The name is rooted in the French word for “pony,” which offers a helpful hint that the basin should be straddled. But it also picked up this moniker because royalty used it to clean up after a ride. Hauling water was a laborious process in that era, but bidet bathing was a regular indulgence for the aristocracy and upper classes. This little bathing workhorse was so much a part of high society that the artist Louis-Léopold Boilly, who painted French middle- and upper-class life, showcased a young woman with her skirts hiked over the washbasin in one of his works—providing a racy bidet counterpart to Degas’s bathtub portraits. They were such an integral part of civilized life that even the imprisoned Marie Antoinette was granted a red-trimmed one while awaiting the guillotine. She may have been in a dank, rat-infested cell, but her right to freshen up would not be denied.

Versions in the 1700s sometimes featured a water-pump handle that could deliver an upward spray from a refillable tank. As indoor plumbing caught on in the 1800s, the bidet moved from the bedroom into the bathroom, and the standard model came into use: a tiny tub that could be filled with a faucet at either end. The first of the plumbed bidets were most common in high society, but its popularity soon spread, both to other social classes in France and to other countries in Western Europe—as well as Latin America, the Middle East, and Asia.

Throughout this bidet boom, the United States resisted its appeal, and the reason might have been the power of first impressions. Americans were introduced to bidets on a broad scale during World War II, when troops were stationed in Europe. GIs visiting bordellos would often see bidets in the bathrooms, so they began to associate these basins with sex work. Given America’s puritanical past, it makes sense that, once back home, servicemen would feel squeamish presenting these fixtures to their homeland.

But even before the war, bidets were linked to sex and scandal. In the United States and Britain, when various forms of douching were thought of as a pregnancy preventive, bidets were considered a form of birth control. As Norman Haire, a birth-control pioneer, put it in 1936, “The presence of a bidet is regarded as almost a symbol of sin.” The present-day American sociologist Harvey Molotch agrees, concluding that the devices were tainted with France’s hedonism and sexuality. “Bidets have had such difficulty ... Even all the power of capitalism can’t break the taboo.”

While they were truly terrible at pregnancy prevention, bidets could be helpful for another taboo: menstruation. As Therese Oneill demonstrates in her book Unmentionable, women’s periods in this time were largely not spoken of and quietly tended to with “jelly rags.” It was a messy and private affair that had no commercial answer. But as a selling point for bidets, menstruation was possibly on par with unwanted pregnancy and prostitution as undesirable and unspoken during the pre- and postwar years. In terms of finding commercial success, it was more a hindrance than a help.