Any discussion of public toilets will run into debates and divisiveness about who has the right to use them, and concerns about people using the ‘wrong’ facilities are always couched in terms of ‘protecting privacy’, especially for women, as Laura Walikainen Rouleau’s introduction to Private Spaces in Public Places attests. Both ‘protection’ and ‘privacy’ are key to this study, concepts which Rouleau uses to illustrate the emergence of public toilets, public baths, fitting rooms and locker rooms in the US during 1880–1930. This was a period of tremendous change, with the clashing of evolving values and perceptions around innovation and modernity, in tandem with growing consumerism and the changing shape of cities. This era was important for the expansion of municipal facilities – for the first time certain bodies were allowed to inhabit parts of the city in ways they had not been permitted to before. Women were finally able to leave their homes for long periods without the worry about a private toilet, while the working classes were increasingly welcomed into different parts of society. Overall, we learn that the increasing visibility of bodies in public was controlled by forces preoccupied with the protection of the female body.
This is a traditional study, making impactful use of archival sources, including architectural plans and photographs, drawing upon the strategies by middle-class reformers, municipal officials and designers to accommodate changing uses of public places and organize how different classes behaved in public. It is a focus on design and architecture by way of acknowledgment of public health initiatives and political intentions. After a detailed introductory chapter, the meat of the book comprises four chapters: fitting rooms in department stores; public baths; public restrooms/toilets; and lastly, public school locker rooms. Inevitably, class was a major factor in planning, as well as gendered and racial segregation. While fitting rooms were some of the earliest examples of privacy in a public space, what links public baths, restrooms and locker rooms were imperatives of segregation and surveillance.
The introduction of these facilities, as Rouleau explains, is not a utilitarian effort to make urban spaces more user-friendly, but really an opportunity for social force and a vehicle for influencing behaviour. Control and coercion was baked-into the design, especially the public baths which were unambiguously for the working classes, whose living conditions did not include sufficient sanitation, and who were assumed to need hygiene education. Assumptions about behaviour also determined how locker rooms were designed. One cannot help but pity the boys for whom privacy was not a given; while girls were granted the use of individual stalls and cubicles, boys were expected to shower communally. This was another kind of surveillance – to ensure that bad behaviour could be observed and swiftly stamped out. This compelled me to think about how men and women inherently experience privacy differently, but the nature of this study means we cannot access these details.
Rouleau’s throughline is that these spaces were based on a specific middle-class definition of privacy, inevitably formed through contemporary social values of modesty and decorum. Rouleau establishes that privacy equates exclusion and protection; keeping people (men) out and protecting bodies (women) from being observed. However, I was surprised by the overall lack of interrogation of ‘privacy’, even though it is the book’s central conceptual spine. Should not a conceptualization of ‘privacy’ examine the experiential, emotional or sensory, maybe with considerations of shame, attention and self-consciousness? Possibly a little more showing and a little less telling could have more successfully articulated why this is the chosen position.
Similarly, I had expected to see some engagement with spatial theory, especially given the overlapping tensions between the public and private; could not Gaston Bachelard or Henri Lefebvre have helped to tease out the conflicts between the personal and the private, the intimate and the social? It is the nature of the chosen sources that means we have little sense for how these spaces were used or what it felt like to use them. Perhaps these sources do not exist, or maybe we need a different way to find them.
For a study of public toilets, baths, fitting and locker rooms, this is an oddly sanitized depiction, seemingly allergic to the effluent and olfactory. It veers close to social history but keeps its distance from people. Perhaps it was due to the photograph on the front cover, of women smiling in a swimming pool, that I had expected analysis of what it was like to use these spaces, but like the photographs inside, it is largely absent of people. While this is not an investigation into the lives of these sites, it does reveal the underpinning policies of municipal development of key city services, providing significant evidence that the impetus was control rather than fair provision and access.
