‘Women explore stench “inferno”’, proclaimed the headline in the Chicago Daily Tribune on 19 June 1910. Twenty members of the Chicago Women’s City Club had gone on a sightseeing trip to the garbage-burning section of Chicago near the stockyards. They carried parasols to protect themselves from the sun, but left their automobiles behind in order to ‘hike’ from one garbage dump to another. One of them said after the trip, ‘Now I know why I have to sprinkle cologne around the house when the wind blows from the west’. Beginning at the University of Chicago Settlement, they were led by its head resident, Mary McDowell, first to gaze at the foul waters of so-called Bubbly Creek, a long, dead arm of the Chicago river full of carbonic gas from years of untreated human sewage and the greasy detritus of the meat-packing industry, and from there to the vast open pits full of putrefying garbage where uncovered horse-drawn wagons daily dumped every kind of rubbish. The Chairman of the Club’s Housing Committee, Mrs Henry Solomon (Hannah Greenebaum Solomon, founder of the National Council of Jewish Women), explained to the Chicago Daily Tribune reporter that the reason for the malodorous expedition was the Club’s ambition to bring about municipal ownership of more scientific and effective methods of garbage collection and disposal. Mary McDowell, from the Settlement, pointed out the connection between Chicago’s garbage problem and the high rate of infant mortality prevailing in the area – at least double that in the districts from which the parasol-carrying ladies came. Research McDowell had carried out with local doctors and nurses estimated that a third of the area’s babies died before they were two, and the most important causes were the open sewer of Bubbly Creek and the garbage dumps – half of the babies who died lived within three blocks of the dumps.

Dirt and cleanliness are recurring themes in women’s history. They stand for the human struggle to impose cultural order on natural disorder, but they also signal one of the strategies that masculine power structures have used to keep women (and other subordinates) in their place. The place of women is in the home.