Separate spheres
It was rooted in the idea of separate spheres: that women’s place was in the home and men’s was outside, in public. So when middle-class women did venture into public for extended periods—when they went to the theater, for example—it was thought that they required a private, safe, gender-segregated space of their own that looked and functioned like part of their home. “They were designed like living rooms—like parlors—as spaces to protect virtue,” Wood said.
But at first, these lounges for women did not include a toilet component, says Terry Kogan, a law professor at the University of Utah. Kogan has worked on guidelines for gender-neutral bathrooms and is an expert on the legal and cultural norms that mandate the segregation of public restrooms by sex.
“Interestingly, ornate lounges for women preceded public restrooms by several decades,” Kogan explained, noting that there were parlors for women in public buildings many years prior to when most of America had indoor plumbing. In other words, gender separation and protecting women’s virtue was initially the justification for these spaces, and the toilet came later.
One of the key figures in establishing public restrooms was Isaiah Rogers, a Boston architect who, in 1828, was contracted by local businessmen to design what was in effect the first luxury hotel in America: the Tremont House.
“The challenge to Rogers was in, part, that he had to make this building sort of supportive of commerce, which was developing in Boston,” Kogan said. “On the other hand, he was caught in the shadow of the separate-spheres ideology, and what he decided [to do] within the Tremont House was to create spaces that were sex-segregated.” Rogers created rooms exclusively for men and for women, including separate parlors and a library and a billiard room for men.
“The significance of that, in my view, cannot be overstated,” said Kogan. “Rogers and the investors … were basically tipping their hats to the separate-spheres ideology, while creating spaces in the public realm for women to become active consumers in the 19th-century economy.”