Sep 27 2008
Searching for the ‘Wo’
I was attending a dinner at the National Academy of Science. It was a mixed crowd and I had some fascinating discussions. But after a few glasses of wine it was time to step out discreetly and find a bathroom. I made a beeline for the most likely place, to one side of the entrance. But peering around the pillar I saw it was for MEN… no WO. It seemed logical to go to the symmetrically positioned location on the other side of the door. But I stood there, bemused to find only what looked like a small reading room or waiting area.
After a lap around the foyer revealed no other bathrooms I went up the stairs. I fairly quickly located another bathroom, also for men. At which point a security guard appeared and said dolefully, “you’re not meant to be here.”
No shit. Literally.
He took me back downstairs, across the foyer to an unmarked, closed door. We crossed a room with a meeting table and chairs, through another door and down a corridor were a women’s facility with three stalls could finally be found–oh, and another one for men.
The days of overt sexism are finally beginning to recede. But it remains embedded in our institutions, right down to the architecture and we will never truly be free of it until we have not only the intention to be unbigoted, but also (with apologies to the bard) all of the trappings and the en suites of ‘wo’.*
* But I have that within which passeth show; These but the trappings and the suits of woe. [Hamlet]
