of gender and race in early America and the Atlantic World. She is also the author of Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia (Chapel Hill, 1996), which won the Dunning Prize of the American Historical Association for best book by a junior scholar.