The Bath: Where the Body Was Made Ready

The philosopher Seneca once took lodgings directly over a public bath, and wrote to a friend listing the noise. There was the man exercising with lead weights, the slap of the masseur's hand, the swimmer, the cake-seller and the sausage-man. And there was the hair-plucker, shouting in a shrill voice to advertise himself, quiet only when he was plucking someone's armpits and making his customer yell instead.^[1]

The joke is a record. Removing body hair was a service sold at the Roman bath, done in the open among the crowd. For most of history the bath was not where make-up came off. It was where the body was made ready for it.

In April 1717 Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, travelling to Constantinople with her husband, the English ambassador, stopped at Sofia to see its hot baths. She arrived at about ten in the morning and found the bath already full: about two hundred women on two tiers of marble sofas, the ladies above and their slaves behind them, drinking coffee or sherbet, talking or working, while the slaves braided their hair "in several pretty fancies".^[2]

Her summary is the line everyone quotes: "'tis the women's coffee-house, where all the news of the town is told, scandal invented, &c." They went, she was told, about once a week, and stayed four or five hours. The women tried to undress her for the bath, and when she showed them her stays they concluded that her husband had locked her into them.^[2]

A century later Edward William Lane described the same institution in Cairo, where between sixty and seventy public baths served the city. When a bath was given over to women, a cloth hung over the door to warn men away. A lady of wealth brought her own attendant, the belláneh, whom Lane calls "the washer and tire-woman": she rubbed and washed her clients, plaited their hair and applied the depilatory, and the women spent an hour or more under her hands before resting, eating and talking.^[3]

Lane records the depilatory too. The usual one was a resin applied melted; the one often preferred in the bath, called noorah, was quicklime with about an eighth part of orpiment, made into a paste that loosened the hair in about two minutes and was washed off.^[3] The bath was also, he notes, where a mother might choose a bride for her son from among the girls she saw there.^[3]

The bath had its own ceremonies. In Constantinople Montagu watched a bride of about seventeen received at one of the finest baths by some two hundred women, relations and friends of the two families. Undressed like everyone else, she was led round the three largest rooms in procession, with perfume carried before her in silver-gilt pots and a wedding song sung in chorus, and then presented to each married woman in turn, who gave her a gift.^[4]

In Cairo the bride also went to the bath in state, in a procession Lane calls Zeffet el-Hammám, and on her return her hands and feet were dyed on the Night of the Henna.^[5] In both cities the bath was the first stage of the bridal toilette, a preparation of the body before any colour was put on it.

The hammam reached Victorian Britain as a cure. The historian of the Victorian Turkish bath has identified more than six hundred opened in the British Isles after 1856, the first London ones used largely as a remedy for illness.^[6] The grandest, the Hammam at 76 Jermyn Street, opened to the public on 28 July 1862, with David Urquhart, its inspiration, as first manager and the dermatologist Erasmus Wilson among its larger shareholders.^[7]

Urquhart's own plan shows what changed in the crossing. The women were to have a separate street entrance, kept from intruding on the central hall, and room for seventy bathers at once, against three hundred on the men's side.^[7] In Sofia and Cairo the women's bath had been a world of its own. In London it was a side door.

What the women in these baths said about themselves. Every account here is an outsider's: a Roman philosopher complaining about the noise, an English ambassador's wife who was herself the curiosity, an English scholar describing a women's world partly, by his own account, from what he was told.^[8] The ritual is well described from its edges, and almost never from inside.