“The Weird History of Gender-Segregated Bathrooms”
“The first gender-segregated public restroom on record was a temporary setup at a Parisian ball in 1739, said Sheila Cavanagh, a sociologist at York University in Canada and author of “Queering Bathrooms: Gender, Sexuality, and the Hygienic Imagination” (University of Toronto Press, 2010). The ball’s organizers put a chamber box (essentially a chamber pot in a box with a seat) for men in one room and for women in another.
“Everyone at the ball thought this was sort of a novelty — something sort of eccentric and fun,” Cavanagh said.
But for the most part, public facilities in Western nations were male-only until the Victorian era, which meant women had to improvise. If they had to be out and about longer than they could hold their bladders, women in the Victorian era would urinate over a gutter (long Victorian skirts allowed for some privacy)…
Thus, the first gender-segregated restrooms were a major step forward for women. Massachusetts passed a law in 1887 requiring workplaces that employed women to have restrooms for them, according to an article in the Rutgers University Law Review. By the 1920s, such laws were the norm.
Victorian-era Americans were segregated by gender in many spaces, Molotch said. There were ladies-only waiting rooms in train stations, and female-only reading rooms in libraries. As sex segregation has fallen to the wayside in other public spaces, bathrooms remain the last holdout, he said.”
Ability to use the bathroom is a great way to control people.
