Tuesday, August 5, 2014

Baths

This is another question I have received often, and according to the amount of people that land on my blog after doing a search for "how often do the Amish take a bath" it is a subject that makes a lot of people curious.

As usual I can't speak for every Amish community out there, but I can share from my own experience of growing up Amish.

When we were little children baths occurred on Saturday evenings, but as we grew older they happened much more frequently. And no we didn't have some ancient tub we had to drag out and fill with water. We had a normal bathtub and nice hot running water.

LV once met an Amish man from a nearby, yet very different Amish community. During their course of conversation the man mentioned how life changes when you have teenagers, his daughter had a boyfriend and now thought she has to take a bath every week!

Not being able to have a bath at least once a week was a little mind boggling to us, but also a perfect example of just how very different Amish communities can be.

18 comments:

  1. Hahahaha ...... so interesting, but, I NEVER really thought about this one .... nope, I need my bath everyday ..... can't imagine ....... funny, how, we think we can't live without such necessities isn't it. These women just amaze me, the work ethics in the home, and, always seemingly so helpful to others, and very content doing so ... Our lives seem so much less complicated, yet, seemingly overdone. Your writes are so thought provoking to me. Thanks for sharing, and, have a blessed day my friend.

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    1. You're welcome. Hope you have a very blessed day as well.

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  2. My mother (b. 1928 d. 2012) grew up not bathing daily, that was the general norm throughout the country. Even I didn't have a bath everyday growing up (b. 1957), didn't wash my hair daily either until I think, after I graduated from high school in 1975 which is about when hand held hair dryers were available to the general public. Before that girls and women washed their hair in the evening and either let it dry naturally or rolled it up and slept on it. We did have a bonnet dryer which were touted to be like having a beauty parlor in your home. Standards of cleanliness have changed over time and many have become "germ-o-phobes" who over wash, then wonder why their skin and hair is so dry and lackluster. As I've gotten older I've discovered that my body is less oily and sweaty so I feel the need to bathe less, especially in the cold and dry winter months. Thanks for sharing your perspective and information about the Amish.

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    1. I still haven't learned to like a hair dryer, I have one but never use it.

      Winters do tend to feel cleaner, don't they?

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  3. Rosy, my mom was a little older than yours (1921) and although I never paid attention to how much she bathed, my sister and I usually had a bath every other day. Hair was washed in the stationary tubs in the basement on Saturday night - period, end of discussion. And we weren't allowed showers, for some reason.

    My Nana (dad's mom) grew up in the outback of Australia, where water was very scarce. When they came to America - the land of running water! - she enjoyed bathing frequently. My mother was scandalized.

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    1. We have experienced living in a place with limited water. Makes you really appreciate the blessing of having plenty.

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  4. Sometimes I have a chuckle about the questions you are asked, Mary Ann! Surely, this is as broad a question about Amish as it wold be about any other group?! Each person or family would do things differently.

    Life has changed in the last 100 years but it tended to happen in mainstream USA faster than in Europe. As children in the 50s/60s we, and almost all families I knew, took an actual bath in a tub once or twice a week, but we were 'strip washed' at least one a day. We stripped off and washed all over with a sponge or cloth, usually on rising and before going to bed, but in the coldest months, only once a day in our freezing, unheated bathroom or, if mother was generous, in the kitchen. By 7 or 8 we would do this unsupervised and never dreamed of skipping it.

    It was done this way because heating fuel has always been more expensive than in the States and most houses had no central heating, just one fire in the main room, so an electric-hungry emersion heater was needed to heat water for a full bath. Showers were very rare until the 70s or 80s. My hair was wshed about once aweek in the hand basin but using a large kettle full of water. My mother still does her hair that way and it always smells sweet and clean. Born in 1921, she firmly believes we over-wash hair now and cause it to try to regain natural oil quickly, which causes it to be greasy.

    Oh - and at my aunt's farm, where I spent all my school breaks, we DID have a tin tub that was pulled out every evening for the men to bathe in. It was stored and filled in the laundry and then tipped over the stone floor to keep it clean. I hated my weekly dip in it - the base either burnt or froze my behind, depending on the whether hot or cold water had gone in first! The tub is now outside my kitchen window, fillled with tomato plants at the moment.

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    1. I think tomatoes growing tomatoes is the best thing to do with those old tin tubs!

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    2. After we 'inherited' it, we used it for 10 years as a water trough for our cows! It has earned it's pension as a plant tub.

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  5. It IS funny, how far reaching some of the questions are! I guess everyone from the outside is just curious about HOW MUCH the Amish church/Ordnung
    /customs rule the lives of the Amish. I'm thinking if the man LV was talking to is not that fond of the boyfriend, he may have found a way to get him to move on to a better smelling girl!

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    1. LOL! Maybe that is part of the reason he didn't want his daughter taking a weekly bath.

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  6. I have to smile at some of the questions you're asked. We bathed in the tub weekly when I was a child but got washed off every day. Now I shower and wash my hair daily and am beginning to think the old way might be better,
    Blessings,
    Betsy

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    1. It could beworse, Betsy. one of our neighbours is an ex-model, desperately trying to hold on to her youth. She spends TWO HOURS in front of the mirror before she is ready to face the day. Personally, I am grateful God decided I was to be far from beautiful so that it wouldn't be worth my while to worry about that make-up routine stuff. Being vain is very time consuming! And a shower a day is still a quicker option than boiing 15 kettles of water, adding 10 of cold water to a tub and still only having 5 inches of bath water. I love a deep bath but am grateful for the speed of a daily shower.

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  7. always wonderful to read anything you write about. :) as to baths, it IS funny what some people tend to think about the Amish. we have wonderful Amish neighbors, and I'm quite sure most would find their kitchens, baths, amazingly 'modern' with the help of propane fuel. goodness, I don't imagine anyone pulls out an old wash tub to bathe in these days. modern or not.

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  8. The Ohio Amish families I grew up around did not bathe daily and actually were against storebought deodorant! A common Rumspringa activity was to buy deodorant from the drugstore, interestingly enough.

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  9. The winter my girls were 4 and 8 our water pump froze, and we didn't have running water from mid-January to mid-March, when my first husband *finally* decided he couldn't fix the pump and bought a new one.

    I spread newspaper on the kitchen floor, turned on the electric heater, heated water on the stove, and the girls bathed in a big metal wash tub. They thought it was great fun.

    We had a hand pump just outside the back door, and I had to boil water the morning to prime it. I would pour two huge buckets of water into the bathtub to come to room temperature during the day, and leave two more buckets on the back of the stove so I would have water when I got home from work to fix dinner and wash dishes. Then I would prime the pump again and boil two more buckets; one went into the tub for the first bath, and then the second one was poured in for the second bath. The first person got clean, but the second one had a hot bath.

    And then I did it all over the next day.

    You'd be amazed what you can do when you have to.

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  10. The Amish at the greenhouse where I do business do not use deodorant - no clue how often they take a bath, but though the girls who run the register at the green house always look clean and neat, the aroma gets my eyes watering :-( Others in the area must use it as I've never had this problem at the produce auction!

    I never gave baths and deodorant a thought til someone else questioned it. I grew up (b 1952) with a Saturday night bath in our bathroom tub and a shampoo in the kitchen sink; no one took showers, only baths but not sure why! We washed up during the week before bed and just our faces and hands in the morning before school. Switched to a daily shower when I got into college and washed my hair at that time, too, but not every day til I moved to a city - city air makes your hair feel like it needs washing every day!! So thankful to be back in the country!

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  11. I've come across "do Amish bathe in the river?" as a thing people ask on Q&A sites and Twitter too. Seeing as I grew up with kettle baths (the hot water heater couldn't make it through 4 adults and 3 kids), I am a bit flabbergasted at people who automatically leap from "no indoor plumbing" to "river baths" with no stop off for a pump or well and a kettle. How many people do you know with a river in their back yard, anyway??

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Thank you so much for taking time to comment. I love hearing your thoughts.