The grandmas weren’t engaged in any sort of sales campaign. They never had a goal to convince outsiders to adopt their values. Most didn’t give a fig how others cleaned themselves.

But every community contains firebrands and opinion-holders. The pro-bath editorials were never published, but this is the best one the students uncovered when they searched.

There’s really no contest. Oh, you can state that the shower is refreshing and the bath is relaxing, that the shower wakes you up and the bath readies you for sleep, but the bath exceeds the shower every time, in effectiveness, luxury, and suggestion.

You get cleaner in a bath. Even though the water you’re in contains your own dander and soil, you’re immersed. You’re soaking. That’s way better at cleaning you than a cascade of water.

The bathing experience is one of unhurried stretch. The shower is fast, expedient. On average, a shower uses half as much water. That’s good, conservationally speaking, but you get what you pay, drill, pump and pipe for: relaxing in a tub of hot water feels great. Showers were first made feasible and popular in French prisons in the late 1800’s. From there the stalls and fixtures moved to the military. Well that makes sense (the mental image of a platoon in some big hot public bath does not evoke military themes), but I’m not a soldier and my home isn’t a barracks. Give me my big beautiful clean bath.

And look at the symbolism. The shower overtook the bath in American home popularity sometime in the second half of the 20th century. And all it’s been used for, in books and film, is an eavesdropping location at best and a scene of bloody murder at worst. Suggestible people can’t relax in a night-time shower alone in the house; no sooner do they close their eyes beneath the spray than they imagine a crazed knife-wielding maniac about to crash the shower curtain or door.

Baths on the other hand? The worst thing that can happen is you get spied upon. By a god or artist who is beguiled at your beauty. Oh that hurts. Seriously, it’s true that the bath scene has been used time and again as a way to peek at naked women and even portray acts of love and pornography. But if we actually are given a choice between love and war: really? I think I know what we’re all going to choose.