The Ladies' Waiting Room
I know I looked like I had a target on my back for a man (or woman) up to no good. I know I looked like the most innocent, naive country bumpkin in the Big City. There was reason for the kindly bus driver to be concerned. In a 1973 article in the Indianapolis News on the safety - or lack of it - at the bus station, the reporter wrote, “Men watch, “picking out the prey – some chick who is “nice,” “friendly,” “gullible,” “naive....” As long as a young girl sat near an older one (40 or older), she was practically unapproachable….Let her walk around for coffee, ice cream, a telephone or the rest room and she’s vulnerable, a sure “hit.”’
In all my travels since, I have never seen a waiting section roped off and marked for women and children. But to our Victorian ancestors (and well beyond), whole separate waiting rooms and travel accommodations divided by gender were the norm.
True Womanhood and Separate Spaces for Women
Beginning in the 1820s, the popular literature - magazines, newspapers and novels - and in religious tracts, and lectures and sermons, “True Womanhood” was preached. It also went hand-in-hand with what historians call the Cult of Domesticity. Of course, True Womanhood and the Cult of Domesticity really only applied to the middle and upper class. It was part of a much older theory that men and women were so different that they occupied two separate “spheres.” These spheres had the components of a domestic, private place and a public, economic place. Women were to devote their lives to housekeeping, childcare and religion, and it was their responsibility to uphold morality, gently guiding and leading men to piety and virtuous behavior. Home was often described as a sanctuary, with her as grand priestess. Motherhood was idealized, and her chief source of power as she influenced the very survival of the nation by molding the minds of the young. According to historian Barbara Welter, there were four primary virtues women were expected to conform to and which they were judged on: piety, purity, submissiveness and domesticity. Men were sensual, sinful creatures; women were morally superior and refined.
The men’s sphere was one of paid employment, politics, commerce, and building. Men were the movers, doers and actors, as Welter said, and women were passive, submissive responders. She was weak and timid, and needed a protector. There were also two separate spheres of physical space; the sordid, dog-eat-dog world of the outside, and the pure sanctuary of home. To the Victorians, then, when women were out in the male sphere, they needed to be sheltered, protected, and kept away from coarse elements. Enter separate spaces in public places.
Ladies’ Spaces: On the Train
How could a woman travel in public - especially unescorted - and still maintain the standards of a True Woman? R. David McCall wrote his thesis in part to answer this question. As people took to train travel, the railroad companies responded. In the east, they categorized people into three groups: genteel, respectable, and the less-than-respectable. Gentility just indicated greater wealth. In the west, railroads had two classifications; respectable and less-than-respectable. This sorting of people determined where they were on a train, and what their rail car was like. Respectable women made up the majority of women passengers.
Railroad company policies were based on the beliefs in the separate spheres and True Womanhood. A woman who was completely capable in her home was relatively helpless outside it. “An endearing dependence and submission to male authority was expected of proper women,” McCall notes. Respectable women were in a class with the elderly and infirm in official rail company policies as needing extra protection and assistance. They also needed separation from the less-than-respectable.
The farther a car was from the locomotive, the more desirable, as the engine belched smoke, soot and cinders, and often sparks. The closer to the locomotive, the less valued the passenger. The first passenger cars, then, were for Blacks, Chinese and Native Americans, who were viewed as not fully human. These were often nothing more than windowless boxcars or the oldest of rough passenger cars. They were used as well for overflow baggage.
This forward car was followed by cars for immigrants and lower-income whites. These were unadorned cars with bare wooden benches - no upholstery - and no carpeting. A writer compared
Genteel white “ladies and gentlemen,” who paid more for the accommodation, were at the end of the train, with the ladies’ car at the very end.
This stratification based on gender, race and class was something Victorians were increasingly concerned with as the rising middle class sought to distinguish itself from others. Advice books proliferated on the proper way to act, dress and decorate. The middle class was anxious to maintain behaviors separating them from the “dangerous classes.” A lady, in public, did not speak to strangers unless absolutely necessary. She comported herself in a formal and restrained manner. In contrast, the gentlemen's car was a lively place with smoking, card-playing, singing and story-telling. The ladies’ cars were described as remarkably silent.
By mid-century, almost all rail lines had separate “ladies cars” in which men were only allowed if they were accompanying a lady. Sofas and armchairs replaced hard benches. A washstand and dressing table was a convenience. By the 1840s, women’s cars had bathrooms; the men’s did not. Most journeys were short, with frequent stops at stations for wood and water for the steam engine. Men, and the other races and classes, were supposed to make a quick trip into the woods if they needed to relieve themselves. This did not change until the 1870s.
Ladies’ Spaces: Depots and Train Stations
After the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, the Michigan Southern and Lake Shore Railway and the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific Railway built a massive new depot in 1873. Next to the dining rooms were the ladies’ waiting rooms, described in the Inter Ocean newspaper as, “large and handsomely decorated, and provided with an ample supply of easy and comfortable seats.” The gentlemen’s waiting rooms were “also provided with every convenience necessary to lighten the tedium of waiting for the train.” Second-class passengers were not forgotten. “A long room next is provided for the second-class passengers, chief among which are emigrants bound West, and whose treatment by some of the Eastern railroads is a shame and a disgrace. It is usual to crowd hundreds of these travel-worn strangers into dirty, dark and unpleasant rooms where they are compelled to wait for hours with the fewest possible conveniences.The room is large and furnished with comfortable settees, well lighted and opens upon a piazza 540 feet long which they can stroll to their hearts’ content, and get fresh air enough to last them a long way west.”
Ladies’ waiting rooms, like the ladies’ rail cars, were designed to evoke home, the women’s sphere, in a public place. Therefore, they were decorated with lace curtains, Brussels carpet, rocking chairs, framed paintings on the walls, and not infrequently fireplaces. The latter were there not for heat, but for the cozy, homey atmosphere they created. When new train stations were built or renovated, the decor of the ladies’ rooms were often described in some detail.
Detroit’s new rail station, built in 1883, had an ideal set-up, from a Victorian perspective. There was a separate entrance for women, and the building was designed so “a lady may purchase her ticket, go to the baggage room and attend to checking her trunks, and then go to the train without coming in contact with the general crowd,” according to a newspaper article. Wilmington, Delaware's new station in 1882 also had separate entrances in addition to the separate waiting rooms.
Many places had attendants. An 1891 profile of Bella, the attendant at Grand Central Station on 42nd Street in New York, gives a glimpse into the attendants’ job and what occurred in this space. Bella was described as tall and slight, with a pleasant manner and kindly face. She had held the job for thirteen years and always remained very calm in a swirl of activity. She was especially a friend and assistant to women and children traveling between New York and Poughkeepsie.
“Ladies coming in for a day’s shopping usually stop in a moment to get rid of heavy veils and dust coats, or to wipe the cinders from their faces,” the reporter noted. She would give regulars special privileges like leaving their hair brushes, towels and soap by the wash basins when they went out.
A big part of her job was acting as a coat check of sorts. For 10 cents, women left their bundles from shopping, while they went out on calls or more errands. When they returned to her she had everything ready, dust coats and parcels on a big table, umbrella and overshoes in a chair in a corner. Women also left their children there for a small fee while they shopped or went “calling.” Another responsibility of the attendant was filling the ink bottles and stationary at the writing tables. This seems especially quaint today.
Ladies' Spaces: For White Ladies Only
Historians say that working class women, and women of races and national origins who were not included in the popular conception of True Womanhood, nevertheless embraced its tenets. The South had three waiting rooms in its major train depots: Gentlemen's, Ladies', and "Colored." An 1884 opinion in the Brooklyn Union stated that this was "a libel on our civilization" as it implied that "colored" people could not be regarded as ladies, and gentlemen. "The only thing to do is "hammer away" until wider education and broader views have done their full work," the newspaper writer said.
Southern newspaper editors definitely did not share the views of the progressive Brooklyn paper. In January 1889 a newlywed Black minister from Baltimore demanded the right to have his wife and mother-in-law seated in an Alabama railroad ladies' waiting room. Rev. W.E. Johnson escorted the women to the ladies' room where the women were seated. They were soon confronted by officers and threatened with arrest if they did not move. The women complied. Rev. Johnson took the issue up with the superintendent of the Louisville and Nashville Railroad who told them they could wait in his office, which they did.
Rev. Johnson was asked whether he objected to the company in the colored waiting room, which was not segregated by gender, or the condition of the room itself. The newspaper claimed it was furnished exactly as the ladies' waiting room and was, in fact, the nicest and most comfortable of the three waiting rooms. This is a very dubious claim. The reverend replied that the sign at the door of the desired room read "Ladies' Waiting Room," not "White Ladies' Waiting Room."
When pressed he said the room was wet and cold, and his wife added that it had an offensive odor, not fit for decent people. In the open and vicious racism of the time, the reporter made disparaging remarks calling the trio by the "N" word and attacking the odor of an entire group of people. It was stated that the Johnsons "affected" culture but were really as lowly as local Blacks, and called Rev. Johnson a Yankee.
In Kittrell, North Carolina in 1897, a group of Black residents signed a petition asking to have Black men and women allowed in the ladies' and gentlemen's waiting rooms. Gender separation was not questioned and in fact was clearly considered desirable. It was racial segregation that was the problem. The town board responded by installing new larger signs stressing the racial segregation, and by passing a $5 fine for anyone sitting in the wrong room.
A few years later, in 1905, Atlanta "solved" the male/female problem when a new train terminal was constructed. As usual in the South, it had multiple waiting rooms, but a novelty was that the "colored" room was divided into men's and women's sections. The other waiting rooms were an enormous main room measuring 166 X 66 feet with 19-feet tall marble pillars, and decorated in "old Spanish" style.
The "ladies' parlor is as dainty as my lady's boudoir," an Atlanta newspaper said. It was 30 feet square with blue walls and red marble, with settees and rocking chairs, hot water and uniformed maids at the passengers' "beck and call." The men's smoking room, also beautifully decorated, had stairs leading to the second floor with public baths and a barber shop.
But the colored waiting room was truly newsworthy. "One would expect to see a few benches, hastily constructed in a dingy room and nothing more," the reporter said. But the "colored" waiting room was "almost as luxurious as the white waiting rooms." They were separated by gender, something unique, with separate bathrooms that both had hot water. The "colored" lunch rooms and cafes provided the "the same high class service to blacks as to white," the paper marveled. It was, the reporter wrote, the most innovative depot in the South.
Murder In the Ladies' Waiting Room
In 1881 a ladies' waiting room became part of the biggest story of the year. President James Garfield was shot by Charles Guiteau in the ladies' waiting room of the The Baltimore & Potomac Railroad Station in Washington D.C. It was described in the Boston Evening Transcript as a "pleasant carpeted apartment, furnished with fixed wooden settees, so arranged as to leave a broad passageway about twenty feet long directly from the outer door to the opposite side of the room." Two doors opened from a side of the room into the larger gentlemen's waiting room. Surprisingly given the configurations elsewhere, men had to walk through the ladies' room to reach the men's waiting room.
Guiteau, a Midwesterner, had failed at many ventures including bill collecting, a law practice, an attempt at preaching and as a member of the Utopian Oneida Community. His family judged him to be insane in 1875 and tried unsuccessfully to have him committed. Guiteau became convinced that he played an important role in getting Garfield elected and that he was therefore owed a federal job. When he was rejected in this pursuit, he followed Garfield to the train station.
The main waiting room and the ladies' room had their doors open facing the tracks on the warm July day. Garfield and his Secretary of State, James Blaine, entered a nearly-empty ladies room - emptied out as most of the women boarded a waiting train.
Guiteau followed the president, and without a word shot him twice with a .44 caliber revolver, running from the room afterwards in a cloud of gun smoke. Mrs. Sarah V.E. White, the ladies' room attendant, was the first to reach Garfield after he collapsed on the floor. The janitor came to assist her, and a mattress was found, which the president was lifted upon and carried to the second floor of the station. Mrs. White had a brief moment of fame as she was interviewed about what she saw and the president's condition as he lay on the floor. In October she also testified before a grand jury.
Ladies' Spaces: Hotels, Stores and Elsewhere
A private hospital in Detroit in 1880.
Doctors' offices.
A livery business in Franklin, Indiana (1883).
The courthouse in Princeton, Gibson County, Indiana, built in 1884.
The Iola State Bank in Iola, Kansas, constructed 1907 with a ladies’ waiting room.
A new Studebaker garage in Evansville, Indiana, built in 1915, “where Milady of the country can pin up her hair and doll up before she goes shopping or to the show.”
Large Masonic Halls.
The livery stable waiting room was discussed in the Franklin Daily News. “Livery stables are not generally considered a proper or popular resort for ladies, as there are generally a lot of loungers around a little too ready with an impertinent remark,” the reporter wrote. “One of the nicest features of the stable is a handsomely furnished ladies’ waiting room.” The room would be “decidedly convenient” for country women coming into town. They could leave their wraps and bundles, and have their purchases sent there while they continued shopping.Their horses would be cared for and their vehicles safely kept for a nominal charge. If that wasn’t enough to entice the ladies, their waiting room was carpeted and had a good fire, wash stand, hairbrushes and looking glasses, “and other conveniences which will be quite a luxury.”
In 1900 a show was staged at a price of 25 cents to benefit the ladies’ waiting room at the Gibson County, Indiana courthouse. The Imperial Male Quartette and the Ladies’ Quartette sang, and John Dunn Martin, “the reader and impersonator,” a recent graduate of the college of oratory at Northwestern University, performed dramatic readings and impersonations. In 1910 the courthouse was renovated to carve out a colored ladies’ waiting room in what had been the records’ room. A 1939 article in the Princeton Daily Clarion noted commissioners appointed Mrs. Ruth Winters as matron of the “white” ladies waiting room and Mrs. Bethel Harmon as matron of the “colored” one. In 1972, commissioners were still funding the job of ladies’ room attendant, but at least since the 1960s, there had only been one, with no racial segregation.
The separate waiting room evolved into lounges in stores. They became an advertising draw merchants used to attract women customers. In 1896 Owl Drug Company in Oakland, California opened a drug store decorated in the company’s colors, orange and silver, with plate glass mirrors “on all sides.” In the rear, a “cozy” ladies’ waiting room was furnished with “an elegant desk with abundant writing material conveniently placed for the use of lady patrons. The furniture is of birdseye maple in the Louis XV design. Mirrors, books and flowers” were available for lady patrons.
The 1899 Edward Malley Company store ad in New Haven, Connecticut featured a sketch of its ladies’ waiting room. An L.L. Hart’s Store ad in 1910 in Bonner Springs, Kansas advertised a free check stand “to take care of all your wraps, dinner baskets, etc.” and a ladies waiting room. Ruby’s Big Store in Bethany, Missouri advertised in 1902, “Remember we are the only store having a ladies’ waiting room and toilet closet.”
They were an important feature in large hotels. In the 1880s the enormous Grand Pacific Hotel opened, said to be the largest in the country. It occupied a full city block and had suites and 450 rooms, 150 of which had baths and water closets. There were five entrances, one of which was exclusively for new arrivals. Entering from this door, ladies were escorted to a reception room where they remained until “provisions have been made for their accommodations.” From the reception room they could slip out to the elevator. There were three parlors, one each designated for ladies and gentlemen, and the third the central parlor. There was a separate ladies’ dining room with an elaborately frescoed ceiling and marble mantles, but there was also a grand dining room and late breakfast and supper rooms.
Other hotels with separate public rooms for women both preceded the Grand Pacific and followed it.
Comportment
There was a code of behavior for a True Woman in public, as elsewhere. She was to be reserved, quiet and formal. She was to discourage any attention from strangers; she should not smile or chat, especially not with men. In a piece published in the Alma, Kansas news in 1873, a writer described a “ghastly, apathetic silence” in ladies’ waiting rooms at train stations. In the gentlemen’s rooms, although there were unsightly spittoons, men at least spoke to “the fellow whom he does not know.” For the women, “The only wonder is that this stiffened, desiccated crowd retains vitality enough to remember the hours by which its several trains depart, and to rise up and shake itself alive and go to board.” He was unusual in this disapproval, as the advice books and articles stressed just such behavior for women.
In Owensboro, Kentucky the station agent and the ticket agent in 1899 were described in a newspaper article as “sticklers for depot etiquette. Let a misguided countryman get into the ladies’ waiting room and draw his cob pipe, or commence to talk loud, or some of the boys around the waiting room get to raising sand, and one of these gentlemen will fly on the offender in a minute.” Yet they were flummoxed with a woman brought to the station by the town marshal, a woman they’d read about in the police court news. She sat in the ladies’ waiting room and lit up a cigarette. She was known for her sharp tongue and the two men ended up leaving her alone.
Over time, as Victorian norms began to loosen, expected behavior clashed with reality. Miss Polly Fishering, matron of the ladies’ waiting room in Atchison, Kansas in 1913, “is gradually having her ideals of womanhood shattered.” One day a seemingly very refined older woman took out a cigar and lit up. Another time Miss Fishering found a young woman in a corner smoking cigarettes. She’d found quids of chewing tobacco in the room. Needless to say, tobacco products were not allowed in the ladies’ rooms.
Occasionally station employees had problems with men who were not accompanying women and tried sitting in the ladies’ waiting room. Some were even more restrictive: no men allowed at all. A woman could sit with her husband or brother in the main lobby. In 1915 in Evansville, Indiana a man named Charles Hornbach had a shoot-out with police when the station master told him he could not sit with his wife in the ladies’ waiting room. He insisted that he needed to be there for her protection. Hornbach was described by police as a “rube from the wilds of Illinois” and a “country jake” who was ignorant of proper behavior in a more refined setting.
The Slow Death of Ladies’ Waiting Rooms
There was a proposal in 1954 in Rushville, Indiana to establish a joint police-sheriff’s office in the county courthouse. “The damper was put on that deal by somebody who went to the powers-that-be and complained that such a set-up would mean the abandonment of the ladies’ waiting room in the county building, a columnist wrote in 1955. “That would never do because it would bring a few riled women down on the heads of the people who superintend the courthouse, seemed to be the gist of the argument.” But officials quietly did away with the separate room, instead roping off a section of seats in the assembly room and designating them for women. At the sheriff’s office, the ladies’ waiting room was done away with without fanfare or public comment.
As Americans increasingly abandoned rail travel in the 1950s, passenger depots closed. Yet the ladies' waiting rooms persisted in places. As late as 1969, in her column “It’s a Woman’s World,” in the San Mateo, California Times, writer Adalene Ross bemoaned the sorry state of the ladies’ waiting room in the Southern Pacific depot in San Francisco. She called it the “ugliest public room in America,” and a disgrace. She described its stained venetian blinds with slats hanging out of order, its broken and dirty mirrors patched with tape, gloomy yellow chairs so uncomfortable that only the most exhausted would sit in them, dismal lighting and the unpleasant smell of a strong disinfectant. The bathrooms were coin toilets only. The sink basins were cracked; the hot water spigots were removed, and there was no place to put down one’s parcels. Clearly, she believed there was still a need for separate ladies’ waiting rooms and that they should have the grandeur and comfort of the past.
The Princeton, Indiana courthouse ladies’ waiting room with a paid attendant was an outlier in 1972. Across the United States, by the 1970s mentions of ladies’ waiting rooms were nostalgia pieces or articles about the conversion of depots into museums, headquarters for historical associations, community theaters and the like. The near-ubiquitous gendered waiting rooms of the past are almost completely forgotten today.
Sources:
McCall, R. David. “Everything In Its Place” Gender and Space on America’s Railroads, 1830-1899,” Thesis, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and University, 1999, accessed at https://vtechworks.lib.vt.edu/bitstream/handle/10919/35334/mccall.pdf?sequence=1
Welter, Barbara. “The Cult of True Womanhood,” American Quarterly, Vol. 18 No. 2, Part 1 (Summer 1966), pp. 151-174.
Newspapers
“Improvements,” Chicago Tribune, 16 July 1864, p. 4.
“The Mammoth Concert - Full Description of the Coliseum - The Largest and Finest Depot and Concert Hall in the World,” The Inter Ocean (Chicago), 3 June 1873, p. 2.
“Ladies’ Waiting Rooms,” Alma News (Alma, Kansas), 12 Nov 1873, p. 1.
“English Railway Travel,” Winfield Courier (Winfield, Kansas), 12 June 1874, p. 1.
"The Nation's Sorrow," Boston Evening Transcript, 5 July 1881, p. 2.
“President Garfield Assassinated,” The Paxton Record (Paxton, Illinois), 7 July 1881, p. 6.
“The New Station,” Detroit Free Press, 24 Jan 1883, p. 1.
“Ready for Occupancy - Completion of the New A.T. & S.F. Depot Building,” Emporia Weekly Republican (Emporia, Kansas), 17 Jan 1884, p. 3.
"A Work of Time," The Brooklyn Union (Brooklyn, New York), 26 Dec 1884, p. 2.
"Civil Rights. A Scene At the Depot," Birmingham Post-Herald (Birmingham, Alabama), 25 Jan 1889, p. 8.
“A Crying Nuisance,” Winfield Daily Courier (Winfield, Kansas), 27 Aug 1889, p. 2.
“Her Gift Is Patience - Bella, The Woman In Charge of a Ladies’ Waiting Room, Ottawa Weekly Republic (Ottawa, Kansas), 30 July 1891, p. 1.
“A Place Well Worth Seeing,” Olsburg News-Letter (Olsburg, Kansas), 18 Oct 1894, p. 1.
Kittrell Petition: Oxford Public Ledger (Oxford, North Carolina), 24 June 1897, p. 3.
“Gossip of the Town,” The Owensboro Messenger (Owensboro, Kentucky), 12 Feb 1899, p. 2.
“Some Fine Music,” Princeton Daily Clarion (Princeton, Indiana), 24 Nov 1900, p. 4.
"Terminal Station Opened Today, A Thing of Beauty," The Atlanta Journal, 14 May 1905, p. 23.
“City News,” The Atchison Daily Globe, 15 May 1913, p. 3.
“No Resistance By Fugitive Gunman; Is Returned Here,” Evansville Journal (Evansville, Indiana), 25 Feb 1915, p. 1.
“Travelers Complain At Inconveniences of the Depot Here - Ladies’ Waiting Room For Ladies in Name, Not Fact,” The Kearney Daily Hub (Kearney, Nebraska), 12 Dec 1919, p. 7.
“How to Beat the Holiday Pickpocket - Guarding Your Purse,” Baltimore Sun, 9 Dec 1923, p. 110.
“Commissioners’ Appointments Are Listed,” Princeton Clarion-News (Princeton, Indiana), 3 Jan 1939, p. 1.
McIlwain, Cy. “Miscellany,” Rushville Republican (Rushville, Indiana), 29 Nov 1955, p. 4.
Hudson, Peg. “Waitin’ at the Station,” Indianapolis News, 6 Aug 1973, p. 1.
Copyright Andrea Auclair © 2023
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