Private Spaces in Public Places: Comfort Stations, Fitting Rooms, Public Baths, and Locker Rooms in America, 1880–1930

Engraved lintels and defunct subterranean pools are some of the few physical reminders that public baths once peppered urban landscapes across the United States. And while modern sanitary infrastructure eventually made these spaces obsolete, in Private Spaces in Public Places: Comfort Stations, Fitting Rooms, Public Baths, and Locker Rooms in America, 1880–1930, Laura Walikainen Rouleau shows how such buildings expressed contested ideals of privacy that continue to circulate today. Noting the concurrent emergence of a network of spaces alongside modern notions of privacy, Private Spaces in Public Places tells the story of how privacy became a spatial and social means of exclusion in the Progressive Era.This text sheds light on the historical articulation of exclusion in the built environment and through social norms. Privacy within public spaces, Rouleau writes, “is predicated on exclusion” (3). Her primary argument, that physical and social means made the modern notion of privacy, is evidenced by four case studies that illustrate how social norms, architecture, and power came together in the Progressive Era. Private Spaces balances analyses of people’s behavior and expectations with those of architecture and interior designs that helped define the emerging concept of privacy. The book examines how ideas about and experiences of social stratification converged in locker rooms, baths, fitting rooms, and comfort stations for working-class individuals as well as reformers and the designers of these spaces.The chronological narrative traces how privacy changed over time and puts forth an argument about its dependent relationship on social and physical exclusion. In a brief introduction, the author heightens the urgency of her critique by linking the historical content of Private Spaces to contemporary discourse about transgender people’s rights to use bathrooms according to their gender identity. Four subsequent chapters are structured around each of the spatial types named in the book’s title. It is within these body chapters where Rouleau makes secondary, yet incisive arguments about social transformation by using the built environment as a source.The book takes seriously the contradictions of private spaces in public places. For example, Private Spaces studies the history of consumerism to show how gendered categories trumped the importance of class in nineteenth-century shopping spaces (the department store fitting room in chapter 2). It traces the introduction of surveillance into a class-based experience of privacy in chapter 3 through an analysis of early twentieth-century public bathing facilities. The reform movement that birthed public baths ironically betrayed a coercive moral economy through the provision of public goods. Chapter 4 illustrates how, as reformers worked to install public “comfort stations” in urban areas, designers of public toilets created privacy through physical and social exclusion. Rouleau’s analysis reveals the ways in which racial segregation in public comfort stations was, at the least, implicit in both Northern and Southern US contexts. Whether by locating comfort stations in a racialized landscape, intimidating patrons with attendants, using explicitly racist signage, or by segregating entrances, “comfort stations” were often anything but for African Americans. Similarly, design decisions such as the division of interiors or sinking restrooms below grade were meant to contain the users of public comfort stations as well as their supposed moral turpitude.The fifth chapter expands Rouleau’s contention that emergent ideas about privacy had widespread and particular impacts on different sectors of society. Here, Rouleau addresses how privacy impacted youth in public institutions such as locker rooms in educational facilities. Locker rooms became the venue in which youth changed clothes, bathed, and (mis)behaved under the watchful eyes of adult authority figures. Privacy, in this context, took place against the backdrop of assimilationism and hardening gender norms that inscribed morality onto the body. Adolescents from working-class families, she finds through oral history interviews, had complex responses to the experience of privacy and cleanliness. As with adults, Rouleau shows that youth experienced classed and gendered privacy as physical education became a core aspect of public education.Rouleau’s creative selection of sources and incisive analysis of ordinary places make the book a pleasure to read. Oral history interviews with individuals who used the featured private spaces animate the book, although the roster of narrators is short. These oral histories add depth to our understanding of how the activities of private sites’ users challenged designers’ intentions. Such interviews also provide unique perspectives on the experience of privacy, the discomfort people endured, and the ways they refused humiliation in these circumstances. As an enticing foray into the history of the built environment Rouleau elevates spatial and material analysis. By carefully reconstructing floorplans of private spaces in public places, the author makes a case for understanding how architecture and design were reflective and constitutive of social stratification. Such illustrations are further enriched by contextual photographs and etchings which accompany them in the work.The brevity of the book makes for itself a few challenges. Rouleau situates her work most firmly among a literature of gender studies in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, which supports her strong analysis of the gendered nature of private spaces. However, Rouleau misses an opportunity to draw on African American historical literature that also deals with the making of gender and racial categories in this era. Doing so might have enhanced the nuance of her analysis of racial inequality and facilitated a broader treatment throughout the text. Another aspect that might have been further developed is the justification of chosen example sites. As Private Spaces moves through time, the reader finds scalar mismatches among the examples and loses sight of the narrative’s geography. Rouleau’s research turned up convincing evidence for her argument in a variety of American cities, yet the logic or process behind her choosing these sites is lacking in the text. This does not detract from the book’s argument but might have been elaborated and clarified to improve the cohesion of examples across chapters.Private Spaces in Public Places is a quick and enjoyable read. The work is clear and concise, if somewhat repetitive. The inclusion of so many images (more than fifty!) does a fair amount of work for Rouleau’s argument as well as the historical narrative. Private Spaces is especially relevant to those who study women’s and gender history, as this constitutes Rouleau’s most significant historiographic engagement. It may appeal to historians of the built environment, and scholars who are interested in material culture would also do well to secure a copy.The book highlights the importance of architecture and social norms in the history of privacy and underscores its contested nature. In conclusion, Rouleau reminds readers that the history of privacy and the spaces that were erected to promote it rested on assumptions that were mutable. Contemporary struggles for bodily autonomy amid the redesigning and redevelopment of the built environment in a new era of surveillance invite us to consider how social norms about privacy still operate on such terms. What is the utility of a coercive or paternalistic space that has been made to promote privacy in public? How might the reimagination and reanimation of defunct public spaces or the adjustment of social norms craft a new and dignified form of privacy?