Women-only space explained

A women-only space is an area where only women (and in some cases children) are allowed, thus providing a place where they do not have to interact with men. Historically and globally, many cultures had, and many still have, some form of female seclusion.

Purpose and background

Women-only spaces are a form of sex segregation, and practices such as women-only public toilets, women-only passenger cars on public transport or women's parking spaces may be described using both terms.^[1] They are sometimes referred to as "safe spaces".

These spaces do not go without challenge. Men's rights activists have launched lawsuits to gain access to female-only spaces, as for example Stopps v Just Ladies Fitness (Metrotown) Ltd, regarding a gym in Canada. The access of trans women, regardless of their legal gender, is also sometimes contentious, both from an ethical and from a legal perspective.^{[2] [3] [4]} In some cases questions have been raised about the value and legitimacy of particular spaces being reserved for women.^[5]

Women's quarters and segregated societies

Many cultures have had a tradition of a separate living space for the women of a household ("women's quarters"); this becomes more elaborate the larger the house is, reaching its peak in royal palaces. The best known example is probably the harem, a Turkish word, but similar systems existed elsewhere, and still do, in some places.

• Andaruni (in traditional Persian residential architecture in Iran)
• Seraglio (Ottoman Empire)
• Zenana (South Asia) – hence, Zenana missions, providing medical and educational support to segregated women
• Purdah (South Asia)
• Terem (Russia)
• Ōoku (Japan)
• Gynaeceum (Ancient Greece)
• Anthapura or Antahpura (India)

Some societies segregate most public facilities by sex, according to their interpretation of Islam and gender segregation; critics call this gender apartheid after the former South African system of racial division. The best-known examples are Saudi Arabia and Iran (Sex segregation in Iran, Women's rights in Iran).

Other systems of sex segregation include Afghanistan (Taliban treatment of women) and Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS).

History

The rise of first wave feminism, including the long struggles for the vote (suffrage) – for access to education and the professions (in English-speaking societies), led to various initiatives to widen women's possibilities.

In 1903, Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughter, Christabel Pankhurst, founded the Women's Social and Political Union. The WSPU confined its membership to women – men could not become members.^[6]

• In the 1910s and 1920s, there was widespread encouragement in the United States for the establishment of ladies' lounges and rest rooms to accommodate rural women who traveled into county seats and market towns to conduct business. The Ladies Rest Room in Lewisburg, Tennessee, may be the last free-standing one in that state still in use.^[7]
• A ladies' ordinary was a women-only dining space which started to appear in North American hotels and restaurants from 1830, when it was socially unacceptable for women to dine in public without a male escort.^[8]
• In 1929 Virginia Woolf published an influential essay entitled "A Room of One's Own".^[9]

Examples

Locations, venues, and activities may allow men at certain times of the day, week, or year; for example, public baths that have some days for women and some for men. Some allow children, either girls only or both sexes. Some establishments allow men and women in areas that are physically set apart from each other. Some exist temporarily (e.g. renting space for a few hours or days).

Businesses and services

• Women-only bank
  • See also the kitty party, an informal savings club
• Of this international list of women's organizations, some have their own premises; others such as the Women's Institute offer their members a women-only space for the duration of the meeting
• Community centres focusing on women, such as The Women's Building in San Francisco and Pankhurst Centre in Manchester
• Sex shops catering to women, such as Sh! Women's Erotic Emporium
• Feminist bookstores may have women-only and mixed-sex times
• Women-only amusement parks
• Resorts such as SuperShe Island^{[10] [11]}
• Spas^[12] (see also section on public bathing, below)

Gyms

• The Young Women's Christian Association (YWCA), now a global movement for education and human rights, was for many decades best known for its hostels and fitness centres, see List of YWCA buildings
• Other chains or stand-alone gyms choose to cater to females, e.g.Total Woman^[13]

Hotels and other accommodation

• some offer women-only floors^{[14] [15]}
• others are the entire business (e.g. the "urban retreat" and spa the Luthan Hotel in Riyadh^[16] and Som Dona in the holiday resort of Majorca^[17])
• capsule hotels in Japan^[18]
• residential hotels offered accommodation for months and in some cases years, particularly to unmarried young women
  • Barbizon Hotel for Women, which opened in 1927 in Manhattan, was not the first but possibly the most famous example,^[19] described in the 2021 book The Barbizon: The Hotel That Set Women Free
• purpose-built long-term bed-sit accommodation for single working women
  • e.g. those blocks built in the 1920s by the Lady Workers' Homes Limited on the Holly Lodge Estate in Highgate, north London.
• Sorority house, for college students

Transportation

• Women's parking space
• Pink rickshaw
• Women-only passenger car
  • on a subway: Brazil, Egypt, India, Iran, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, South Korea, Philippines, Thailand, UAE (Rush Hour)^[20]
  • buses : Bangladesh, China, India, Iran, Malaysia, Morocco, Nepal, Pakistan, Papua New Guinea, UAE^{[21] [22]}
  • taxis: Egypt (Cairo), Malaysia (Kuala Lumpur), India (Kerala), Pakistan (Karachi), UAE (Dubai)^[23]

Women's clubs

that have or had their own premises (parallel to a gentlemen's club), and more recently women-only restaurants and networking events^[24]

• see List of women's club buildings as part of the US woman's club movement
• women's only digital platforms (e.g., social networking sites) appear to serve as a parallel to the brick and mortar women's club; however, efforts to establish such spaces have faced legal challenges

Celebrations

Many celebrations, especially around rites of passage, are marked by a girl or woman and her female relatives and friends. For example, many cultures have a party before the wedding for the bride, in Western culture known as a hen night or bachelorette party. Parties for a pregnant woman are baby showers, usually attended by female friends and family.

Changing rooms

See main article: Changing room.

Places to change one's clothes, for example for leisure (at the gym, swimming pool, or beach), or for work (locker rooms at factories and hospitals), or while shopping (department store fitting rooms), are usually single-sex. Some have individual cubicles, while others provide only communal facilities, e.g. an open space with benches and lockers.

Cultural events

• Michigan Womyn's Music Festival (closed after 40th anniversary in 2015)
• Nyansapo Festival, an Afro-feminist festival in Paris in 2017
• Mountain Moving Coffeehouse, a weekly music night in Chicago (1974–2005)
• Race for Life, a British charity event that raises money for cancer
• Marches to protest and celebrate, such as Take Back the Night and the Dyke March
• Yamurikuma, a gender role reversal festival of some Xingu tribes
• The Fainting Club, a supper club described as an old boys' club for girls

There are many other festivals, conferences, etc. that focus on women's achievements and women's issues, but allow anyone to attend, from the Rochester Women's Rights Convention of 1848 to today's Women of the World Festival.

Education

• Girls' schools, i.e. single-sex education, see also
• Women's colleges and universities
• Finishing school
• Sororities

When formal education was banned by the Taliban, underground schools sprung up, such as the Golden Needle Sewing School for writers to secretly discuss their work.

Health care

Historically, some health care services for women (particularly around childbirth) were staffed by women. As women gained increased access to education in the late nineteenth century, hospitals hired female physicians for female patients; nurses by this point were almost exclusively female.

• Elizabeth Garrett Anderson and Obstetric Hospital is named after one of Britain's first female physicians
• London School of Medicine for Women, the first medical school to train women as doctors

During second-wave feminism, health activists set up feminist health centers, particularly in the United States. Some places are for women from one background, such as the Native American Women's Health Education Resource Center. Some holistic care centres are for mothers and their children, such as Nkosi's Haven in South Africa.

Land and shelter

• Womyn's land, stemming from separatist feminism of the 1970s, e.g. Amazon Acres in Australia
  • A precursor to this is the Woman's Commonwealth, founded in Texas in the late 1870s by a women's bible study group
• Anti-war activism such as Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp in the UK and Seneca Women's Encampment for a Future of Peace and Justice in the US
• Umoja, Kenya, a village of women and children fleeing domestic violence
• Jinwar, Syria, a village for women without a husband and their children
• Women's shelter, a place of temporary accommodation for women fleeing domestic violence, e.g. Vancouver Rape Relief & Women's Shelter
• Some homeless shelters are just for women, e.g. Rosie's Place
• Most Rape crisis centres

Lesbian services

• Cruises and vacation resorts such as those operated by Olivia Travel
• Lesbian bars such as the now-closed Candy Bar in London and the now-closed The Lexington Club in San Francisco
• June L. Mazer Lesbian Archives
• Lesbian Connection network forum
• Lesbian Herstory Archives

Menstruation

See also: Culture and menstruation. Some menstrual taboos require a woman to stay at home, or avoid certain places such as temples, but other cultures assign a particular place to segregate herself from her community, for example the chhaupadi (menstrual huts) of Nepal today, or The Red Tent, a fictionalised version of Old Testament-era customs. The anthropologist Wynne Maggi describes the communal bashali (large menstrual house) of women in the Kalasha Valley (northwestern Pakistan) as their 'most holy place', respected by men and serving as women's all-female organizing centre for establishing and maintaining gender solidarity and power.^[25]

The seclusion of girls at puberty (i.e. menarche) is another such custom.

Military, policing, and prisons

• Some countries operate or operated separate services for women, such as the UK's Women's Royal Air Force, see
• Women's police station
• The incarceration of women is in most countries in single-sex prisons, or female-only wings within larger men's prisons, see

Motherhood and lactation

The lactation room is a modern, mostly American phenomenon, designed for using electric breast pumps and refrigerating the expressed milk. In many countries, spaces for women to nurse their babies can be known as breastfeeding rooms or nursing areas. The period of postpartum confinement was traditionally a time for new mothers to learn to care for their infant from older and more experienced women.

Places to wash and swim

Public nudity is in many cultures restricted to single-sex groups. Public baths may separate men and women by time or by space.

• Victorian Turkish bath and hammam, see especially their function as gendered social spaces
• Mikveh, the Jewish ritual bath

Specific examples include:

• Frauenbad Stadthausquai, a public bath built in Switzerland in the late 19th century for women, and which still operates as such
• Hampstead Heath Ladies' Pond, a reservoir in a London park
• McIver Women's Baths, also known as McIver Ladies' Baths, in New South Wales, Australia. It is a council-owned, late C19 heritage structure.
• La Femme (beach), Egypt

In many cultures, laundry was seen as "women's work", so the village wash-house (lavoir) acted as a space for women to gather and talk together as they washed clothes.

Religious festivals

• Attukal Pongala – Hindu festival in Kerala, India
• Thesmophoria in Ancient Greece
• Jivitputrika
• Karva Chauth, celebrated by Hindu women in Northern India

Religious places

• Women's mosques, which have existed for centuries in China; in the 21st century, new examples have been created around the world
• More generally, the women's space in most mosques, see Gender separation in mosques
• Gender separation in Judaism, as for example the mechitza used to demarcate women's space in a synagogue
• Convent, the home of Christian nuns
• Double monastery, with separate space for monks (men) and nuns (women)
• Beguinage, all-women accommodation in the Low Countries (Belgium and the Netherlands)

Sports

Many amateur and most professional sports are segregated by sex.

Toilets

See main article: Sex segregation in public restrooms. In almost all countries, public toilets are segregated by sex.

See also

• Radical feminism
• Right to privacy
• Voyeurism
• Womyn
• Womyn-born womyn
• Separate spheres

Further reading

• Web site: Brotman. Barbara. Dictionary For 'Womyn' Says Half Of Society Is A Dirty 3-letter Word. Chicago Tribune. 23 October 1986.
• Book: Enke. A. Finn. Finding the Movement: Sexuality, Contested Space, and Feminist Activism. 2007. Duke University Press. 978-0-8223-4062-1. 1st. registration.
• News: Fenson. Zoe. Why women-only spaces still matter. The Week. February 22, 2019.

External links

• Women-only space
• Respect women's-only space
• Exploring the Value of Women-Only Space
• Women-Only Spaces: An Alternative To Patriarchy

Notes and References

1. Browne. Kath. Genderism and the Bathroom Problem: (re)materialising sexed sites, (re)creating sexed bodies. Gender, Place & Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography. Sep 2004. 11. 3. 331–346. 10.1080/0966369042000258668. 145219853.
2. Web site: On the Outside Looking In . Julia Serano . Julia Serano . 2013-01-08.
3. Web site: Legalities of excluding trans women from women only spaces . Julian Norman . 22 May 2012 . 2013-01-08.
4. Murphy. Mary. FEMINIST SPIRITUALITY AND GENDER Lessons From Beyond Women-Only Space. Communities. 2014. 162. 38–72. 10 May 2014.
5. Web site: So I'm a feminist troublemaker for requesting some women-only space? . Julia Long . 2012-12-07 . The Guardian . 2013-01-08.
6. Book: Hostettler, John. 2012. Dissenters, Radicals, Heretics and Blasphemers: The Flame of Revolt that Shines Through English History. Waterside Press. 223. 1904380824.
7. Web site: Ladies Rest Room: correspondence 2 :: Southern Places. digital.mtsu.edu. 13 February 2018.
8. Freedman. Paul. 2014-09-01. Women and Restaurants in the Nineteenth-Century United States. Journal of Social History. 48. 1. 1–19. 10.1093/jsh/shu042. 143102613. 0022-4529.
9. Web site: Because They're Worth It! Making Room for Female Students and Thealogy in Higher Education Contexts. fth.sagepub.com. 2016-10-24.
10. Web site: SuperShe Island. Spring 2018. SuperShe. 4 June 2018.
11. Web site: After working in a world of 'tech bros,' this woman founded a female-only island. Berger. Sarah. 15 April 2018. CNBC. . 4 June 2018.
12. News: Travel: In L.A., spa days can stretch into night. 4 March 2018.
13. News: Town Sports International acquires Total Woman Gym and Spa chain. Walker. Tom. 26 February 2018. Health Club Management. 16 May 2018.
14. News: How smart hotels are catering to women and small business travellers. intheblack.com. 4 March 2018.
15. News: Singapore hotel dedicates floor to women. Stuff. 4 March 2018.
16. News: No men allowed!. 26 February 2015. The Economist. 4 March 2018.
17. Web site: Sun, sea and sisterhood: Inside Som Dona, Spain's first women-only hotel . . 27 September 2019 . 10 August 2020.
18. News: Women-only Capsule Hotels sprout in Tokyo. 23 February 2018. Medill Reports Chicago. 4 March 2018.
19. News: When the Barbizon Gave Women Rooms of Their Own . 22 June 2021 . The New Yorker.
20. Web site: 2015-08-26 . Women-only carriages around the world: do they work? . 2022-10-12 . the Guardian . en.
21. Web site: Woolsey . Barbara . These 5 cities have women-only transportation options . 2022-10-12 . USA TODAY . en-US.
22. Web site: Kathmandu . Agence France-Presse in . 2015-01-05 . Kathmandu trials women-only minibuses to tackle sexual assault . 2022-10-12 . the Guardian . en.
23. Web site: Woolsey . Barbara . These 5 cities have women-only transportation options . 2022-10-12 . USA TODAY . en-US.
24. News: No boys allowed: the rise of single-sex clubs and societies. Williams. Zoe. 4 January 2013. the Guardian. 18 March 2018.
25. Book: Maggi, Wynne. 10.3998/mpub.11273. Our Women are Free. Gender and Ethnicity in the Hindukush.. 2001. University of Michigan Press. 978-0-472-09783-8. Ann Arbor, Michigan.