This is an I-Heart podcast.

Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of IHeart Radio.

Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson.

And I'm Holly Fry.

We got an email from listener, Liz, asking for an episode on the history of soap. That is something that I had on my list back when Holly and I first joined the show in 2013. Holly has thought about doing a soap episode also.

It has never happened.

It had never happened.

So I was like, why not?

Why not now that someone has actually asked for something that I thought maybe no one would find interesting.

We will do it.

We'll do it now.

This turned out to be tricky to do the research on, because Holly's laughing, a lot of writing about soap is either really hyper-specific, like the history of the soap industry in one

particular city over a specific period, or it is so broad that it's hard to

pull details out of.

And then there are also some details that just get repeated all over the place, but they don't

really add up.

A lot of the books that are connected to this history are really histories of cleanliness or hygiene, which is a slightly different thing.

So in parts of this episode, we're going to be talking about a bunch of things that all happened in roughly the same period of history, but not necessarily

in a specific order chronologically. And now you know why I never got an episode about soap

turned out. Yeah, when I asked you about it, you said, I think I ran into some kind of problem,

and I learned through experience what the problem was.

Yeah.

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