Sex Separation: Gendered Toilets
Why are our public restrooms genderly segregated ? Why do we feel unconfortable with the idea of shared public restroom ? This is what Terry Kogan tries to understand in his article “Sex Separation: The Cure-All for Victorian Social Anxiety”.
As a matter of fact, our public restrooms were not always divided according to our sex, the first law happened in Massachussett in 1887. The role of men and women in the society was clearly organised in the USA; men were out, working, while women stayed in, taking care of the children and the house. However, more and more women started working in factories or simply going out in public spaces, such as library. This “intrusion” of women into the public space raised some questions, mainly moral ones.
Back in the XIXth centuries, toilets in factories were very basic and hygiene was not the main interest.
Such an environment was not adequate for the women. As a matter of fact, women were considered weaker so they needed to be protected physically from the male predator, morally as it was already enough for a woman to be seen entering the water closet to put her morality into jeopardy.
Furthermore, as sanitary became an issue at the end of the XIXth century, it was also important to protect the “mother”, as the women were invested of the role of being the carrier, caretaker of the next generation.
“The physical strength of the working man is less likely to fail through overwork; and even when it does fail the effect on future generation is less serious than a similar deterioration in the mothers”
Last but not least, as the place of women were in the domestic sphere, it seemed important to recreate this feeling of domestic confort for women. To achieve that, architecture came to use, not only for the toilets in factory but also in the construction of special reading rooms for women in library for instance.
All this movement started in the USA in the XIXth century, however we do still have genderly-separated public restrooms in most cases. This division works if you accept that we all are either male of female but what happens to people who do not feel like belonging to this duality ? Which restroom should they use ? Should we use the restroom of our physical sex or the one of our “inner” one ? All those questions are opened and will be answered differently by everybody. But one can wonder if maybe one day genderly-separated restroom will be cancelled and if this day we will look back at them ackwardly, thinking that it was complete nonsense.