After I got over my jealousy, I began to think about my
modern convenient life versus my grandmother’s almost primitive way of
living. I made soap for the fun of
it. She made soap because that was the
only way she would get it. I had lots of
questions, so I called my dad and began quizzing him about grandmother’s lye
soap. “I can’t give you much
information,” he said. “Making soap was
woman’s work.” I grunted. “I don’t mean to be offensive; that’s just
how it was back then.”
Here’s all he could tell me:
she made it annually using the leftover fat from butchering hogs, and
she used the soap to wash clothes (in her wringer washer). Those two pieces of information made me
marvel at how industrious humans are.
According to soaphistory.net,
people have been producing soap for nearly 5000 years. The earliest recorded proof of soap’s
existence dates back to 2800 BC in Ancient Babylon, where soap was made by
mixing animal fat and tree ash to form a cleansing product. How is it that someone would figure out that
mixing animal fat with alkaline wooden ashes would create a cleansing agent? As an obsessive clean freak, I am incredibly
thankful for the discovery.
A number of sites shared information about soap use over
time – like its use in 1500 BC in Egypt and ancient Germans mixing ashes with
animal fat to produce soap. In the 8th
century, soap making was well-known in Italy and Spain. At the same time,
France began using olive oil to make soap.
Obviously time went on and more discoveries were made. The
Industrial Revolution changed the way soap was made, and folks started buying
it from a catalog or store. Not my
grandmother. She was born in 1911, and I
suspect that she learned how to make it as a young girl. She continued to make it until the early
1980’s, and she used it until she passed in 1984. And it still lives today – in a bucket in my
sister’s basement.