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Romans spent several hours a day soaking in public tubs, scraping off dirt with a metal tool and then rubbing themselves with oil to get clean.

Seventeenth-century European scientists "proved" that wearing fresh linen was much safer and more effective at cleaning the body than immersing oneself in water.

Nowadays, being clean requires daily showers, frequent hand-washing and countless anti-bacterial products.

Cleanliness is a moving target, Toronto writer Katherine Ashenburg says in her new book The Dirt on Clean: An Unsanitized History.

In an interview with The Globe and Mail, Ms. Ashenburg explores the history of "clean," why you didn't really need a shower today and other dirty secrets.

It seems like the history of clean is closely tied to the history of smell. Let's start with a question that you were asked often as you were researching this book: Didn't people in the old days just smell bad all the time?

The smell of dried sweat was just the ocean our ancestors swam in. I think the nose is very adaptable as an organ. I make the comparison with the fact that 20 or 30 years ago, our college classrooms and people's houses and hotels and restaurants were filled with cigarette smoke, and we just adjusted. And now that there are all these anti-smoking laws, you walk into a room where someone's had a cigarette three days ago and you say, "Oh, has someone in here been smoking?"

When you started telling friends you were writing this book, you began getting confessions from people. What sort of secrets did people tell you?

They were much more likely to confide less washing than the norm rather than more washing. Although one woman friend said to me, "You know when I started going out with X 25 years ago, he was taking three showers a day, and I would have just loved to know what he really smelled like, as opposed to Dial soap." And I said something like, well, now you've been married for 25 years, so I guess you know. And she just looked at me and said, "No, I have no idea, he's still doing it." ...

It reminded me of the last book I wrote, which was about mourning customs, when people would take me aside at parties and say, "You know I'm still wearing my father's undershirts and he died five years ago." Things that were not really acceptable for 20th- or 21st-century North America.

So I thought wow, there's a kind of underground, a whole universe of people that are flying under the radar, who are not obeying the rules.

Is there the same amount of emotion around people's cleaning habits as you found around their secret mourning habits?

Oh, yeah! Probably more so because we've been so conditioned by advertising.

There's this word that occurs over and over and over again in advertising, starting right at the beginning of the 20th century - we're terrified of "offending." Which was a really completely new word to use in terms of your hygiene.

I mean, you offended somebody by smiting them on the face or something, not by the fact that you hadn't washed within three hours of seeing them.

Speaking of advertising, I was fascinated by the parts of the book that talked about the "problem" of a woman's odour. How closely does this preoccupation with feminine hygiene products track with the women's movement?

The first instance of that is weird, or counterintuitive, in the sense that feminine hygiene sprays were invented right at the end of the 1960s, beginning of the seventies, and connected in the ads with women's liberation, which was also connected in those days with the sexual liberation movement.

So women were induced by these ads to think that when they went out to enjoy sex with whomever they wanted to ... they had to be absolutely odour-free and they would enjoy it so much more if they didn't ever have to worry that they smelled like a woman.

What do you think of the

current craze for all these

anti-bacterial products?

I think it's advertisers looking for a new frontier, new products that they can sell. I think they're very successfully working on our fears of disease, which has become a much more real event in the past 20 years or so.

There was a very interesting article in The New York Times connecting all these fears of new germs and all these sprays and anti-everythings with the fear of terrorism, saying just as germs are unseen, deadly enemies, so are terrorists.

I enjoyed your description of how bathrooms have gone from non-existence to being basically a second master bedroom. What are some of the lavish things people are doing with their bathrooms?

Well, they're being encouraged by bathroom manufacturers and shelter magazines to see the bathroom as another kind of family room, as a place where the whole family gets together at the end of the day and decompresses and talks about their day and relaxes together.

On the one hand that sounds sort of crazy, sybaritic, but on the other hand the Romans would have found that completely natural. And other cultures that bathe communally: The Japanese do that in their traditional baths; Hungarians do that when they go to the mineral baths that are all over Budapest.

Do you think there's anything that could break the North American trend toward overzealous cleanliness?

As we get more green and more conscious of what we're doing to the environment, I think that the pendulum will swing back.

There is just some more understanding or curiosity about what are the toxins that we're pouring down our drains with all these conditioners and deodorants and body softeners and body hardeners, whatever it is that people are buying. And nothing would change our washing habits more quickly than a water shortage, for sure. ...

But just having looked at what we think is clean over 28 centuries, it just seems that that pendulum is always moving. Everybody thinks they've got it right and almost nobody in the 28 centuries has really gotten it.

There's always some dirt on clean, which is what the title means. I think because it's about our bodies and it's about control, the definition never stays constant for all that long.

Did researching and writing

this book cause you to change any of your own personal

habits?

Yes. First of all it has made me much more conscious of the kind of voluntary side of bathing. ...

I now realize we've never had less reason to wash, or I've never had less reason to wash in that I walk down the hall to my office and I sit in front of my computer all day. ...

Obviously there's a variation in how much people sweat and how much they perspire, and I have nothing against recreational showers or baths. But I've really come to realize in the course of the book that one a day for many sedentary workers is not really necessary.

Go ahead and have one, as long as we're not having a water shortage, but realize that hey, I feel like it, it's not like I need it.