Between 1837 and 1901, downstairs hygiene was a mysterious subject. Women were particularly uncomfortable, since their layers of petticoats prevented them from lifting their clothes to use the bathroom. Rose Heichelbech of Great Life Publishing’s Dusty Old Thing confirms that women’s pantaloons in the Old West were crotchless, allowing them to simply hover over the toilet. And to combat the odors of their private areas, says the BBC’s Laurel Ives, regular douching prevented “misery, woe, and utter despair.” For monthly menses, says Femme International, ladies used grass, cotton, rabbit fur, rags, or sheep’s wool to keep themselves clean before sanitary pads came about in 1888. Tampons, Rainy Horowitz of Arizona State University writes, wouldn’t be invented until 1931.
Men, meanwhile, were sometimes terrorized about their pubic area; by 1894, Dr. Otterbourge of Salt Lake City was just one “doctor” whose frightening advertisement addressed men’s troubles, with the promise of a cure. Ultimately, however, doctors decided that the best way to keep men’s genitals cleaner and disease-free was via circumcision, according to Kate Ringer at the University of Idaho. Indeed, circumcision was believed to prevent or even cure such maladies as epilepsy, “mental retardation,” masturbation, and even syphilis, says The Circumcision Debate. And for good measure, said doctors, it would also somehow cure hysteria in women.
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