History

From the perspective of the early 21^st century, it would be easy to see communal showers as an eternal institution extending so far back into the past that they may as well have always existed. Given their ubiquity for the last several generations, it's easy to see why one would have this impression. Strictly speaking, however, this view would be mistaken. While we might readily recognize the several decades that followed World War II as a golden age of communal showers, it is important to remember that this “golden age” was close to the inception of the practice. The first modern communal showers were developed in the 1870s in France, initially for prisons and the in military facilities. They proved so efficient that they became common in settings were large numbers of people needed to get clean. It was not until the very end of the 19^th century that they started to appear in the U.S. in boarding schools, military bases, and pools. The first communal shower in a public school, a cultural touchstone to this day, was not installed until 1900 at Boston Latin (fittingly the first school in the United States).

It would be tempting to latch onto the year 1900 as the inauguration of the era of communal showers. We should remember, however, that in being the first, Boston Latin was also, at least initially, unique. Out of the many thousands of school districts in the country it was the lone example to provide communal showers. While they proved popular and spread after this date, we really do not have good data on exactly how fast and where. If Boston Latin was the one example in 1900, there is not even a current estimate on how many had them in 1910 or 1920. Broadly speaking it seems that by the decade before WWII they were common, and in the decade after they seemed to have become very common if not close to universal in schools. The uncertainly we have regarding their occurrence in schools is no less than the uncertainty in other facilities. Although communal showers would become standard in many different types of facilities, such as pools, gyms, athletic facilities, beaches, barracks and factories, this technology was still new, costly and took time, and certainly several decades to transition from novelty to ubiquity. Until more research can be done, only the vaguest contour of this process can be gleaned. However, it seems clear that far from being an institution from time immemorial, the communal shower is very much a 20^th century (and indeed mid to late 20^th century) phenomenon.

The recognition that communal showers began, flourished, and then began a noticeable decline all within a single century could very well lead one to dismiss their social importance as a transitory fluke of historical happenstance. A circumstantial phenomenon that flourished in the last two thirds of the 20^th century but then waned as the particular circumstances that gave rise to it changed. While understandable, this conclusion would fail to appreciate the continuity that communal showers share with a much older and well established practice of communal bathing.

Presumably, humans have been bathing with each other for as long as we have been humans. Likely as such prehistoric communal bathing probably was, before the development of a division of labor and the expansion of populations and material culture that accompanied civilization, direct evidence of the practice is lacking. That first evidence comes to us from the 3^rd millennium BCE from sites in Egypt and the Mojenjo-Daro site in the Indus River civilization. Later in the 6^th century BCE in Greece we have not only the first direct evidence of communal showers but also the first indications of their specific social character. These communal bathing and showering facilities were an important linchpin of the polis in the Hellenistic world, both for their hygienic utility and as a forum for strengthening social bonds. The Romans, after conquering the Greeks militarily, were in turn culturally conquered by them. Roman baths were an important cornerstone of civic society. Their use was encouraged and popular and spread throughout the Roman world where the practice was retained even after the breakup and disintegration of the Empire. The Turkish baths and Hammams can trace their development to the Byzantine and Roman bathhouses or Thermae that preceded and inspired them.

Given how famous and well attested communal bathing was in the Classical period it would be wrong to think the advent of the Christian Era in Europe marked its end. Certainly the less centralized and smaller successor states to the Roman Empire lacked the resources to build bath houses on the same scale or grandeur. One might also assume that Christian prudishness must have prohibited anything as risqué as public nudity. The new religion changed many things from the cultures of antiquity, but prohibitions on nudity was not one of them. It was not until much later in the Victorian Era that Christian morality reached the levels of anti sex, anti-nudity assumptions many people associate with the religion. Scripturally and practically speaking, no such opprobrium was attached to nudity during the middle ages. The graphic depictions and written documents we have from the end of the Roman Era up until the late 19^th century tell a story many might find surprising. Public bathing while naked was encouraged and to the extent the limited resources of the day allowed, subsidized. There was a prohibition on the mixing of sexes in nude environments but otherwise the practice had few restrictions.

The second half of the 19^th century was a pivotal inflection point in the history of nude bathing. There was on the one had the revolutionary surpluses and prosperity of the industrial revolution that made the logistics of mass bathing far more practical while, on the other hand, intersecting with Victorian notions about sex and morality that rendered millennial old ideas and practices of communal nudity suspect. Prior to this time, very few people or institutions could afford to build or maintain the infrastructure of communal bathing. People would swim and bathe naked, but it would primarily be in natural settings such as a local natural swimming hole. With the rise of a middle class with disposable income, dedicated beaches for recreation emerged. Municipal governments, schools, private clubs and pools suddenly found themselves able to build and sustain facilities where communal nudity could be practiced. Communal showers developed to fill the hygienic needs of a growing population. As had been done for thousands of years, when people swam, they swam naked, and when they needed to bathe, be it in a bath house or in the newly developing communal showers, they did so naked. In some cases, segregation of the sexes was practiced and in others not. However just as the age-old phenomenon of communal nudity was transitioning into a new modern industrial age, Victorian ideas about sex, nudity and the human body started to question these norms.

It started with views on the sexual vulnerability of woman who were seen as being at constant risk of being over sexualized. As a result, naked women intermixed with naked men became increasing taboo (though it clearly did occur with some regularity). Later as norms tightened, even nudity in strictly segregated all female settings was seen as suspect. One barometer of this shift is the rise and proliferation of swim wear. Rare at first and practically not necessary for most functional swimming needs, perceived norms or female modesty shoved women and girls into swim suits by the last decades of the 19^th century, just as recreational beaches and pools were becoming commonplace. Nudity among men was tolerated longer, but even here there was a steady retreat. Initially nudity among men in a segregated setting was seen as normal, as attested by artwork of the time that often depicted naked men and yet was not seen as scandalous or inappropriate. Gradually these norms shifted. Starting with older cohorts and working its way ever younger, how old you needed to be until you should start wearing a suit gradually decreased. In 1900 most men could get away with it, but by 1910 once you’d past your teens it was seen as inappropriate to not cover up. By the 1930’s you’d have to not have reached adolescence if you wanted to swim naked and not be considered uncouth.

This trend away from public nudity in bathing and swimming contexts was revolutionary and represented a departure not only from classical norms but even from medieval renaissance and early modern practices. However, in strictly controlled environments, such as indoor pools and the associated locker rooms, the practice continued. Even by Victorian Standards, public nudity in sex segregated environments was permissible. So, while you may have been expected to wear a suit to the public recreational beach (if not the secluded swimming hole) your YMCA, High school or College pool may well still allow and indeed mandate naked swimming at least for boys, and sometimes if less often for girls.

The beaches now largely closed to nudity, pools and the communal showers associated with them and many other recreational, military, educational and municipal facilities flourished to fill this social need. The Finns had their Saunas, the Turks, Iranians and Koreans their Bath houses, and the Japanese their sento, but in much of the west the communal shower became the place you could relax, get naked with members of your community and enjoy the egalitarianism and comradery of social nudity. Public nudity now being restricted and curtailed in almost all other settings the importance of these facilities was all the more heightened. This social significance was often appreciated if not always understood. The practical reasons for their existence were logistically sound. They are cleaner, safer, cheaper to build and maintain and can handle far more people with far less space. It was also widely understood that their benefit went far beyond their utility and practically. As a character building and bonding experience, they have a unique potency. By the mid-20^th century if not slightly before they had become a culture touchstone. A rite of passage and ubiquitous feature of the society, their importance was enshrined in the architecture of nearly every pool, gym, beach, factory, campground, dorm, and military based built in the 20^th century. In the 1960’s, experts on gym design were lauding their superiority to any alternative and predicting a bright future.

Then, without warning or even apparent cause they started to decline. There was no prohibitive law or definitive litigation that signaled the shift, nor was there a concerted movement to abolish them. No, rather at some point fewer and fewer people used them. Presumable there had always been at least some people who for whatever reason wished to avoid the experience, but these numbers were evidently small and not expanding. At some point those numbers started growing. Not only that but whereas in the past when an objecting person may have been told to “get over it”, more and more administrators of communal shower facilities were willing to listen and indulge the objections of those who offered them. We don’t have data on usage and practice. All we have are scattered anecdotal reports of more and more students refusing to use them, culminating in 1995 with a trio of articles from three of the main newspapers in the country, the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune and the L.A. Times, noting that showers were no longer nearly as widely used as they once had been. The articles note that many communal shower facilities sit unused, some to the point of being converted to other uses. When did this decline start and where? How rapid was it? Most curious of all, why? Why did communal showers after being born in the restrictive environment of the Victoria Era suddenly find themselves in rapid retreat after the sexual revolution of the 1960s? There are many proposed culprits: Gay liberation, pornography, smaller families, school funding, Title IX, desegregation, rising wealth, the child rights movement, the ACLU, but little definitive evidence has been found to substantiate these speculative culprits. The change is all the more interesting in that despite it being massive and revolutionary it has drawn comparatively little attention. Indeed next to the question of why this is happening, the question of why so few notice or care is nearly as big a mystery.

Interesting as those question of why and how this shift happened without generating much attention, the more important question may be, what is actually being lost? It's true that communal showers are very much a modern, mostly 20^th century phenomenon, however they represent the terminal iteration of a tradition of social nudity that stretches back at least to the Classic Greeks, if not deep into pre-history. They represent both a hygienic necessity and a social space that cultures the world over and throughout recorded history have relied upon. Something so important probably should not be abolished or diminished to vestigial status without a compelling reason, or as is the case no actual reason at all.