Soap, Imperialism, and Racism

Soap: an innocent item of everyday life, one would think. The Victorians proclaimed "Cleanliness is next to Godliness." Soap and water were the keys to cleanliness. Today, most of the world's people are fortunate enough to have access to them. That hasn't always been the case.

During the Victorian Age, water was increasingly supplied to houses in the industrializing West, and people could buy manufactured soap. Keeping clean became easier for much of the population. Western cleanliness, however, soon became a mark of racial and imperial superiority.

During this time, western states were not only industrializing and urbanizing. They were also colonizing less developed regions of the globe. Imperialists justified their territorial acquisitions as a civilizing mission, or the "White Man's Burden," the title of Rudyard Kipling's popular poem of 1899. 

The British company that began making Pears' Soap in 1807 seems to have been the first to exploit that idea. The company promoted its product as possessing a "civilizing influence." Soap and civilization, Pears' ads declared, marched hand in hand. 

Soap lightened the White Man's Burden, by "brightening the dark corners of the earth." That translated here as cleaning up the dirty natives. The ads also complimented the advanced (white) civilizations for using soap. 

In the Pears' ad below, American Admiral Dewey, victor of the Battle of Manila Bay (1898), is pictured using the "ideal soap" while civilizers are bringing it to the people sitting in darkness.

Advertising in newspapers, magazines, and billboards boomed as never before in the late 19th century. Ads became larger and colorized, making them hard to miss. Soap companies, like many other businesses, were quick to take advantage of the latest in advertising technology and styles.

Many soap ads were innocent enough, such as this cute one:

But even apparently innocent ads often emphasized how the soap helped preserve one's "white and beautiful" complexion.

Intentionally or not, they encouraged the idea that skin that deviated from pure whiteness was inferior. 

Many soap ads were overtly racist. Besides claiming that dark skin was less desirable than white skin, they implied that it was unclean. The ads promoted the "whitening" quality of the soap by showing it being used to wash the color off black or brown skin. 

The intention of such ads was not to claim that the soap really could turn dark skin white but to highlight the pure complexion it could ensure for white folk, as in this thoroughly racist one for Cook's "Lightning" Soap. 

The ad below illustrates the same intention in another way. The immaculate white child asks the filthily dressed black girl "Why Doesn't Your Mamma Wash You With Fairy Soap?"

Below is an ad that seems at first to imply that blacks might benefit by using Pears' Soap. In fact, it ridicules black people. The key is the contrast between the testimonial of Sambo with that of Adelina Patti in the upper right corner. Patti was a famous late 19th century opera singer. Sambo was a common derogatory term for a black man.

Ads sometimes juxtaposed white and black folk in more realistic situations that emphasized the "whitening" quality of the soap. In this American ad, the speech pattern of the porter, "chocolate custard" Sam (short for "Sambo"?) reinforces the white-black gulf. The very name of the soap, "Ivory," highlights its "white purity."

The history of soap highlights how even ordinary items of daily life can take on a much broader and sometimes sinister connotation.