Includes bibliographical references (p. 343-355) and index.

A Culture of Cleanliness -- Soap as an Artifact of Culture -- Definitions: Myths, Icons, Stereotypes, Heroes, Rituals, and Formula -- Cleanliness, Not Always a Virtue -- One Thousand Years without a Bath -- New Gentility in the New World -- Nineteenth-Century America -- The Commercial Soap Trade -- Rise of the Mass Market, 1875 to 1900 -- The New Culture of Consumption -- From Domestic to Municipal Housekeeper -- From Outhouse to In-House -- Soap Trade and the Era of the National Market -- Advertising and Mass Production -- The First National Advertisers -- Brightening the "Dark Corners of the Earth" -- Soap, Sex, and Science, 1900 to 1920 -- The Great Unwashed -- The Modern Bathroom -- The Soap Trade and Mass Selling -- Advertising and the New Science of Psychology -- Three Campaigns in the Making -- Soap Goes to War -- Shrines of Cleanliness, 1920 to 1940 -- The Liberation of the Bathroom -- The Importance of Knowing the Customer -- Three Formulas in the Making, 1920s -- Advertising Gets Entertaining, 1930s -- Soap, Sex, and Society, 1920 to 1940 -- Women Compose the Selling Prose -- Beauty Types -- The Cleanliness Institute, 1927 to 1932 -- Soap Operas and Soap -- White Soap and Black Consumer Culture -- African Americans and Personal Care Enterprise -- The Politics of Appearance -- Beauty Types, Stereotypes, and Countertypes -- The White Trade in Black Beauty -- Sexualizing the Sell -- Advertising and the Consumer Culture -- New Shrines of Cleanliness.