In the Ladies’ Loo
Gender-segregated bathrooms tell a story about who is and who is not welcome in public life.
Passengers freshening up in the ladies’ restroom at the Greyhound bus terminal, Chicago, 1943 via LOC
By: Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza
Women’s entry into public life around the turn of the twentieth century was a major catalyst for the creation of sex-segregated public restrooms. As scholar Daphne Spain writes, female civic reformers lobbied municipal governments to make cities more inclusive places for women, pushing for amenities such as health clinics and kindergartens. And in both small towns and big cities, notes historian Peter C. Baldwin, women worked to ensure the availability of public toilets. The first gender-segregated public bathrooms afforded women privacy, safety, and autonomy—if, that is, the women were white and of means; otherwise, access to bathrooms served as a tool of segregation. The history of the women’s bathrooms in the United States is a story of who does—and who doesn’t—get to belong in public life.
The first public bathrooms in the United States appeared in the late 1800s. Pub owners offered them to paying customers to drum up business and keep drinkers drinking. But, as Baldwin notes, pubs and saloons were improper, unwelcoming, and sometimes dangerous environments for women, and were effectively male-only establishments whose facilities only catered to men.
Just a few decades later, according to Spain, women had begun to challenge their “proper place” in society. While middle- and upper-class women increasingly ventured out of the home into the burgeoning urban environment to shop and to socialize, their lower-class counterparts increasingly found work in factories and other non-domestic environments where they could earn their own money. And some, many of whom belonged to the upper classes, forced their way into political and civic life, lobbying for, and winning, suffrage. Changing social stations pushed women and men together in public. They shared sidewalks, transportation, parks, stores, and restaurants. Women entered public life, and standards of decorum shifted to accommodate them, though certainly not to include them—gender segregation became a paramount concern, according to Baldwin, for preserving the modesty and propriety of women. Still, a dramatic shift had occurred: Men no longer wielded a monopoly on public life.
In the absence of an available pub bathroom, men were accustomed to relieving themselves in the street. Not only did that suddenly seem crass in mixed company, but the new science of germ theory made it clear that using the city as a toilet posed a health hazard, Baldwin says. Urban designers, physicians, and civic groups lobbied municipal governments in Chicago, Boston, New York, and elsewhere to provide a sanitary solution to the problem of human waste.
The first public toilets, euphemistically called “comfort stations,” appeared in American cities in the 1890s, according to Baldwin. By 1919, roughly one hundred cities, including Denver, Cleveland, Detroit, Philadelphia, and Seattle made toilet facilities available to the public for free or a small fee. Some were funded by health-minded philanthropists and reformers concerned not only with physical cleanliness, but “moral cleanliness,” writes sociologist Alexander K. Davis. They believed the two were intrinsically linked.
Comfort stations were gender segregated but not gender equal. While men were afforded the opportunity to take care of their most basic needs—the need to relieve themselves—women were not given the same. Women’s facilities were often smaller and had fewer toilets than the men’s, writes Baldwin, and were consistently inferior to the semi-private “customers only” bathrooms available in the “Adamless Eden” of a department store, as one such store owner Spain quotes called them; these were available only to patrons.
For those women denied the privilege of department store entry owing to race or lack of means, the comfort station was the only option for getting some privacy in public. Businesses, manufacturing plants, offices, and government buildings almost entirely lacked gender-segregated bathrooms, and because it was scandalous for a woman to enter a bathroom that men used, the lack of women’s toilets sent a clear signal about who was and wasn’t welcome in a particular space. Without equitable access, women were not able to fully participate in life outside the home. If you can’t empty your bladder or your bowels with dignity, it’s hard to be away from home for long.
Public stations were expensive to maintain and quickly became dirty and malodorous. Many were underground or in secluded areas and were dangerous for female users. Baldwin points out that by the early 1920s, cities cut budgets and patrons abandoned the cause, so stations fell into disrepair almost as soon as they appeared, and some of the same women’s groups that had petitioned for their creation eventually pressed for their closure. The provision of bathrooms became largely the remit of private business owners who could provide or restrict access as they pleased.
Though the truly public bathroom—where access is free to all—is increasingly rare today, the semi-public toilet is taken for granted. The ladies’ room in restaurants, bars, airports, train and bus stations, hotel lobbies, schools, and event venues remains one of the few spaces where men are strictly prohibited. Though many are accessible only to those who can patronize a business or afford a ticket for travel.
It’s such an important part of female culture that the women’s bathroom is a convenient prop in movies, TV, and books. Writers set a scene in the ladies’ room, where women gather to complain, cry, confide, confess, gossip, preen, or bully. And though such scenes sometimes lean on tired tropes of female behavior, the gender-segregated bathroom is a place to exist beyond the gaze and reach of men. Here, women speak candidly about feelings, bodies, periods, sex, romantic partners, friends, jobs, and family.
“They offer a space for bonding, the exchange of information, and personal recovery,” writes scholar Christine Overall. “Sex-segregated toilets provide ‘the element of sociability important to many women, who also use the women’s room as a refuge, ‘a place to feel safe, both physically safe but also psychologically safe.’” On the wall and in stalls, it’s not uncommon to see phone numbers for domestic violence helplines or, in bar bathrooms, instructions for ordering an “angel shot”: a coded way to ask a bartender for help in the face of harassment.
Of course, the ladies’ room by design isn’t a safe space for all women.
“At various points in US history, the absence of toilet facilities has signaled to [B]lacks, to women, to workers, to people with disabilities, to transgender people, and to homeless people that they are outsiders to the body politic and that there is no room for them in public space,” writes the feminist scholar Judith Plaskow. If these bathrooms are supposedly for the public, then by virtue of excluding certain people, the message is that their needs are not for consideration.
Access to public space in the US has even been explicitly exclusionary. When the Boston-based advocacy organization Women’s Educational and Industrial Union pressed for the creation of health clinics and lunch rooms in the early twentieth century, it made it clear that their goal was to segregate classes and create spaces, Spain explains, where only “middle-class and elite women could appear without being declassed and working women could appear in public without having their virtue questioned by being ‘on the streets.’”
In the Jim Crow south, writes Baldwin, Black women had to use separate bathrooms, typically older and poorly maintained, and were not afforded the privacy of gender-segregated facilities. In some cases, Black people in the segregated South had no access to public bathrooms at all.
Now, the current campaigns of exclusion seek to bar transgender women from accessing the ladies’ room. In 2016, the North Carolina state legislature passed “the bathroom bill,” which forced people to use the bathroom that corresponds to the gender they were assigned at birth. The next year, eight more states moved to impose similar restrictions. North Carolina’s bill was met with such anger on behalf of the LGBTQ community that some elements were quickly scrapped, and the remainder was left to lapse in 2020. While campaigns for equity have made such laws and restrictions exceedingly unpopular, they have not yet made them extinct.
In November 2024, Sarah McBride became the first openly transgender person elected to Congress, representing the state of Delaware. Within weeks, representative Nancy Mace of South Carolina introduced a resolution banning transgender women from the ladies’ bathrooms on Capitol Hill. Within days, House Speaker Mike Johnson announced the official ban.
