Washing Out Mouth With Soap - Notable Cases

Notable Cases

• In 1890, a Mormon father submitted a complaint to the Brooklyn, Nevada school board noting that a teacher had washed his daughter's mouth out with soap, after she lied to him.
• In November 1980, an African American mother in Albany, Georgia appealed to the school board to fire the Caucasian teacher who had washed her daughter's mouth out with soap. When the schoolboard refused, 500 black families picketed the school board.
• It formed some part of hazing rituals in the Royal Navy in the 1940s.
• In March 1949, twenty years before the advent of no fault divorce, Mary L. Muick was granted a divorce against her husband Joseph Muick in San Jose, California after he retaliated against her own threats to soap his son's mouth for foul language at a family gathering, by forcibly washing her mouth with soap.
• Washington Senator Lorraine Wojahn noted that her mother washed out her mouth with soap when she was five years old, for trying some of her father's chewing tobacco.
• President George W. Bush recalled that his parents had washed his mouth out with soap when he came home from school using racist language.
• Through the 1960s and 1970s, Sister Marie Docherty was accused of mistreating girls in her care at Nazareth House in Aberdeen, Scotland; including washing their mouths out with soap if they swore.
• Following Toledo, Ohio mayor Carty Finkbeiner's use of profanity in a news conference in 1998, presidential candidate Ralph Nader sent him a bar of soap with which to wash out his mouth.
• Convicted murderer Steven W. Bowman was alleged to have washed out his girlfriend's mouth with soap in July 2000, when she mentioned her other romantic partner's name; before murdering him.
• A teacher in Rochester, New York was suspended in 2004 for washing out the mouth of a student for using vulgar language. Following her suspension, parents and family members of her students signed a petition supporting her actions and requesting her reinstatement.