Woodcut of a woman in sixteenth-century dress emptying out a washtub with a baby still inside, from Thomas Murner’s 1512 Narrenbeschwörung.
17 June 2022
The phrase throw the baby out with the bathwater is a calque of a German proverb, das Kind mit dem Bade ausschütten, that dates to at least 1512. But it took several centuries for the phrase to make its appearance in English. And the exact wording of the English version varies, with the earliest instances using the verb to empty rather than the verb to throw, but regardless, the phrase and metaphor are recognizably the same.
The phrase’s first known appearance in German is in Thomas Murner’s 1512 satirical Narrenbeschwörung (Appeal to Fools). In a chapter in the book titled Das Kindt mit dem Bad vß Schitten, which consists of a seventy-six-line poem, the phrase occurs three times. The poem opens:
Ein narr der meint, es su nit Schad,
Das kindt uß schitten mit dem bade,
Und su so gut, in die hell gesprungen,
Als mit rütschen drun gerungen.(A fool thinks it’s not a bad thing to spill the baby with the bathwater; it’s as good to leap into hell as to slide into it.)
Murner uses it in later works, indicating that it was probably already in oral use by 1512. Other German writers rapidly followed, and the list of those who have used the phrase over the centuries includes Martin Luther, Johannes Kepler, Goethe, Bismarck, Thomas Mann, and Günter Grass.
The phrase’s first known appearance in English is a disturbing one, appearing in a racist, pro-slavery tract by essayist and philosopher Thomas Carlyle. That does not mean, though, that the phrase itself is racist or that we should be hesitant to use it in our speech and writing today. But it’s important to recognize who we are dealing with when we see quotations from noted personages of the past. As the following passage shows, Carlyle was a hardcore white supremacist (and also anti-Semite). The passage is from Carlyle’s 1853 essay Occasional Discourse on the N[——]r Question:
I am prepared to maintain against all comers, That in every human relation, from that of husband and wife down to that of master and servant, nomadism is the bad plan, and continuance the good. A thousand times, since I first had servants, it has occurred to me, How much better had I servants that were bound to me, and to whom I were bound! Doubtless it were not easy; doubtless it is now impossible: but if it could be done! I say, if the Black gentleman is born to be a servant, and, in fact, is useful in God’s creation only as a servant, then let him hire not by the month, but by a very much longer term. That he be “hired for life,”—really here is the essence of the position he now holds! Consider that matter. All else is abuse in it, and this only is essence;—and the abuses must be cleared away. They must and shall! Yes; and the thing itself seems to offer (its abuses once cleared away) a possibility of the most precious kind for the Black man and for us. Servants hired for life, or by a contract for a long period, and not easily dissoluble; so and not otherwise would all reasonable mortals, Black and White, wish to hire and to be hired! I invite you to reflect on that; for you will find it true. And if true, it is important for us, in reference to this Negro Question and some others. The Germans say, “you must empty-out the bathing-tub, but not the baby along with it.” Fling-out your dirty water with all zeal, and set it careering down the kennels; but try if you can keep the little child!
Carlyle was a Germanophile and undoubtedly became familiar with the phrase from reading German writers.
The phrase appears in American writing a few years later, in the February 1860 issue of the religious magazine The Dial. It seems likely, however, that the phrase was brought to North America by German immigrants, rather than through the influence of Carlyle. The phrase is used in an editorial note following an article that is critical of the institution of prayer:
The defect of the above article seems to us to be that, in the language of a homely German proverb, it throws out the baby with the bath. Its fierce indignation at superstition holds discrimination in abeyance, and because of the worm cuts down the tree.
The phrase appears sporadically in British and American writing until the middle of the twentieth century, when it suddenly gains traction and becomes a widespread adage.
The phrase is only a metaphor, not a description of actual practice. No one ever actually disposed of a baby along with the washing water.
Sources:
Carlyle, Thomas. Occasional Discourse on the N[——] Question. London: Thomas Bosworth, 1853, 28–29. Gale Primary Sources: The Making of the Modern World. (The elision in the title is my own. Note, the original 1849 version of the essay, which does not contain the baby-bathwater metaphor, uses Negro in the title.)
Davies, Mark. Corpus of Historical American English, accessed 11 May 2022.
Google Books Ngram Viewer, accessed 11 May 2022.
Mieder, Wolfgang and Wayland D. Hand. “‘(Don’t) Throw the Baby Out with the Bath Water’: The Americanization of a German Proverb and Proverbial Expression.” Western Folklore, 50.4, October 1991, 361–400. JSTOR.
Murner, Thomas. Narrenbeschwörung. Halle: Max Niemeyer, 1894, 243. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
“On Prayer.” The Dial, February 1860, 129. Proquest Magazines.
Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2011, s.v. baby, n. and adj.
Shapiro, Fred R. The New Yale Book of Quotations. New Haven: Yale UP, 2021, 664.
Tréguer, Pascal. “The German Origin of the Phrase ‘To Throw the Baby Out with the Bathwater.’” Wordhistories.net, 23 November 2018.
Image credit: Unknown artist, 1512. Public domain image.