When did everybody start showering?

Damn. That must have been an old house. Even clawed bathtubs in pre-war buildings have showers.

I grew up in a housing project in the 60s. I'm white. The project was built in the 1950s primarily for veterans who returned from World War II and the Korean War and who were getting married and starting families.

All the apartments had showers. I guess we were kind of fancy.

All that swirling filth crawling up your naughty bits is gross, we have evolved as humans, baths are for children and the infirm.

Just how OLD are you people. I grew up in the 70's and we only took a bath when we were little. Are you al in your 80s?

Grew up in the 70s, too, r4. We took baths until around age 7 or 8. Then we showered. I shower every day as an adult.

I'm 58. I grew up with a bathtub in our only bathroom. Not until college did I start showering.

Did they use a galvanized #5 tub?

I grew up showering. I only remembering taking a bath as very young child, but it didn't last long. I was showering even as a young kid.

And I showered pretty much every day as an adult, often times twice a day when going to work and then going to the gym became part of my daily schedule. However, in the past couple of years, I have often worked at home and my gym schedule isn't always what it used to be. So I try and have a consistent shower, but I often skip a day simply because there are some days when I never leave the house other than to step outside and get the mail.

I'm not recluse, but this working at home has continued long after COVID, and as a result I sometimes don't shower daily.

this is normal for the UK.

Well, I think *all* little kids take baths whether there's a shower or not. It's easier for a parent to wash a kid in tub than leaning in and getting soaked in a shower.

But I'm 50 and our house always had a shower in the bathtub. And my home is 99 years old with an original claw foot tub. And it has a shower.

I started showering around age 8, baths before that. Today, I would soak in a tub if I felt chilled or stressed…

Story from my grandmother, who was born in the 20s: she viewed her hot baths (with oil or foam) as an affordable luxury, one of the few she could afford while working two jobs supporting her kids in the 50s/60s.

“It wasn’t until the early 1980’s that showering as we know it became popular with the masses.”

Taking baths cause you to have to wash the bathtub more often than if you were to take showers.

R9 eating mushy peas is also normal for the UK!

NEVER!

I don't remember. I know I started showering in HS junior year three times a week. I'm not sure if we had our shower installed by then. Our house was built in 1918.

They were definitely popular by 1960

If you're over 40 and haven't taken a bath since you were a kid, I recommend you try it at least once. A good hot soak feels amazing on old muscles and joints. It also helps with dry skin immensely.

I have only a shower where I live now, but my routine used to be a shower when I got home from work to remove the stink and soil of the day, and a bath to start the morning. I miss it very much.

People would get dirty from physical labor and a bath and a good scrub does a better job on caked on dirt than la douche

I was born in 1980. We didn't have hot running water until 1997. I literally took baths in a metal tub with water heated in a kettle.

Beat that, bitches.

Lol the Republicans would rather have half the country bathing in buckets in front of the fireplace. We don’t need no socialistic plumbing. No sirree bob!

I think baths are gross, yes, so after them I take a shower. But to be honest, showers are gross too, so after that I take a bath.

I'm old. I used a bathtub as a child, graduated to the shower around 12 years old, and am now pricing walk-in tubs with shower. I want to soak my lower parts for awhile after my shower.

“It wasn’t until the early 1980’s that showering as we know it became popular with the masses.”

is this a joke thread? EVERYONE i knew took a shower after like 7 years old. I grew up in the late 60's and 70s. WHERE did you people live? No really?

{r22} yeah baths are gross so after the bath i took a bath....

we could go on all day

I was always down for a bubble bath, but my mom was discouraging about that. She said it would empty out the hot water heater tank. (Suburban house.)

R24, they used to make bathtubs that were kind of appealing to lie down and relax in. Made with something like ceramic, nice texture, nice look. They’d have a slope at one end to rest your head on. That’s what my grandma liked - she used it as a chance to relax and was in there a while. A shower is much quicker.

I was born in 1972 but I grew up in a house built in the early 1920s. One bathroom, bathtub only. My parents grew up with baths only, so I didn't realize that "normal" modern people took showers not baths until I started school.

Baths are so relaxing and civilized.

bump

R12–as far as the USA is concerned, that quote is utter bullshit.

I don't remember a time when we didn't have a shower, and I'm ancient. First we lived in a tract house, then we moved to a 1920s colonial.

bathtubs are for tiny people

R33 = Chrissy Metz

R2

I also grew up in a housing project in the 1960s. The complex was built in the early 1960s. I'm Black, if that's relevant, but the buildings were racially and ethnically mixed. The apartments had showers. My father liked to take a bath every day and in that he was quite unusual.

I was only allowed to have a shower with my father. Otherwise I had to use the bathwater my older brother had bathed in. It was said this was all to save water. I thought this was normal behavior for men until when my cousin visited and my father said he had to shower with my father too. Then it got weird. I never showered with my mother.

Shower before you bathe so that you‘re clean and not lying in a cauldron of your own filth — and a quick rinse after you get out of the tub.

Showers are kind of a luxury. All that water just running away. You can save water with a bath and have multiple people in it.

Come to think of it, it was the 90s when my family started showering as well. I only had baths up until then. Rural, old farmhouse that was built in the 18th century (Europe).

R12's linked article, breezy as it is, seems about right: the 1980s. That's the time when home bathroom design started to reflect the importance of showers and the diminished interest in bathtubs.

Of course showers have been around for ages, but they were not standard fare in American or British homes until fairly recently. (Many of those 100-year-old bathtubs with showers that poster have noted were retrofitted as showers late in their history.

Look at photographs and floor plans of domestic bathrooms from the 1920s and you will see a few shower stalls here and there, but very few, and usually in quite expensive houses with large bathrooms that display the full range of available sanitary technology. Shower stalls show up in 1950s, 1960s, 1970s homes, but rarely still. More often what you see are bathtubs increasing built into niches where before they projected into the room; these niched areas could be tiled and fitted with the plumbing for a shower -- or often it was just a handheld 'telephone style' hand spray nozzle controlled with the bath Hot and Cold water taps.

The examples below (there are several photos) show how baths increasing became semi-enclosed features that lent themsleves to dual use as showers or, later, for conversion to showers. The very last (blue) example shows an odd triangular tub within a square footprint that was dual shower/bathturb -- if neither very successfully.

It wasn't really until the 1980s that showers as purpose-specific bathroom features began to come into their own in a big way, and probably not until the 1990s that more people decided against fitting a new house or apartment with a bathtub and favored instead a shower stall. The stall itself doubled and tripled in size from this period to the present, becoming a party in the bathroom space at one point in the 2000s with expansive disco shower rooms with multiple shower heads and jets and nozzles everywhere (this trend seems to have been fairly short-lived and moderated with more luxurious but smaller spaces, but still spaces much larger than the sqaure stall of 30"or 36"square. Currently popular are spaces about 36"x 72", partially glazed so that one can step in and out of the shower spray easily without flooding the adjacent area of the bathroom.

^Bullshit

Shower-“specific”? Plain dumb reply ^^ by you up there, just above.

I like to treat myself to a bubble bath every so often. It's quite therapeutic. Of course, I also shower and rinse off the foam afterwards.

R12 ‘s link: some Brit bathroom supply house’s lame attempt at marketing…it is irrelevant to ANY discussion of past developments in the US. Got that R40?

The 1920s was when showers began to spread to “normal” homes in the USA, especially new homes, according to many writers.† The pictures at the bottom of the page give a foretaste of this, with US bathroom designers illustrating not-too-lavish bathrooms with showers included. Sears Roebuck was selling showers by 1915. By 1965 a study of one thousand American middle-class homes found that 85% had both a tub and a shower.*

Even though British shower manufacturers and wealthy customers had kept pace with American developments up to WWI, it stopped there

Did the shower scene in Psycho lower the sales of shower installation in the 1960s?

Of course showers were standard in American bathrooms long before the '80s. I grew up in the '60s and '70s and never heard of a house not having a shower, not even older houses built in the '20s and '30s.

Re OP's question, I think World War II was the watershed (no pun intended) when showering began to become more common than bathing. Millions of men served in the military, where showering was the only option. They kept up the habit when they got home and eventually most other people followed along.

In Mr Blandings Builds His Dream House (1948), both Cary Grant and Myrna Loy take a shower in their NY apartment. I don't think that was meant to be seen as an oddity but rather a normal feature of domestic life.

I remember visiting Scotland 15 years ago and having a bath with no mixer tap, and no shower, how do you rinse off at the end without a shower?

Modern showers have been around pretty much since indoor plumbing arrived. Various other means of showering have been around for centuries. This ranged from standing under a waterfall to having someone pour a container of water over you.

If OP is asking when showering overtook bathing in popularity well at least for USA it was about middle of 20th century.

Showering is seen as more hygienic, uses less water (especially hot) and is quicker than bathing.

For few years now at least here in NYC new construction multi-family and some homes no longer have bathtubs, only showers. Some homeowners when renovating take out bathtubs and install showers only.

Personally agree with Joan Crawford who removed bathtubs and installed showers when renovating her Manhattan apartment; " I don't sit in my own filth".

r47 yes I was thinking of Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream Home. Even the decrepit old Bates Motel had showers. Even Nellie Forbush in South Pacific had a shower. I grew up in a dead average 60s tract house in the rural south. 2 of the bathrooms had shower stalls, 1 had just a tub with no shower head. The tub was useful for bathing small children and dogs and then when I hit puberty I graduated to the shower. Each bathroom had its own color scheme with matching colored fixtures and tile borders around the shower entrance. Like this, but not as grandiose.

Aside from a few for relaxation I have not taken a bath to clean myself since I was about 13. Always took a shower.

Any friend or man I knew that bathed themselves at night to "save time" getting ready for work the next morning always stank of either BO or oily sweat.

🚿 My home was built in 1890. Fortunately for me, the bathrooms were modernized complete with showers before I moved in. The large claw foot bath tub was left in the larger bathroom, and its in pristine condition. Maybe no one ever used it !

If you take a bath, you must shower when your bath is done.

We had no shower when I was a kid. It was an old house, so there was only bathing.

Hate showers, love baths. You can shower yourself down and then take a bath.

I don't really care for showers, though they have their place.

I will shower in instances of industrial grade dirtiness or when I want a quick cleaning rather than the pleasure of a long soak in the bath.

If I'm drenched on sweat or sex or have been cleaning out an attic or gardening, a shower is the better option. If I've spent a day at my laptop, watering the plants, reading, making a bit of lunch, picking up a couple things at the shops, meeting friends for drinks or dinner...I don't need the full Silkwood scouring.

As for "soaking in one's own filth," some of you evidently can't reach your stumpy little arms around to wipe your ass properly, or your idea of wiping is to spread your shit about as if frosting a cake. Most adults don't share this problem. Bathing is fine, perfectly so when interspersed with showers on a regular basis and as occasion warrants.

As a student renter I used to share a place with someone who would not shower because he said hot water harmed his skin. He used to have a whore's bath instead which is washing yourself with cold water from a bowl like they did in Westerns and then applied perfume. I myself like cold showers. As Katharine Hepburn said, they build character.

"Was anybody going to tell me that I was supposed to shower regularly, or was I just supposed to read that on Datalounge myself?"

For those of you going on about sitting in your own filth if you take a bath, you must be a bunch of really filthy dirty bastards. Do you even wipe your arse after taking a shit? If you take a bath every day you are not filthy dirty unless you work on a construction site or are a farm worker or the like.

I have a bath and a shower in my house and I always use the bath. I see it as part of my day, relaxing in a hot bath with Dove bath foam. In my summer/vacation house I only have a shower and I loathe it. I don’t mind it for a couple of weeks, and it’s handy in the hot summer heat to have a quick shower two or three times a day. But after this I really miss having a nice bath.