Origins of Gender Segregated Space

Public gender-segregated spaces first appeared in the first half of the 19^th century, decades before the first public bathrooms. At that time, American society ascribed to what is often called the “Cult of True Womanhood,” a system of belief in woman’s superior moral sensibilities and her natural role as the virtuous homemaker. Based on an Idealist framework, it had no basis in reality. Rather, it seemed to deny the real cultural changes occurring at the onset of the Industrial Revolution. (Kogan, 19-20)

The Industrial Revolution uprooted business, commerce, and production from the home and transplanted them into the city. While men followed the workplace into the city, women largely remained at home to handle domestic labor. Separated into the public and private spheres, respectively, men and women came to be associated with different realms of life. However, it was not at all uncommon for women to participate in public life. Many joined the workforce or participated in civic life, though they were generally barred from public recreation and entertainment like parks and theaters. But soon, this too would change. (Kogan, 21-22, 23-24)

In the second half of the 19^th century, it became acceptable for women to attend the theater and other public places. Uncomfortable with the contradictions between real women and the Cult of True Womanhood, Victorians turned to pseudo-science in order to maintain their idealized vision of woman. To support the separate spheres ideology, scientists used deeply flawed methods to prove the female body weaker than the male body. This evidence became the basis for laws enacted to protect supposedly fragile women who ventured out of the safety and comfort of home. Many of these laws regulated architectural space, creating dedicated female spaces in public places where they could rest and recuperate. These spaces could be found in nearly every corner of life: department stores, hotels, commercial photography studios, restaurants, banks, post offices, public parks, public libraries, and trains. Though similar spaces existed for men in many cases, women’s spaces were less formal. Their décor mimicked that of domestic interiors as a way of making women more comfortable and maintaining the association between women and domestic life (Figures 1 & 2). As bathrooms made their way into the public sphere, the same gendered logic would apply. (Kogan, 23-24, 27, 29-31, 33)

Privacy Gradients in Gendered Bathrooms

During the first half of the 19^th century, plumbing infrastructure and technology only supported single-user water closets. As a growing number of water closets were installed in public spaces, upper- and middle- class values concerning privacy influenced their design (Davis, 71). It quickly became convention to place water closets within gendered spaces like reading rooms and parlors, making them gendered as well (Yuko, par. 12). Similarly, with more women entering the workforce, factories came to include heavily regulated gendered spaces. Starting with Massachusetts in 1887, states passed laws requiring factories with male and female employees to provide gender-segregated water closets. It was also common to require separate dressing rooms, washrooms, and lunchrooms for men and women. Additionally, factories provided a resting/emergency room in case the supposedly weak and delicate women became fatigued or faint. Like other gendered spaces, these spaces could be nested within each other. For example, a bathroom could commonly be found within a women’s rest/emergency room (Figure 3). (Kogan, 40, 43)

This nested spatial strategy was not only more cost effective and spatially efficient, but also helped to create greater privacy in bathrooms. Victorian modesty and anxiety over bodily functions went so far that to even be seen entering a water closet could be cause for embarrassment (Kogan, 48). Architects strove to create private approaches to bathrooms in order to resolve this issue. One way to create a more private approach is to place bathrooms within already gendered spaces. Choosing to nest gendered spaces, architects created privacy gradients from public spaces to semi-private gendered spaces to the fully private water closet. As architect and theorist Jon T. Lang suggests, privacy gradients like these increase feelings of comfort and security by creating defensible spaces. Defensible spaces are spaces that an individual or group feels territorial control over (Lang, 151-152). In this case, the parlor, reading room, or emergency room become a defensible space. Female occupants can surveil who enters and what activities take place. An interloper could be expelled before reaching the much more private area of the water closet. It is not clear that Victorian architects understood or intended to activate these mechanisms. However, regardless of their intentions, the spaces they created exemplify privacy gradients and defensible space.

While initially both men and women had dedicated public spaces with water closets within them, things began to change as plumbing technology and infrastructure advanced. Starting in the 1860s, multi-user bathrooms became more common. While the gendered spaces that once contained them disappeared over time, bathrooms retained their gendered character. For women’s bathrooms only, a vestige of the gendered parlor was retained in the form of a bathroom lounge attached to women’s bathrooms. These lounges served as a space for women to rest and recuperate. Additionally, they maintained a deeper privacy gradient, acting as a buffer between the fully public space and the toilet stalls (Figure 4). As men were thought to be of greater fortitude than women, these lounges were not considered necessary. Over the course of the 20^th century, women’s restroom lounges became a space for any gendered activity modest values dictated be hidden from view, like breast-feeding and applying makeup (Figure 5). (Yuko, par. 14, 18)

Masculine gender roles aside, it seems the main answer to the question of why women’s restrooms are more committed to stall partitions than men is ultimately because women are not provided with a means of urinating while standing up. Historically, there have been many objects, what I like to call ‘props’, for female upright urination, but no plumbing fixtures. In the 18^th and 19^th centuries, women used portable urinals and bourdaloues (Figure 6). Each was like a small, handheld chamber pot. Bourdaloues had a bowl like shape with a handle, while portable urinals were bottle-like, making them convenient for travel. Though convenient for the women of the era, they would not suit the needs of modern women. In the 18^th and 19^th centuries, the crotchless pantaloons women wore under their skirts made it possible to use portable urinals and bourdaloues without much hassle. A more recent foray into urinary props for women is the P-mate. It is a disposable, funnel shaped object that allows women to aim the stream of urine, rather than collecting it like bourdaloues and portable urinals. Though more sanitary than its predecessors, it is more of a stopgap than a true solution. (Penner, locations 2180-2183)

Fixtures for convenient female urination are few and far between and were never widely adopted. The urinettes of 19^th century pay-per-use London public bathrooms were cheaper to use than water closets and were self-flushing like urinals, but still required assuming a squatting or sitting position. Though they used curtains rather than stall partitions, this choice was not because less privacy was necessary. Rather, it simply made them cheaper to construct. Similarly, modern attempts at female urinal design have failed to address the problems of posture and exposure inherent in toilet-use (Figure 7). These urinals still require women to undress from the waist down but are used in a squatting position without the protection of stall partitions. If anything, these arrangements would make them more inconvenient and much less comfortable than toilets stalls, and certainly more embarrassing. (Penner, locations 2200-2211, 2251-2257)

There is at least one example of a system for female urination that does not require full exposure of the lower body. However, it does require an overhaul of the women’s fashion industry. In the early 1990s, J. Yolande Daniels designed the FEMME^TM pissoire (Figure 8). Along with her design for the fixture itself, she proposed a change to women’s pants design. Her P-system pants include a zipper low in the crotch so that users of the FEMME^TM pissoire need only unzip to use it. (Penner, locations 2251-2262)

In general, female urinal designs have not been taken seriously. When actually installed, it’s usually just for the sake of novelty (Penner, location 2273). Our cultural failure to design an adequate female urinal suggests a commitment to female toilet use, with its many partitions. As we continue use of disparate fixtures and partitions in men’s and women’s bathrooms, we perpetuate Victorian values of modest and discreet femininity, tough and heterosexual masculinity, and the anxieties that go along with them. Though our anxieties around bathrooms is a cultural construct, that doesn’t make them any less distressing (Davis, 94). With that in mind, it’s important to make bathrooms comfortable for everyone and to ease those anxieties where we can, especially as gender neutral bathrooms become more common.

Though gender neutral bathrooms mark a huge shift in public bathroom design, some designers believe there is more to be done. Joel Sanders and Susan Stryker advocate for an entirely new approach to public bathrooms. Their proposed design uses a more open plan with deep privacy gradients, much like those of earlier women’s bathrooms, to increase safety and inclusivity (Figure 9). They created zones for coiffing, hand washing, and using the toilet. Multiple lines of mirrors allow for coiffing in the open or in semi-privacy. Additionally, the floor-to-ceiling stalls also include a mirror for anyone who requires complete privacy for coiffing. They even include a waiting area with a couch, reminiscent of the furniture in women’s bathroom lounges. But unlike women’s bathrooms, or indeed any bathrooms built in the United States before, their proposed design is a well-defined but open space. Rather than divide the bathroom from the space it serves with a wall and door, their design relies on their multi-layered privacy gradient to create sufficient privacy for each zone. In this way, they take the comfort and security of the women’s restroom lounges a step further, allowing for networks of behavior surveillance from both the inside and outside the bathroom.