City Cleansing

In the post Civil War era to the more contemporary times, the efforts against "congestion, noise, filth and stench"(60) were progressive ideals for Americans in their industrializing world. Cities like New York faced an epidemic of vast expansion, crowded living, and ramped disease.

In Suellen Hoy chapter "City Cleansing" from her novel Chasing Dirt, she depicts the American culture “in the battle against offensive odors and filthy things” (61). With the help of George Waring, Ada Sweet, and organizations such as Woman's Christian Temperance Union, the need for change and on a massive scale became a progressive social movement on hygiene and moral cleanliness.

Many “progressive reformers joined the purity movement to rid the city of its dirt moral as well as material”(80). The cleanliness soon was lumped with crime and vice as reasons for the constant moral degradation of their society. Women, who had little rights in the political sphere, soon took on a strong movement toward cleanliness with the WCTU and made strong changes in local cities for change. Their personal “initiatives of anti-vice campaigners succeeded in making social cleanliness as a vital part of city cleansing” (81). The efforts of these women brought cleanliness to their areas of town, but usually stayed in the middle class to upper class who had the time for this concern.

This mind set and era of sanitation and city cleansing was a belief “instructed [on] a nation bent on progress that filth bred chaos and barbarism, while cleanliness ensured order and advancement” (70). Their goals were to achieve a civil and efficient society, while also preserving the environment. However, the changes did not reach all. Those who were outsiders and immigrants still did not receive all the luxuries of sanitation, and therefore were part of the unclean in their hygienic society.