¹ Davidoff, L., ‘Gender and the “great divide”: public and private in British gender history’, Journal of Women's History, 15 (2003), 12CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also essays in Fainstein, S.S. and Servon, L.J. (eds.), Gender and Planning: A Reader (New Brunswick, 2005)Google Scholar, and Miranne, K.B. and Young, A.H. (eds.), Gendering the City: Women, Boundaries, and Visions of Urban Life (Lanham, 2000)Google Scholar.

² According to Winter, J., London's Teeming Streets, 1830–1914 (London, 1993), 113–14Google Scholar, the London police were not concerned with the disorder of male prostitution. The 1824 Vagrancy Act applied the term ‘common prostitute’ only to females.

³ For examples of earlier urban measures that sought to remove women from urban public space, see Arnade, P., Howell, M. and Simons, W., ‘Fertile spaces: the productivity of urban space in northern Europe’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 32 (2002), 515–18CrossRefGoogle Scholar; V. Harding, ‘Space, property, and propriety in urban England’, ibid., 549–69; Howell, M., Women, Production, and Patriarchy in Late Medieval Cities (Chicago, 1986)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Lacey, K., ‘Women and work in fourteenth and fifteenth century London’, in Charles, L. and Duffin, L. (eds.), Women and Work in Pre-industrial England (Beckenham, 1985)Google Scholar. Leon Battista Alberti's fifteenth-century treatise, Della Famiglia, drew from the ancient Greek text Oeconomia by Xenophon for the roots of western ideas about women confined to the private because it was their nature, especially their uncontrolled sexuality.

⁴ Anon., ‘The glorified spinster’, Macmillan's Magazine, 58 (1888), 371–6, quoted in Livesey, R., ‘Women rent collectors and the rewriting of space, class and gender in East London, 1870–1900’, in Darling, E. and Whitworth, L. (eds.), Women and the Making of Built Space in England, 1870–1950 (Aldershot, 2007), 101Google Scholar.

⁵ Subsequent paragraphs will give more detail about why I chose these four cities, but, generally, each city was striving to foster significant urban reforms to enhance the city's image. Dublin was not the industrial centre of Ireland (that was Belfast), but its struggle to regain its importance as a beautiful capital city after decades of decline made it the best choice for my purposes. See, for example, O'Brien, J., Dear, Dirty Dublin: A City in Distress, 1899–1916 (Berkeley, 1982)Google Scholar.

⁶ See Massey, D., Space, Place, and Gender (Minneapolis, 1994), 1–13Google Scholar.

⁷ Examples of male-controlled reform institutions for each city are the Chicago's Citizens’ Association, Toronto's Guild of Civic Art, Dublin's Guinness Trust, London's Peabody Trust. Chambers of Commerce and organized and expanded municipal departments for police, fire, housing, transit and health and sanitation were all directed by, and positions held by, men. See, again, Davidoff, ‘Gender and the “great divide”’, for her assessment of this situation. London and Dublin functioned under national Municipal Corporations Acts, Toronto answered to its provincial government and Chicago functioned under its state constitution's Incorporation Act.

⁸ Dennis, R., Cities in Modernity: Representations and Productions of Metropolitan Space, 1840–1930 (Cambridge, 2008)Google Scholar, provides additional insight into how comparisons within the Anglo-Atlantic urban world differ from the urban context of continental Europe. Although Rodgers, D., Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, MA, 1998)Google Scholar, examines transatlantic sharing, his two chapters on cities do not explore the fundamental differences in urban legal and political structures between continental and Anglo cities that resulted in different municipal structures and infrastructures.

⁹ See Withington, P., ‘Two renaissances: urban political culture in post-Reformation England’, Historical Journal, 44 (2001), 239–67CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed, quote 252.

¹⁰ See, for example, charter of Richard II to York (1383) for the king's grant of specific new legal and fiscal liberties to ‘the mayor and citizens of our city of York’. Transcribed from Latin in Sellers, M. (ed.), York Memorandum Book, part I, 1376–1419 (Surtees Society, vol. 120, 1911), 143Google Scholar, www.trytel.com/~tristan/towns/florilegium/government/gvcons08.html (last accessed 20 May 2013).

¹¹ King Henry II issued Dublin's first charter in 1171. It is held in the Dublin City Archives, Pre-1840 Collection, Calendar of Ancient Records, Dublin City Library and Archives, Pearse Street.

¹² Rodger, R. and Colls, R., ‘Civil society and British cities’, in Rodger, R. and Colls, R. (eds.), Cities of Ideas: Civil Society and Urban Governance in Britain, 1800–2000 (Aldershot, 2004), 1–20Google Scholar, quote 10. For women's marginalization, see H. Meller, ‘Women and citizenship: gender and the built environment in British cities, 1870–1939’, in ibid., 231–57.

¹³ Tarr, J. and Dupuy, G., Technology and the Rise of the Networked City in Europe and America (Philadelphia, 1988)Google Scholar, xiv.

¹⁴ Among such men who worked and consulted throughout the Anglo-Atlantic world were Englishmen Raymond Unwin and Patrick Abercrombie; Americans John Nolen and Daniel Burnham; and Scotsmen Patrick Geddes and Thomas Adams. For examples, see ‘Town planning conference, London’, Transactions of the Royal Institute of British Architects Town Planning Conference London 10th to 15th October (1910); ‘Cities and town planning exhibition, May 24th to June 7th, 1911’ (Dublin), in miscellaneous pamphlets, Dublin City Library and Archives; ‘11th annual conference on city planning (United States and Canada)’, American City, 20 (1919), 501.

¹⁵ Meller, H., ‘Planning theory and women's role in the city’, Urban History, 17 (1990), 85CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Jarvis, H. with Kantor, P. and Cloke, J., Cities and Gender (Abingdon, 2009), 220Google Scholar; and Pateman, C., The Disorder of Women: Democracy, Feminism and Political Theory (Stanford, 1989)Google Scholar, quote 123. See also Karsten, L., ‘“From a top-down to a bottom-up urban discourse”, (re)constructing the city in a family-inclusive way’, Journal of Housing and the Built Environment, 24 (2009), 317–29CrossRefGoogle Scholar, for an assessment of the contemporary city that draws a similar conclusion.

¹⁶ Examples from each city are Dublin's Women's National Health Association, the Chicago Woman's Club, Local Council of Women of Toronto and London's Kyrle Society.

¹⁷ For just a few broad examples, see Deutsch, S., Woman and the City: Gender, Space and Power in Boston, 1870–1940 (New York, 2000)Google Scholar; Flanagan, M.A., Seeing with Their Hearts: Chicago Women and the Vision of the Good City, 1871–1933 (Princeton, 2002)Google Scholar; Rappaport, E., Shopping for Pleasure: Women in the Making of London's West End (Princeton, 2000)Google Scholar; Spain, D., How Women Saved the City (Minneapolis, 2001)Google Scholar; Straitigakos, D., A Women's Berlin: Building the Modern City (Minneapolis, 2008)Google Scholar. For an example of women's urban activities focused on an issue that was a struggle over a specific urban space, see Hickey, G., ‘The geography of pornography: neighborhood feminism and the battle over “dirty bookstores” in Minneapolis’, Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, 32 (2011), 125–51CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Many other examples of women who inserted themselves into public issues that involved specific spaces would be studies of such well-known London housing reformers as Octavia Hill and Henrietta Barnett, and the lesser-known Elizabeth Denby. For Denby, see Darling, E., ‘“The star in the profession she invented for herself”: a brief biography of Elizabeth Denby, housing consultant’, Planning Perspectives, 20 (2005), 271–300CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁸ Greed, C., Women and Planning: Creating Gendered Realities (London, 1994), 4–5Google Scholar, provides a succinct explanation of this idea.

¹⁹ For a short discussion of the difference between examining women in the city and women as an integral part of understanding the city, see Flanagan, M.A., ‘Women in the city, women of the city: where do women fit in urban history’, introduction to the special edition on ‘Women and the city’, Journal of Urban History, 23 (1997), 251–9CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For an earlier discussion about experience, see Flanagan, M.A., ‘Gender and urban political reform: the city club and the woman's city club of Chicago in the progressive era’, American Historical Review, 95 (1990), 1032–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Flanagan, Seeing with Their Hearts.

²⁰ Depending on the city, there could be a limited municipal franchise for women, but men controlled the political and economic systems. They were the principal decision-makers that women would need to confront in order to effect any differing urban reforms.

²¹ See Rappaport, Shopping for Pleasure.

²² Wilson, E., The Sphinx in the City: Urban Life, the Control of Disorder, and Women (Berkeley, 1991), 46Google Scholar, for banishment and regulation of women, and 8 for quote. See also Darke, J., ‘The man-shaped city’, in Booth, C., Darke, J. and Yeandle, S. (eds.), Changing Places: Women's Lives in the City (London, 1996), 88Google Scholar. See Winter, London's Teeming Streets, for lack of concern over male prostitution and disorder. I limit my discussion of the gender dimension of public toilets to women because it was their sexuality and use of public space that men wanted to control in the time period covered by this article. See Greed, C., Inclusive Urban Design: Public Toilets (Oxford, 2003), 86–7Google Scholar, for later fears about male homosexual activity. See also Grosz, E., ‘Bodies-city’, in Colomina, B. (ed.), Sexuality and Space (Princeton, 1992)Google Scholar, esp. 250.

²³ Surveyor and Municipal and County Engineer, 3 (1883), 280. The British Architect, 23 (30 Jan. 1885), 60, lauded a new men's underground lavatory in front of the Royal Exchange, around the base of the duke of Wellington's statue, as a ‘city improvement of a most important character’.

²⁴ Penner, B., ‘A world of unmentionable suffering: women's public conveniences in Victorian London’, Journal of Design History, 14 (2001), 39–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar n. 34.

²⁵ Woodward, W., ‘Proposed public improvements at Charing Cross’, Journal of the Society of Architects, 1 (1894), 61Google Scholar, and idem, ‘The sanitation and reconstruction of central London’, in Essays on the Street Re-alignment, Reconstruction, and Sanitation of Central London and the Rehousing of the Poorer Classes (London, 1886). See also Richardson, J., Camden Town and Primrose Hill Past (London, 1991), 61Google Scholar.

²⁶ See Rappaport, Shopping for Pleasure, 82–4, 251 n. 59. For the Union of Women's Liberal and Radical Associations, see Penner, ‘A world of unmentionable suffering’, 39.

²⁷ Greed, Women and Planning, 104. The 1894 Parish and District Councils Act made women eligible, while the 1899 act amalgamating vestries and creating boroughs made them ineligible for serving on borough boards. In 1894, 13 women were elected to vestry boards in St Martin in the Fields, St George's Southwark, Kensington, St Marylebone, St Pancras, Camberwell and Paddington. Their number never exceeded 15. See Holles, P., Ladies Elect: Women in English Local Government, 1865–1914 (Oxford, 1987), 344–52Google Scholar. For the LSA, see Rappaport, Shopping for Pleasure, 84 n. 55, and Walker, L., ‘Vistas of pleasure: women consumers of urban space 1850–1900’, in Campbell Orr, C. (ed.), Women in the Victorian Art World (Manchester, 1995), 70–85Google Scholar.

²⁸ Reverend J.R. Knowles quoted in Rappaport, Shopping for Pleasure, 85. One can acknowledge the class dimension of such a statement without negating its patriarchal nature: it is men who are attempting to distinguish ‘their’ women from ‘other’ women. See Penner, ‘A world of unmentionable suffering’, 39 nn. 28, 29 and 30, for the LSA, including mention of a letter from the LSA to St Pancras vestry in 1878 complaining about its refusal to build women's public toilets.

²⁹ Penner, ‘A world of unmentionable suffering’, 41.

³⁰ Dennis, Cities in Modernity, 136. In just one section of the ordnance survey map of 1894–96, I identified urinals at such busy intersections as the south end of Dartrey Road at Cremorne and Cheyne Walk; King's Road at Blantyre Street and Dartrey Road; Westminster Bridge Street and Stangate; Hungerford Bridge at Charing Cross Station; Vauxhall at Bond Street; south ends of Albert and Battersea Bridges; at Kensington Vestry Wharf; on the Albert Embankment; along Lambeth Road; and along the tram route on Kennington.

³¹ In addition to Penner, ‘A world of unmentionable suffering’, 41, see Bernard Shaw, G., ‘The unmentionable case for women's suffrage’, Review of Reviews, 39 (1909), 342Google Scholar. Shaw was a vestryman and then borough councillor of St Pancras.

³² Penner, ‘A world of unmentionable suffering’, 35–6.

³³ See Greed, Inclusive Urban Design, 43, for some examples.

³⁴ Report, Medical Officer of Health, ‘Public conveniences in London’ (13 Dec. 1928), pamphlet at Women's Library, London Metropolitan University, quotes 3 and 5. Toilet accommodations – urinals, stalls and water closets – across London totalled 4,541 for men and 846 for women. Ibid., Table 1.

³⁵ Music and lyrics for ‘My Fair Lady’, by Frederick Loewe and Alan Jay Lerner (1964).

³⁶ Minutes of the Municipal Council of the City of Dublin (MMCCD) (1897), #421, 375. Freeman's Journal and Daily Commercial Advertiser, 3 Jan. 1898 and 22 Aug. 1899, provide additional accounts of Dublin Council discussions of this issue. The Dublin Corporation is a small body headed by the lord mayor; the municipal council is elected to represent the city's wards and ratepayers. The council forwarded its resolutions to the corporation. The two bodies kept separate records and minutes and all can be found at the Pearse Street Public Library.

³⁷ See, for examples, MMCCD (1898), #46 and #111, 29 and 84, (1899), #326, #332, #339, 221–5, and (1900), #521, 452; Reports and Printed Documents of the Corporation of Dublin (RPDCD), vol. 1 (1898), #9, 69, vol. 2 (1899), #65, 373–5, and #72, 415–17, vol. 3 (1900), 143, for Mountjoy, and 828–30 for Bachelor's Walk, vol. 2 (1900), #68, 445, and vol. 1 (1901), #53, 347–8.

³⁸ See MMCCD (1899), #339, 225, and (1901), #365, 543. See RPDCD, vol. 1 (1902), #12, 81–2, for the council's decision.

³⁹ Women would be charged for having privacy, but Cameron did grant that one toilet in a shop should be free! RPDCD, vol. 1 (1906), #161, 649–50. For Cameron's continuing stress on private facilities for women, see RPDCD, vol. 2 (1911), #120, 451–2.

⁴⁰ For the council's proposal, see MMCCD (1907), #591, 426–7.

⁴¹ See reporting on the suit, ‘McDowell et al. v. Corporation’, in Irish Times, 5 Sep. 1907. See MMCCD (1908), #5, 7–8, for the council's decision.

⁴² See RPDCD, vol. 1 (1911), #2 and #42, 19–23 and 405, and vol. 2 (1911), #107, 375–6, and #120, 451–2, for Cameron and deputation's request. See also MMCCD (1911), #371 and #577, 269–70 and 577, and #577, 394 for the mayor's ruling.

⁴³ MMCCD (1912), #146 and #994, 110 and 691.

⁴⁴ RPDCD, vol. 1 (1915), 97, and MMCCD (1914), #487, 307.

⁴⁵ MMCCD (1915), #247, 119–22, and Irish Times, 12 Feb. 1915. Similar to the St Pancras episode, one representative of the ‘local inhabitants’ declared that he ‘did not want such a place under his own windows’. Quoted in Penner, ‘A world of unmentionable suffering’, 41.

⁴⁶ The Port and Docks Board (composed of male property owners) objected to the site as unstable and secured an indemnity from the corporation in case of any loss, damage or necessity to remove the lavatory. MMCCD (1921), #654, 460, and RPDCD, vol. 2 (1921), #230, 575–9. I found no information about the eventual outcome.

⁴⁷ For figures and emphasis, see Toronto Harbour Commissioners, ‘Toronto: a city of opportunity’ (Jun. 1912), pamphlet in Fisher Library Digital Collection, University of Toronto: www.library.utoronto.ca/broadsides/CAP01978/0005-3-0.jpg (last accessed 27 Aug. 2008). See also Osbaldeston, M., Unbuilt Toronto: A History of the City that Might Have Been (Toronto, 2008)Google Scholar; Solomon, L., Toronto Sprawls: A History (Toronto, 2007)Google Scholar.

⁴⁸ Canada Lancet, 37 (1904), 851.

⁴⁹ Toronto Public Library holds scattered issues of the Annual Reports; some reports are digitized online in the Gerritsen Collection of Aletta H. Jacobs at archive.org and the HathiTrust Digital Library.

⁵⁰ Toronto City Council (TCC), Regular Minutes, vol. 1 (1912), #1041, 447, meeting of 5 Jan. 1912, notes that the women had submitted their ‘list of desired measures’, but gave no details. Nor did the Toronto Star list the women's requests in its summary of the council proceedings. TCC, #599, 191, meeting of 1 May 1912, mentions that the LCWT was petitioning the council not to curtail the cost estimates of the health department, and in ibid., vol. 1 (1913), 441, the council received letters from the LCWT asking it to help the unemployed during winter. The LCWT, 20th Annual Report (1913), credited women with gathering 700 signatures which helped to restore $11 million to the health department.

⁵¹ TCC, Appendix C (1907), 3 and 12.

⁵² Harris, R. and Bloomfield, A.V., ‘The impact of industrialization on the gendered journey to work, 1900–1940’, Economic Geography, 73 (1997), 94–117CrossRefGoogle Scholar, statistics 109. When public toilets for women were built later, they were not in the downtown area.

⁵³ LCWT, Annual Reports, 1910 and 1912.

⁵⁴ Toronto Star, 30 May 1911.

⁵⁵ Ibid., 1 Feb. 1913 and 16 Feb. 1915, for the public library board.

⁵⁶ Ibid, 1 Feb. 1913, 5 Feb. 1914 and 18 Feb. 1919. For various proposals and decisions on public toilets across the next several years, see 4 Jan., 16 Feb. and 23 Mar. 1915, 10 Jan. 1916, 28 Nov. 1918 and 22 and 28 May and 1 Nov. 1919.

⁵⁷ Other sites mentioned for public lavatories were St Clair and Dufferin, Queen Street East and Kingston Road, Gerrard and Greenwood, and Broadview and Danforth. A map of outbound rush hour homeward transit movement from 1915 prepared by the Civic Transportation Committee demonstrates that the vast majority of such persons came directly from the downtown area where women would most have needed a public toilet. See http://maps.library.utoronto.ca/datapub/digital/rushhour.jpg (last accessed 20 May 2013). The New Zealand city of Dunedin followed a similar practice. The first women's public toilet, built in 1906, was not in the city centre, but at a beach. See Cooper, A., Malthus, J. and Wood, P., ‘Rooms of their own: public toilets and gendered citizens in a New Zealand city, 1860–1940’, Gender Place and Culture, 7 (2000), 423CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵⁸ The City Council Parks Committee, for example, refused to give a vacant building it owned to the Central Neighborhood House (CNA) settlement for use as a children's shelter, claiming the CNH was a ‘sectarian’ enterprise not to be supported with taxpayers’ funds. This claim was manifestly false, so the more likely reason was because the CNH was run by women for the sake of poor women and children that the council had no control over. See Toronto Star, 5 Nov. 1912.

⁵⁹ ‘Report on a comprehensive plan for systematic civic improvements in Toronto by the Toronto guild of civic art’ (1909) and Toronto Civic Guild, Bulletin, ‘Report of civic improvement committee for the city of Toronto’ (1911), Urban Affairs Library, Toronto. (This is the same group; it just changed its name.) See also Dennis, Cities in Modernity, 16–18 and 117.

⁶⁰ Toronto Star, 27 Jan. 1914, and 6 Dec. 1916.

⁶¹ Ibid., 22 May and 8 Sep. 1914; Dennis, Cities in Modernity, quote 17. See also the brief overview in Osbaldeston, Unbuilt Toronto, ch. 3.

⁶² Toronto Star, 1 Feb. 1913 and 14 Nov. 1914, for quote from the North Toronto Ratepayers. Letter of 9 Apr. 1912 from Vincent Basenti? (spelling is blurred) to Frank Beers, declaring that street improvements were of the utmost importance to good citizenship, in Frank Beers manuscript collection, Box F177-MU59, General Correspondence, 1905–29 (also marked as Series I, Box 1), folder 1905–13, at Archives of Ontario, Toronto. When the Guild hosted a conference on Toronto Improvements, representatives attended from ‘business, ratepayers, and neighborhood organizations’. There is very little evidence in any of the Guild's publications that its members and attendees at such meetings included many women. See Toronto Civic Guild, Bulletin (Oct. 1912), for conference.

⁶³ For such arguments, see Darling and Whitworth (eds.), Women and the Making of Built Space in England, esp. H. Meller, ‘Gender, citizenship and the making of the modern environment’, 13–32, and A. Anderson and E. Darling, ‘The Hill sisters: cultural philanthropy and the embellishment of lives in late nineteenth-century England’, 33–50. See also essays in Bingaman, A., Sanders, L. and Zorach, R. (eds.), Embodied Utopias: Gender, Social Change, and the Modern Metropolis (New York, 2002)Google Scholar.

⁶⁴ S. Haar, ‘At home in public: the Hull House settlement and the study of the city’, in Bingaman, Sanders and Zorach (eds.), Embodied Utopias, 99–115, quotes 111 and 113. See Jarvis, Kantor and Cloke (eds.), Cities and Gender, 131, for quote on infrastructure of everyday life. Rendell, J., The Pursuit of Pleasure: Gender, Space and Architecture in Regency London (New Brunswick, 2002), 23Google Scholar.

⁶⁵ Mackintosh, P.G., ‘Scrutiny in the modern city: the domestic public and the Toronto Local Council of Women at the turn of the twentieth century’, Gender, Place and Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography, 12 (2005), 29–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁶⁶ Chicago Daily Tribune, 28 Mar. 1892.

⁶⁷ Ibid., 26 Jul. 1892 and 7 Jun. 1893. Chicago built its first public bath in 1894. In 1895, the MOL renamed itself the Free Bath and Sanitary League.

⁶⁸ Journal of the Proceedings of the City Council of Chicago (JPCCC), meeting of 1 Jul. 1907, 925.

⁶⁹ Chicago Daily Tribune, 3 Oct. 1907. See City Club Bulletin, 20 (Nov. 1907).

⁷⁰ See JPCCC, meetings of 6 Jan. 1908, 3647, 19 Feb. 1908, 3970, 21 Dec. 1908, 2216; Chicago Daily Tribune, 1 Jan., 30 Sep. 1911 and 10 Dec. 1912.

⁷¹ This rhetoric of distancing the US from Europe may explain why Chicago residents referred to public toilets as comfort stations; or perhaps it stemmed from an anxiety over the ‘saloon menace’ to the growing public presence of women. See City Club Bulletin, 20 (Nov. 1907).

⁷² Chicago Daily Tribune, 25 Oct. 1907. See also ibid., 6 May 1908; City Club Bulletin, 20 (Nov. 1907), for discussion, names of participating clubs and suggestions for possible toilet locations in downtown; J. Allen, ‘Public comfort stations’, Western Architect, 12 (1908), 16 and 17; Charities and Commons, 19 (1907), 1233; and Report of the Department of Health of the City of Chicago, ‘Annals of health and sanitation in Chicago’ (1919), 1520.

⁷³ See Chicago Daily Tribune, 6 May 1908, for parks and public toilets. For Chicago's governing system, see Flanagan, M.A., Charter Reform in Chicago (Carbondale, 1997)Google Scholar, and Platt, H., Shock Cities: The Environmental Transformation and Reform of Manchester and Chicago (Chicago, 2005)Google Scholar, for additional specifics on city council operations. For Chicago's finances, see Mayor Carter Harrison II, ‘New Year's message to the people’, Chicago City Manual for 1911 (Chicago, 1912), 219, wherein he announced a corporate fund credit of $4,314,817.90 and a water fund credit of $2,450,000. In Toronto, the city council refused to allocate a small grant of money that women requested to help them maintain a night shelter for women; the previous year the council had allocated $10,000 to advertise Toronto at the Columbian Exposition as a ‘manufacturing, commercial, an educational center, etc., etc.’. See TCC, Minutes, vol. 2 Appendix A (1894), 71, and ibid., vol. 1 Appendix A (1893), 79 and 101.

⁷⁴ Chicago Daily Tribune, 25 Oct., 10 and 14 Nov. 1907, and City Club Bulletin, 20 (Nov. 1907). See also illustration 4 for the fact that no women were invited to participate in discussions.

⁷⁵ Ibid., 251.

⁷⁶ For discussion of the differing biological needs and social constraints of men and women in public and of the problem of women with children, see Edwards, J. and McKie, L., ‘Women's public toilets: a serious issue for the body politic’, European Journal of Women's Studies, 3 (1996), 216–19CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁷⁷ See Chicago Daily Tribune, 10 Jun. 1913, for the CWA and other women's clubs and Domestic Engineering (4 Oct. 1913), 69, quote, and library's offer of street space. The Chicago Political Equality League's public comfort station committee was petitioning the city council and working with the other women's groups. See JPCCC, ‘Index’ (1913–14), file #3793, 3005.

⁷⁸ Woman's City Club of Chicago, Bulletin (Dec. 1914 and Nov. 1915).

⁷⁹ The paucity of evidence of male support for public toilets and the failure of those who did support them to advocate strongly for the needs of women and children gives truth to this statement. Among the few exceptions were Alderman Willis Nance MD who requested the council's Committee on Finance to include funds in the 1913 budget for the public comfort station at Randolph Street; Dr A. Wilberforce Williams who noted the lack of public toilets in ‘congested parts of our city, where a stranger, or any individual woman or child [may] have the advantage of sanitary toilet facilities’; and Alderman R.R. Jackson who wanted a public toilet built in his ward. See respectively Tribune, 29 Oct. 1912, Chicago Defender, 8 Aug. 1914 and 13 Mar. 1920. Williams and Jackson were African American.

⁸⁰ Bulletin of the Department of Public Welfare, City of Chicago, ‘Public Comfort Stations’, Department Serial Number 3 (Oct. 1916); WCC, Bulletin (Sep. 1916); and Chicago Daily Tribune, 16 Dec. 1916. The commissioner of public welfare – the only female department head – was paid less than males heading all other municipal departments.

⁸¹ WCC, Bulletin, Apr. and May 1917.

⁸² Ibid., Jul. and Aug. 1918 and May 1925. The city even refused until 1923 to erect signs directing people to the few toilets that did exist. The WCC lobbied the parks boards to erect conspicuous signs directing pedestrians to public comfort stations; asked women to write their park district commissioners to demand that they do so; and demanded that building public toilets be incorporated into all new plans for the built environment. In contrast, British architect S.D. Adshead had argued that lavatories were an ‘abortion’ akin to trolley poles and ugly lamps and that if there must be public toilets they should be as invisible as possible. See ‘Town planning and amenities’, Town Planning Review, 10 (May 1923), 95, and ibid., 5 (Jul. 1914), 89.

⁸³ Smith, C., The Plan of Chicago: Daniel Burnham and the Remaking of the American City (Chicago, 2006), 135CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The WCC had demanded public comfort stations on the widened Twelfth Street and Michigan Avenue. See Adshead's, S.D. commendation of the ‘Recommendations of the London branch of the board of trade, 1911’, Town Planning Review, 2 (Jan. 1912), 256CrossRefGoogle Scholar, for ‘directing attention’ to such street traffic obstructions as lavatories.

⁸⁴ See Executive Committee Chicago Plan Commission, Proceedings of the Twenty-Second Meeting of the Executive Committee of the Chicago Plan Commission held in the Main Dining Room, Hotel La Salle, Chicago, January 24, 1913, in Chicago Plan Commission manuscript collection, folder 1913–14, at the Chicago History Museum. Well over 100 people attended this meeting, applauding all such comments – no woman attended. For council's declaration, see WCC, Bulletin (Sep. 1918). See also ibid. (Aug. 1917 and Jun. 1918).

⁸⁵ WCC, Bulletin (Jan. 1923 and May 1925).

⁸⁶ LCWT, ‘Historical sketch’, manuscript collection, Archives of Ontario, Toronto, 1.

⁸⁷ Greed, Inclusive Urban Design, 38–9, 47.

⁸⁸ Irish Times, 17 Nov. 1907.

⁸⁹ Meller, ‘Gender, citizenship and the making of the modern environment’, 16–17.

⁹⁰ See Jarvis, Kantor and Cloke, Cities and Gender, ch. 5.

⁹¹ One example is D. Harvey's focus on inequity in property values, resource availability, the distribution of the production of society and ‘contribution to the common good’. See Social Justice and the City (Baltimore, 1973), chs. 2 and 3. Jarvis, Kantor and Cloke, Cities and Gender, 12, notes that a principal text used for teaching urban studies credits Charles Booth, the Chicago school of Burgess et al., LeCorbusier, William Alonso, Lewis Mumford, David Harvey, Manuel Casells, Mike Davis and William Cronon as providing the ‘top ten’ urban ideas. Pinder, D., Visions of the City: Utopianism, Power and Politics in Twentieth-Century Urbanism (New York, 2005), 106Google Scholar, rightly criticizes Le Corbusier's failure to connect with how people actually live, but he never contests the privileged position Le Corbusier and other men believe they possess to decide on the construction of the city.