I found an academic blog about the history of women's public toilets and the 'urinary leash'

[BadSkiingMum]

By sheer chance I happened to find an academic blog about the history of women's public toilets and the impact of the urinary leash. I was searching for something using the words 'women owned logo' (which is a business promotion scheme in the USA) and my finger slipped off the 'g', leaving me with a search for 'women owned loo'!

It's an interesting blog and what stood out to me is that the big London department stores only introduced women's toilets for commercial reasons, as they realised that it would help women to spend more money. Perhaps there is a lesson in that for the issues of today? I remember that in America they had the 19th century women's 'Rest Rooms' movement in big cities. I think those facilities were more similar to waiting rooms, in that they had a sitting area as well as the toilets, but anyone who has been to a hotel built in that era knows that ladies loos often have a sitting area as well as the toilet facilities. So there was a understanding of the privacy/safety need, as well as hygiene.

Women’s rights and the “loo leash”: the fight for public toilets in the UK | Water, Sanitation and Health (WASH) Blog

Thank you to the author for putting this article out there.

I saw the same video, apparently you could just flip the hoops up at the back. Rather like you can with a hula hoop!

I think Edwardian long and straight or even ‘hobble’ skirts must have been more of a nuisance. But that was also when the rational dress movement was picking up pace.

One of my grandmothers used to spit feathers about hobble skirts, impossible to get on a bus was a sore point.

I just did a dive on that channel - I love it.

Thank you so much.

Interesting read. Some proof reading might have spotted the "After the commissioning of the first flashing public toilet in 1851"...

They certainly did. I suspect they disappeared in the mid-60s. But some stations still have women's waiting rooms even now. Very useful if you are alone.

I have some modern hoops, and you can do just that. But working class women were probably still wearing the original crinolin, which was actually stiff fabric and would have been much less easy to manipulate.
I have often wondered how women in the early 1800s managed menstruation with see-thru muslins. Anyone know?

Me too - I often wonder about menstruation management.

In fact, it crossed my mind that the layers they wore as undergarments could well have helped for staining.

The later hoops while constraining on the one hand, would surely have been great on the other? In the sense that the legs under the hoops are very free. It created a bubble around the wearer, and again, for many things including menstruation, could have been quite freeing?

If you come across any reading material I would be glad of it!

This was just supposed to be a pertinent bump

But reading the thread reminded me of a bit in one of the books in Pat Barker's Regeneration trilogy, a character (an older woman) was described as urinating in the street by just straddling her legs and pissing like a mare. Something facilitated by the long dresses of black bombazine she wore. It seemed to be a custom that was dying out but, presumably, had been commoner. I don't believe the author made this up from thin air but it's never appeared in anything else I've ever read. Currently I'm reading Little Women, in which (so far) no one goes to the toilet despite going on long picnics, with plenty of food and drink or spending hours sitting under trees some distance from home. Obviously it would be unusual if these bodily functions did get a mention. How the sexes managed their toilet arrangements (or didn't) was too vulgar to mention.

I did once tell a bloke in a pub, who was annoying me, that women going to the toilet in pairs was a holdover from the days when we wore long skirts and needed help to wrangle them. He believed me. I thought I was making it up...

The 'urinary leash' is a total myth. Working-class women had been away from home in workplaces forever (in fields, factories, stately homes, etc), they weren't in any way 'leashed' to their homes.

Nor we're upper-class women, who either ordered a servant to fetch a chamberpot or used the convenient hole in their bodices and pissed wherever.

Public toilets were a response to hygiene concerns, to stop people pissing in the street. And have never been safe.

I recall using them in the '60s and '70s.

Women's waiting rooms I remember.

But never heard or seen men's ones.
It was marked Ladies waiting room.
The other was simply
Waiting room. Open to all

Like Ladies only carriages.
There was never a carriage for men only.