Rooms of Their Own: Public toilets and gendered citizens in a New Zealand city, 1860‐1940

Abstract

Differences in the provision of public toilets for men and women point to the gendering of citizens. In the later nineteenth century, provision of public toilets in the city of Dunedin centered on the management of male bodies as the meaning of 'public decency' was transformed, while women were catered for as consumers. By the beginning of the twentieth century, when provision for women became a public issue, it was debated in terms of women's special character as citizens. The bodily and spatial characteristics of public and private were renegotiated around this issue: as women became more public, toilets became more private. This article draws on debates about the sexed and gendered body in public space, maternal citizenship, the civilising and modernising of landscapes and bodies, and shifting conceptions of privacy and public.

Full text

Gender, Place and Culture, Vol. 7, No. 4, pp. 417–433, 2000
Room s of Their Own: p ublic toilets and gender ed citizens
in a New Zealand city, 1860–1940
ANNABEL COOPER, ROBIN LAW & JANE MALTHUS, University of Otago,
New Zealand
PAMELA WOOD, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand[1]
ABSTRACT Differences in the provision of public toilets for men and women point to the gendering
of citizens. In the later nineteenth century, provision of public toilets in the city of Dunedin centered on
the management of ma le bodies as the meaning of ‘public decency’ was transformed, while women were
catered for as consumers. By the beginning of the twentieth century, when provision for women became
a public issue, it was debated in terms of women’s special character as citizens. The bodily and spatial
characteristics of public and private were renegotiated around this issue: as women became more public,
toilets became more private. This article draws on debates about the sexed and gendered body in public
space, maternal citizenship, the civilising and modernising of landscapes and bodies, and shifting
conceptions of privacy and public.
Introduction
In studies of urbanisation and modernity in the Western world, women and men appear
in a variety of settings and spaces: as patriarchs or ‘angels of the house’ in suburban
homes, aˆneurs and promenaders on city boulevards, workers labouring in factories,
consumers thronging department stores and cafe´s, commuters on trams a nd streets, and
citizens gathering at public meetings and spectacles. A now substantial literature
documents the gend ering of these spaces and settings during the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries (Wilson, 1991; Walkowitz, 1992). Yet, despite increasing attention to
embodiment, discipline and cultural meaning in discussions of citizenship and space
(Douglas, 1966; Foucault, 1977, 1980; Stallybrass & White, 1986; Sennett, 1994), only
recently has a discussion d eveloped about the emergence of one of the most segregated,
compact, and ubiquitous expressions of gendered urban space: the public toilet (Wright,
1960; Cavanagh & Ware, 1990; Andrews, 1990; Greed, 1995, 1996; Edwards & McKie,
1996; Tankard, 1996; Daley, 2000)[2]. Behind the apparently mundane na ture of these
‘small’ sp aces lies a history of the sexed and gendered body in urban space, the civilising
and modernising of landscapes and bodies, the nature of citizenship, and the shifting
practices and technologies of private and public.
The discourses sur rounding the provision, design and surveillance of public toilets
mark them as culturally overdetermined spaces. In the New Zealand city of Dunedin
between 1860 and 1940, public toilets, and their expanded and feminised form, rest
rooms, became the sites within which bodily excreta and exchange—urination, defection,
menstruation, lactation and sex—could be licitly or illicitly carried out ‘in private in
Correspondence: Annabel Cooper, Gender and Women’s Studie s, University of Otago, P.O. Box 56, Dunedin, New
Zea land.
ISSN 0966-369X print/ISSN 1360-0524 online/00/040417-17
Ó
2000 Taylor & Francis Ltd
DOI 10.1080/09663690020009000
417

41 8 A. Cooper et al.
public’. This process was driven in part by the impetus wh ich drove sanitary engineering
and architecture through the Western world from the eighteenth century: t he public
health ag enda which, as Peter St allybrass and Allon White have argued compe llingly,
mus t be seen not only as a practice of medical hygiene but as constituted by psychic and
so cial formations (Stallybrass & White, 1986). In New World societies such as Dunedin’s,
the d esire for a ‘pure’ city was coloured by recent departure from the grime and human
waste of industrial Britain. The path we trace through the discursive and architectural
transitions of the public toilets of Dunedin is marked out by changing u nderstanding s of
se xed, gendered and classed bodies, opening up narratives of disgust and respectability,
of bodily practices as ill- or uncontained ‘nuisances’ and of bodies as freshly-minted New
World citizens and c onsumer s.
Our initiating questions in this study concerned mobilit y and access to the public
sphere. What, we thought, could be more limiting to women’s ability to move about the
city than a lack of toilets? F or an in triguing fact had rapidly become clear: the  rs t
publicly pr ovided urinals for men in Dunedin were built in 1862, 14 years after
European settlem ent in 1848; toilets for women appeared only after 60 yea rs. While this
might re ect the greater numbers of men actually ‘in public’, the l ack of toilets for
women could help to ensure that the imbalance contin ued. As our research progressed,
ho wever, our early interest in differing levels of mobility and relationships to th e public
sphere was augmen ted by other questions: concerning differences in practic es of bodily
transgression by men and women over this period, of different imperatives and kinds of
provision for men and women, and of shift s in th e ‘technologies’ of privacy. Men—or
so me men—had to be made less ‘public’ at a time when women were campaigning to
become more s o. Yet, as women’s occupatio n of ‘the public’ was r eshaped by suffrage,
transport, employment, and patterns of consumpt ion and recreation, they did not simply
depart ‘the private’ as they shut the ir fron t doors behind them for longer periods of time
and for new purposes. In fact, as women became more public, their spaces of ‘public
privacy’ underwent transitions shaped by modernity and gendered notions of citizenship,
and were managed less by clothing and more by architecture. We therefore argue in t his
article for a more inclusive, subtle and detailed attention to what cons tituted private an d
public. As we map the cha nging spatial practices of gendered bodies over time, we
discuss the spaces created and de ned by clothing as well as walls, doors and screens.
The focus of our study, Dunedin, is one of New Zealand’s southernmost cities, settled
in 1848, predominantly by Free Church Presbyterian settlers from Scotland. A planned
se ttlement, it was characterised initially by a high proportion of families and a near-equal
se x ratio. Despite further immigration over the century we consider, it remained a
predominantly British settlement[3]. In 1861, the discovery of gol d in Central Otago,
in land from Dunedin, brought wealth to the city, but disrupted the self-consciously
or derly community by bringing a large in ux of people to the town, making it rapidly,
but brie y, the most populous city in New Zealand. Most of the newcomers were men
and—perhaps more disturbingly to Dunedin’s ne w Presby terian elite—a high proportion
were Irish. By the turn of the century, Dunedin was a prosperous provincial por t with
a wider u rban populat ion of 47,280 people.
Our discussion is shaped by the fact t hat the degree and kind of articulation
surrounding the topic of public toilet provision in Western cities has varied greatly: such
glimpses as there are of changes in practice con rm that notions of ‘offen ce’, ‘politeness’,
‘dirt’ and ‘privacy’ are indeed categories whose content shifts dramatica lly (Elias, 1939;
Douglas, 1966). As in other Western cities, the nineteenth century saw public urination
become indecent, and ‘an altered threshold of public decency eventually cordoned off the

Public Toilets and Gender in New Zealand 419
public t oilet as the only appropriate place for such bodily function’ (Tankard, 1996):
si milarly, the threshold of discursive decency altered. As a result of these transitions, the
so urces available to us shift over the period under study[4].
Flax Bushes and Underwear: provision and practices from the 1860s
In the early years of settlement, before Dunedin could be properly described as urban
space, the ‘frontier’ practice of urinating and probab ly defecating in public places was
apparently followed and tolerated[5]. Citizens could be charged with indece ncy for
urinating in public, but until 1861, were not. Prosecutions began in October 1861, 5
months after Gabriel Read’s discovery of gold in Central Otago, inland from Dunedin.
The gold rush precipitated a rapid and dramatic increase in the city’s population (from
17 12 in 1858, to 6 523 in 1861, to 15,790 in 1864) (McDonald, 1965), and qui ckly
cr eated a public health problem. In resp onse, a Sanitary Commission was established.
Reporting in 1864, it fo und that parts of t he city, especially those in which the
suddenly-e ruptin g tent communities or closely-tenanted housing p urpose-built for the
transient population were concentrat ed, had inadequate provision for privies and for the
removal of exc rement (Report of th e Dunedin Sanitar y Commission, 1865, p. 29)[6].
Although levels of dirt were gen erally high in nineteenth-century cities, this increase
caused concern.
Established settlers, especially those familiar with—and happy to have left—large cities
in Britain where slum areas could accumulate backyards piled with excrement and other
waste, must have reac ted with horror at this signi er of Old Wor ld evils emerging in their
new country[ 7]. Accompanying, and con  at ed with, the material problem of public
health was a problem of masculine behaviour. Between October 1861 and December
18 62, 42 men were prosecuted for ‘exposure of person’ or ‘indecency’, and  ned be tween
a shilling and £5 (Dunedin Resident Magis trates Court Fines). These c harges would
usually have referred to urinat ing or defecat ing in pub lic. The Town Board also
appointed James Nimon as the  rst Inspector of Nuisances at the end of 1861. The
sudden in ux into and through the city of a transient group of usually young and l one
men on their way to th e rough life of the gold e lds also changed the sex ratio. Dunedin’ s
European population in 1856 was 2100 men and 16 96 women, but in 1864, it was 8927
men and 6863 women. Not readily counte d among this largely ‘stable’ population was
the moving populatio n which passed through the town on its way inland. Immigration
to Ot ago in 1862 included 21,092 adult men, but only 3036 adult women; mo st of these
men and women disembarked in Dunedin. The tide of male immigrants caused a change
in the effective sex rat io, but at least as signi cantly, it shifted the balance among men. A
co mmunity that had set out to construct itself as stable and familial by New World
st andards was confronted by an eruption of a nomadic masculine tribe through the town,
whose buildings and drain age could not contain it and whose civic identity objected to
the disorder of its bodies. Previously unused legislation was rapidly deployed as city
of cials and the property-owning citizenry sought to manage these low-Others passing
riotously through the city, often drinking very heavily and on binges of several days’
duration (Olsseen, 1984; pp. 56–66; Phil lips, 1987)[8]. The self-consc ious civility of the
new city was threatened by this particular form of masculinity, and it responded. The
Daily Telegraph pronounced strangers t o Dunedin guilty of addin g to the  lth of the town
by using any available land as a toilet (‘Something wante d’, Daily Telegraph, 5 January
18 63, p. 3). The ‘ lth’ problem was not one of ‘men’ per se: it was a question of competing
mas culinities, of class, and of the decencies of New World citizenship.

42 0 A. Cooper et al.
These early prose cutions were accompanied by a growing sense that some civic, and
civ ilising, provis ion should be made in addition to hotel lavatories. When John Woods,
for example, appeared in court in March 1862, the magistrate  ned him 5 shillings and
co sts but remarked that the Town Board shoul d erect ‘suitable places for public
co nvenience’ (‘Resident Magistr ate’s Cour t’, Otago Witness, 2 2 March 1862, p. 3). Two
public urinals were built, but by the end of the year they were insuf cient and  lthy; one
was describe d as a ‘standing nuisance’ (Town Board Minutes, 23 December 1862). More
were built, but the cleanliness d id not improve. In 1863, the Board employed a urinal
attendant, but the Board minutes throughout 1864 co ntinued to refer to the urinals’
 lthy state. The registering of municipal disgust alerts u s to the existence of other toilets,
evidently for men only, attached to civic buildings. Toilets at the court house, for
example, were recorded as bein g in a ‘disgraceful state’ for months (‘City Council’, Otago
Witness, 11 August 1866, p. 8). Plans for the new Town Hall, drawn in 1873, included
on ly men’s (City Engineer, Architectural Plans). That neither court nor town hall, both
civ ic institutions which symbolised the public sphere, provided for women marks the
gender of citizenship at this time.
The provision of toilets for men was an architectural response to a perception of ‘  lth’,
but seems initially at least to have missed its targets. In 1864, the editor of the Otago Daily
Times obser ved t hat the ‘extensive middens’ surrounding  ax bushes in and aroun d the
town would give anyone curious about ‘matter in an adv anced stage of decomposition ’
an interesting study. Every  ax bush, he complained, had been converted into a
‘magazine of disease’ and it had been done with ‘unremitting energy’ (‘ “Inveniam viam
aut faciam” ’ , Otago Daily Times, 1 September 1864, p. 4). There was on ly one thing to
do, and the Insp ector of Nuisances set out to achieve it: he urged the newly established
Sanitary Commission to ensure that owners or occupiers of land where  ax grew
removed it as it was ‘the receptacle for  lth wherever it exists’ (Report of the Dunedin
Sanitary Commission 1865, p. 3 0). The inspector’s response is entertaining in r etrospe ct,
but we might re ect on the slippage between t he management of men’s bodies and
the management of a distinctively ‘nativ e’ landscape. Ne w Z ealand  ax—dominant as
the vegetation of the wetter areas, but perhaps more importantly visuall y dominant in the
landscape—functioned as a signi er of ‘nativeness’, appearing in many early paintings of
the city and marking its non-Europeanness. Did such distinctively ‘native’ vegetation
so licit symbolic degradation? Or does the inspector’s request suggest that t he removal of
the  ax in some way stood for removal of the danger that men themselves, or—more to
the point—a c ertain class of men, might ‘go native’, an d that the removal of the wildness
fr om the landscape might constrain the wildness in these transient men?
Whether the  ax attracted women as powerfully as it did men is not documented, but
no toilets for women were even considered at this stage—suggesting that women were at
least not recognised as the source of the problem, or that their contribution to it was not
perceived as great e nough to warrant the extra cost of building facilities for them. While
men ’s bodily waste in public was subject to increasing levels of scrutiny and management,
that of women received no attention that we have dete cted. We cannot be certain about
women’s p ractices at this time, al though gender and class undoubtedly produced
differing degrees of self-discipline and modesty and differing notions of appropriat e
public behaviour. It seems likely that women did at least at times urinate in public spaces,
though we have found no direct l ocal evidence. There are a few references to practices
elsewhere. Margare t Andrews refers to early trains in England allowing passengers to
alight, men urinating from the ends of plat forms, ‘while women stood in earnest
co nversation here and there, their long skirts providing cover’ (Pudney, cited in Andrews,

Public Toilets and Gender in New Zealand 421
19 90, p. 4). One of Ha velock Ellis’s earliest memories was ‘of once accompanying the
nurse who was wheeling the perambula tor with the baby along Morland Road. The
nurse stood still and I heard a myst erious sound as of a stream of water descending to
the earth’ (Ellis, 1940, p. 43). These events suggest that such things were done, but
perhaps not frequently (little Ellis was evidently sur prised), perhaps s ubject to differing
practices according to class, circumscribed by suitable degrees of discretion, and with the
assistance of the screen offe red by clothing. This br ings us to consideration of the
evidence offered by dress.
Men’s dress re ected the r elative freedom of movement allowed and expected of men
in nineteenth-century New Zealand and, of course, elsewhere. In form, men’s dress was
adapted to their ‘externalised genito-urinary system’. By the 1840s, trousers had a  y or
co ncealed fastening at the centre front instead of a fall or  ap (Byrde, 197 9; p. 86;
Costantino, 1997, p. 55). Until the 1930s, when zippers began to be used as  y
fa stenings, the  y was closed with buttons. Their clothing allowed men quick and easy
urinating when and where necessary even as the practice was becoming socially less
acceptable at least in urban spaces.
Yet in the nineteenth centur y, it could be argued, women’s dress was just as well, or
even better, adap ted to discreet urinating as that of men. From the 1840s to the 1860s,
women’s dresses were long with full skirts pl eated or ga thered into a wais tline, over one
or more petticoats. The cage crinoline, adopted in the mid-1 850s, supported and held
out the skirt without the need for layer s of undergarments. Women also wore a pair of
drawers, two cylindrical l eg coverings attached to a waistband but open through the
cr otch (Malthus, 1997). It would have been reasonably easy for women to urinate
in conspicuously in public spaces if necessary (and without revealing what they were doing
or any inappropriate part of the body). The accounts above describe women doing just
that. Although the fashio nable sk irt narr owed in shape at the end of the 1860s, restricting
movement of the legs, f ewer undergarments were worn and drawers remained open
between the legs. Changes in the styles of skirts fr om the 1870s until t he 1910s would
no t have presented signi can t impediments t o discreet relief: although all were narro wer
than crinolines, they remained concealing ly long. A few extant stained petticoats and
li nings reveal that women did get ‘caught short’, and appa rently relieved themselves
st anding or squatting (Otago Museum and the University of Otag o, cl othing collections).
The extent to which clothing provided a n effective scree n more generally is suggested by
an oral history informant, who described how when he worked as a delivery boy for his
parents’ suburban Dunedin shop in the 1 920s, carryin g groceries around the back of
ho uses, ‘I’d sometimes be horribly embarrassed if I saw some body—most of the toilets
were outside, and you might  nd the lady of the house sitt ing on the toilet with the door
open, and I don’t know whether she was embarrassed, but I was … I’d just say, excuse
me and, and go around to the back door and wait till she came round’ (McCracken
in terview, Ca versham project). Embarrassed he may have been, but it is likely that such
a practice might have seemed less ‘public’ because of the relatively voluminous clothing
st ill worn in the early 1920s.
We can only speculat e on the possibility of more frequent need for relief because of
co rsets and garment bonin g, but even though most women did not lace their stays tightly,
co nstriction of abdominal organs would place some pressure o n the bladder. Menstru-
ation posed different questions in regard to clothing, and undoubtedly con ned many
women to their ho mes for some days each month. Barbara Brookes and Margaret
Tennant’s work on the ‘catamenial’ devices s ubmitte d to patent of ces in the  rst half
of the twentieth century points to the ongoing dif culty involved in managing menstru-

42 2 A. Cooper et al.
ation, and their oral history reveals the extent to which it was p opular ly marked by
il lness, incapacity, uncleanness, shame and loss of freedom (Brookes & Tennant, 1994,
19 98).
From Lolly Shops to ‘Handsome Lavatories’: semi-public provision for
women, 1870s to 1900
More customary avenues of relief for women away from home in t his earlier period of
se ttlement are not well documented, and we must therefore speculate, with some caution,
on the possibilities. The Sanitary Commission’s report in dicates that not in frequen tly one
privy would be used by several dwellings; 9 years later it wa s still the case that ‘pit closets
are used by from one to twenty households’ (Report of the Dunedin Sanitary Com-
miss ion, 1865, p. 29; Gillies, 1875, p. 4). This applied largely to poorer households, but
such communal privies were likely to have been more accessibl e to a passer-by in the
kn ow than a single-dwelling privy would have been[9]. Domestic toilets did not retreat
in to the more private areas of the home—making them less accessible to passers-by or
casual acquaintances—until well into t he twentieth century[10]. In the small community
of the early years of settlement when most pe ople knew each other and business pe ople
kn ew their clients, netwo rks of provision o pen to women (and at times to men) pr obably
in cluded acquaintances’ homes and small businesses: ‘lolly shops’[11], usually staffed by
women, have endured in folk memory. These arrangemen ts were undoubtedly facilitated
by women’s responsibility for childre n.
The most detailed accounts of semi-public provision appear in a report in 1878 by the
In spector of Nuisances on places of employment, and while this tells us little about the
fa cilities available to women in the city, it does suggest something about expectations of
privacy. It records the number and kind of t oilets provided by employers for th eir male
and female workers. At this relatively early date the inspector is closely att entive to the
women’s privacy, unhappy that at Ha llensteins’ clothing fa ctory ‘the main doors opening
in to the halls are both in the same side, c onsequently male and female mus t see each
ot her entering together if they chance to meet at the outside doors’. At Herbert, Haynes
and Co.’s clothing workrooms, he compla ined, the women’s single earth closet was
downstairs where the men worked (Reports of the Inspector of Nuisances, Appendices to
the Journal of the House of Representatives (AIHR), 1878). He is concerned in particular that
women should not be seen, by men, to be going to the lavatory. Men’s privacy or lack
of it raises no comment.
By the 1871 census, the sex ratio in Dunedin was again fairly evenly balanced. By the
late 1880s, however, it was showing a slight bias in favour of women, at a time when
women’s part in public life was a matter of national debate with the campaign for the
fr anchise (gained i n 1893), whe n their participation in th e commercial world as
co nsumers and as workers was increasing signi cantly, and whe n systems of public
transport increasingly facilitated their access to larger areas of the city[12].
As settlement pro gressed and suburbs expanded, there was one kind of provision for
women which was not necessarily available to men, and which was linked to women’s
primary and increasingly complex and time-consuming responsibility for consumption.
As i n other, larger cities, the new department stores recognised that women would spend
more time there if they were provided with toi lets (Walkowitz, 1992, p . 48 Reekie, 1993,
p. 12). Women’s lavatories seem also to have signi ed the sta tus an d modernity of the
st ore. The Dr apery and General Importing Coy (D.I.C.), established in 1884, had a
refreshment room and ‘ladies’ dressing room’, although this might not have meant toilets.

Public Toilets and Gender in New Zealand 423
Duthie Bros Ltd, opening new premises in 1889, provided a waiting room, and lavatories
at the back of the showrooms. Herbert, Haynes & Co. built new premises some time
after 1896 and these had ‘a very  ne waiting room for ladies’ which was ‘most
elaborately furnished’. Lavatories throughout the store were ‘ tted with the latest
appliances’. Mollisons also had a waiting room and ‘handsome l avatories’  tted up
throughout the store (Cyclopedia of New Zealand, 1905, pp. 301–306). Later, hairdressers
began to advertise the provision o f lavatories for customers[13]. By the same token, it is
probable that toilets in hotels became less accessible to women as moves were made to
exclude women from hotels in the 1890s. The dubious character attributed to wo men
who did enter hotels would have discouraged many women from using these toilets in
any case.
‘For Ladies Only’: towards civic provision for women
The  rst mention in newspapers of civic provision for women, however, came only at the
end of 50 years of settlement. It reveals the importance of a t oilet for women which had
been provided in the ra ilway waiting room (av ailable since 1881 and probably earlier, as
a mention in Mary Lee’s autobio graphy indicates) (Lee, 1992, pp. 113–114). When the
railway head of ce in Wellingt on determined to close platforms to non-passengers in
18 98, the non-travelling female public had no access to toil ets except tho se in stores.
Murray Aston felt moved to write to th e newspaper: ‘In London and other great cities
places marked “For ladies only” are quite usual. I fail to see, therefore, why this colony
sh ould be 25 years behind the times’ (‘Lavatories for women’, Otago Daily Times , 9
December 1898, p. 3). He initiated a spirited correspondence. (The correspondents who
si gned their names were male; of those who used n oms-de-plume, the sex is unclear.
Perhaps women of the letter-writi ng classes were unwilling to declare t hemselves
co ncerned with the topic.) All agreed that public conveniences for women were needed.
They disagreed over whether they should be provided and run by central government,
lo cal authority, the Salvation Army or private business. One correspondent suggested
that the National Council of Women should lobby for public toilets, and, 5 years after
the gaining of the vote, the debate referred to civic provision for women as citizens. John
H. Cater thought it ‘a great shame’ that the ‘many country and suburban ladies and girls
co ming into our city daily’ had not ha d ‘their comfort and conveniences attended to
before now’. He noted that the council had ‘control of the lavatories for men, and our
women are citizens also; but possibly our City Councillors do not represent all our
citizens. The only people they seem to stud y is the ratepayers’ (‘Lavatories f or women’,
Otago Daily Times, 15 December 1898, p. 2; 10 Decembe r 1898, p. 6; 20 Decembe r 1898,
p. 6). Despite this debate, no public toilets for women were established. The council was,
ho wever, c onsidering more urinals, to counteract ‘the committal of nuisances in the
st reets’ (DCC General Committee Minutes, 5 December 1899). By 1906, the city had 10
co nveniences, all for men, ‘with a total accommodation for 27 persons, four of these ten
being l atrines’ (City of Dunedin Annual Report 1905/1906, pp. 23–24).
The  rst toilets buil t by the council speci cally for women were not in the city centre
but at St Clair, the city’s most popular beach. In the  rst decade of the new century ,
expansion and wider us e of public transpo rt was transforming urban ci tizens’ access not
on ly to the central city but to pla ces of recreation and leisure; at St Clair swimming and
surf-bathing increased in popularity. The decision to build toilets for women arose from
a mixture of commercial and civic in terests and reveals the council’s recognition
that access to public spaces was to some extent controlled by the availability of toilets.

42 4 A. Cooper et al.
In 1908, a Mr Nind, the St Cl air tearoom owner, who clearly had some interest in
the matter, offere d to lease the council land next to his tearooms for l adies’ public
co nveniences, an d by 1909 they had been built. They appear to have been considered
in adequate, however, since in 1911 one councill or argued that many wome n and
ch ildren were prevented from visiting St Clair because of the absence of conveniences.
Backed by a request from the Surf Bathing Club, the Tramways Department
also lobbied for ‘s uitable attractions’ including conveniences for both sexes, and set
out the ‘handsome’ increase in tram revenue expected to result—again, the commercial
and the civic combined to favour provision (DCC Tramways Department Minutes,
13 March 1911 ). A pavilion including tearooms, lavatories, and dressing rooms
opened in April 1913 and although it burnt to the gr ound in May 1915 and was
no t properly replaced until 1928, special provision was made in late 1915 for another
ladies’ convenience (DCC Town Clerk, 1912; Memo 24 September 1908 and 28 August
19 08; ‘The Town-Planning Bill’, Ot ago Daily Times, 10 August, 1911, p. 7; ‘St
Clair improvements’, Otago Daily Times, 24 August, 1911, p. 4; ‘St Clair esplande’, Otago
Daily Times, 24 April, 1913, p. 5; ‘Fire at St Clair’, Otago Daily Times, 5 May, 1915, p.
3; ‘St Clair improvements’, Otago Witness, 29 May 1928, p. 68; DCC Transport T/3,
19 15).
The council had already begun, but not acted upon, serious consideration of toilets for
women in the city itself. The question emerged as part of the council’s decision to effect
more planned, systematic provision in line with that in Australian and European cities,
and in concert with a new attention to discretion. In 1906, a new Town Cl erk, W. R.
Richards, newly arrived from Sydney, reported that English and European authorities
had lately begun ‘ to make ample provision of these public necessities’, despite routine
objections by nearby residents out of ‘sentimental objections, or a supersensitive de-
ce ncy’. Richards argued for adoption of the new un derground conveniences to displace
‘the unsightly arr angements of above ground’; and in London, he noted, some of the 19
‘urinals’ ‘have accommodation for females’ ( City of Dunedin Annual Report, 1905/1906,
pp. 23–24). Although he argued in vain at the time, the u p-to-date Town Clerk had
in itiated a new era in civility and modernity: the underground toilet, discreetly ‘there’ but
co ncealed from public view, was the facility of choice in discussions during t he  rst two
decades of the century.
By 1909, the council had decided to build t wo underground conveniences in t he city.
Those in the Octagon, in the centre of the city, would include toilets for women. Charges
se t in other cit ies were quoted: the proverbial penny was the charge for a WC although
men ’s urinals were fr ee; higher charges were set for ‘wash and brush-up’ and dressing
rooms. The distinction between necessity and vanity was perhaps mar ked by the note
that ‘in women’s lavatories the charge of 2d [two pence] is now invariably demanded if
use is made of the looking-glass’ (City of Dunedin Annual Report, 1909–1910; pp. 24–29).
The second underground toilet, a few blocks south in Customhouse Square, incl uded
no provision for women, and nor did those planned later for Frederick St reet at the
no rthern end of the city. In 1912, a group of businesspeople and residents petitioned the
co uncil t o remove existing latrines by the Market Reserve at the southern en d of the city,
which were ‘ in their present state a blemish to the main thoroughfare, obsolete and
unsanitary. As this i s the only convenience of its kind at this end of Princes Street and
within a considerable radius around, we ask that it be replaced by a modern under-
ground means adapted to the needs of both sexes ’ (DCC Town Clerk to Messers Smith
et al. 1912). The coun cil responded—and built an above-ground toilet, with urinals only
(DCC City Engineer, Architectural Plans).

Public Toilets and Gender in New Zealand 425
FIG. 1. A plan for underground toilets, Dunedin, circa 1910.
The new theme of visual discretion, and the consequent attention to underground
toilets, appears to have accompanied the trend towards provision for women. The
disadvantage of ‘shop conveniences’ such as those tried in Liverpool—shops with the
‘rear p ortion  tted up as a public convenience … [and] … the front part … arranged
with two separate entrances’, one fronted by a tobacco stall (for men) and the other by
a ‘small fancy shop’ (for women) to ‘act as a mask or a screen to the respective
entrances’—was that even with such disguise, ‘ladies do not care to enter’ (City of
Dunedin Annual Report, 1909–1910, pp. 24–29). Underground toilets met with increasing
approval. In 1909, Councillor Barr considered that unlike the ‘particularly unpleasant’
‘overground erections’, they were more permanent, sightly and up to date. He had seen
them in Christchurch and was satis ed they were ‘admirable in every way’. Furthermore,
when conveniences were erected in London and throughout Britain, they were inevitably
‘in the underground form’. There had been a suggestion, he said, that women would not
use these conveniences, but experience elsewhere showed this was quite a mistake and
that in the course of time they would be used quite freely. The needs of visitors should
be remembered, particularly women who were ‘not at home in the large shops and
elsewhere’. At present, he said, one or two shops in the city were ‘rushed’ (‘Municipal
reform’, Otago Daily Times, 27 August, 1909, p. 2). This is a revealing commentary,
indicating the extent to which shops’ lavatories were routinely u sed by women, but also
the extent to which shopkeepers’ provision might operate according to a discreet,
unspoken understanding among locals, not one about which visitors to town could
brazenly enquire.
Congratulating the council on its decision, Town Clerk Richards referred also to an
equivalent of urinals for women: ‘urinettes’ had been  xed in several of the women’s
underground conveniences in London. They were like a small water closet but required
less water for  ushing. A curtain rather than doors provided privacy, although sometimes
there was no screen at all. Evidently urinating, as for men, required a less stringent level
of privacy than other functions. A reduced charge, or no fee, was made for their use.
One ser ious objection to them, however, was that they were frequently subjected to
‘improper usage’, esp ecially by ‘the poorer class of women’, who used them as water
closets. He meant that these less well-disciplined (or perhaps more thrifty) women
defecated in receptacles designed to accommodate urine only (City of Dunedin Annual

42 6 A. Cooper et al.
Report, 1909–1910, pp. 24–29): a small but precise narr ative about bodily discipline,
fe mininity and class.
We have argued to this point that s hifting concepts of public decency with regard to
bodily function were closely interwoven with shifts in the gender of ‘the public’. Th e
difference in the time it took to provide public toilets for men and for women seems t o
have arisen for a number of reasons. The semi-priv ate provision—homes and shops, and
then the department stores—available to women might have been regarded as suf cient.
Women’ s and men’s differing occupation of public space warrants some attention,
ho wever. Women left home for different purposes, less often than men did, and on
average probably travelled shorter distances, although the increasing number of women
in paid emp loyment was altering these factors. The lac k of publ ic toilets for wome n
might be explained in part by these differences, but it would also have helped to ensure
their continuance. We have entertained the notion of the bladder as a kind of leash
restraining women’s forays away from home , and to the bladder we might add the
capacity of sanitary towels or cloths. Notions of citizenship, rather than the commercial
imperatives of earlier provision, helped to precipitate the c ouncil’s provision for women,
with the  rst discussions about publ ic toilets provided by the city occurring relatively
so on aft er the gaining of the franchise in 1893. No doubt these discussions had much to
do with the desire to emulate the modernity of London and ‘other great cities’—but
women’s political a nd public life appears to have been one signi er of modernity at the
turn of the century. The particular rhetoric of the suffrage campaigns, in wh ich the
domestic virtues of women were promoted as a civilizing in uence on the disorderly
public sphere, and which argued for the greater sexual continence of women, may also
suggest a reason for the much more limited pr ovision: women were construed as having
greater bodily self-discipline (Bunkle, 1980; Macdonald, 1993). While women might have
been acquiring new rights as citizens, they were also conceptualised as no t requiring the
ki nd of controls neces sary to manage men’s bodies. It was a discourse which almost
ce rtainly translated int o practice. Older women we have interviewed for another purpose
were asked about how women ‘managed’ when they went into the city shopping. Most
of them vol unteered the view that ‘you planned ahead and wouldn’t drink before you left
ho me’ (Cav ersham project).
The Spatial Separation of Public Provision: sex and r est
One might imagin e that once joint facilities for women and men had been built, they
would become the norm. The pattern, however, was not quite so straightforward. As we
no ted earlier, plans for t hree under ground toilets were approved in 1909, but two were
for men only (Cit y Engineer, Architectural Plans). Ev en the central ci ty toilets in the
Octagon allowed for only four water c losets for women compared with four closets and
10 urinals for men. Three facilities built over the next four years were for men only. In
19 16 plans were put forward for toilets in Woodhaugh Gardens for women and children
on ly—though they do not appear to have been built (City Engineer, Arc hitectural Plans;
City of Dunedin Departmental Reports, 1913–14, p. 65).
The greater n umber of facilities for men was no doubt in part a result of t he extent
to which men more than wo men spent time in p ublic space. But the separation of facilities,
which became more common, may have derived from ongoing and emergent anxieties
about men’s embodiment and their sexuality. As large cities in Europe and North
America had prov ided systems of public toilets, a use for them had been found which
mun icipal authorities had not intended. By the t urn of the century many cities had a

Public Toilets and Gender in New Zealand 427
subculture of sex betwee n men which, u nable to  ourish in domestic settings, emerged
in ‘private’ spaces in the public domain. Men’s public toilets were signi cant among these
si tes. George Chauncey has noted that New York’s public toilets and subway washrooms,
built around the turn of the century, ‘had quickly become homosexual rendezvous’.
Unlike public parks, they provided relative privacy in public (Chauncey, 1994, pp.
19 6–201) . Steve Maynard observes of Toronto in the early 1900s that ‘one of the
unintende d outcomes of the expansion of the city’s sys tem of lavatories was that it
in creased the number of public places men could meet for sex’ (Maynard, 1994, p. 214).
There is, unsurprisingly, very little overt public discourse around this topic. Police
records usually offer the bes t available evidence, and Dunedin ’s are no longer extant .
One possible piece of evidence, while s uggestiv e, is inconclusive. In 1919, the Town
Clerk asked for police surveillance of the men-only undergro und toilet at Customhouse
Square:
Complaints have been made as to the conduct of a number of young fellows
who are in the habit of using the Underground Convenience at Customhouse
Square, and it is also alleged that a good deal of drinking goes on in th is place.
I would be obliged if you would be good enough to arrange for one of your
of cers to pa y periodical visits of inspection to the Convenience, more
particularly in the evenings, with the object of checking any tendency in the
direction complained of . (Town Clerk to Inspector of Police, 12 June 191 9)
The toilets were a ttended, raising the question of how much activity coul d have escaped
the attendants (although there were occasional complaints of drunkenness or disorder
laid against a ttendan ts themselves). Although it is unclear at what per iod some Dunedin
toilets might have be come recognised sites for sexual encounter[ 14] the capital city,
Wellington, had a subculture of sex between men operating in streets, parks and public
toilets by the late 1920s (King, 1995, pp. 92–93). Maynard points to ‘a constant slippage
within the language of the lavatory between issues of public health and issues of
morality’, in which words such as ‘ lth’ and ‘revolting’ could signify not only the physical
st ate of lavatories but also the exchanges which might take place between men wit hin
them—and could associate the two meanings (Maynard, 1994, p. 215). Such an
association, apparent among Maynard’s Toronto sources, may also have formed part of
the discourse of repugna nce in Dunedin in relation to men’s toilets, and have helped to
sustain the sepa ration of facili ties. This theory is unsettled, we must admit, by t he city
engineer’s prediction that the ladies’ convenience at St Clair erected in 1915 was ‘likely
to be used for immoral work during the hours of darkness’ (City Engineer’s Of ce
Minute Paper, 24 December, 1915).
A further anxiety about men’s sexuality app ears als o to have been a factor in the
se paration of facilities, in this case by age more than by gender. The  rst indication of
a need fo r separate children’s toilets, in 1916, appeared around the same time as reports
of men as predators on children in toilets. Privacy—in the sense of a screened
space—held the potential for threat as we ll as for security.
If disgust and anxiety continu ed to attach themselves to men’s toilets, discussion of
women’s toilets took on two new forms in the decades following 1910, and was
accompanied by new and more encompassing types of building. Women were imagined
in one narrative as entitled in the same way as men, as ‘business girls’, and in another
as mothers r equiring spe cial provision. The former dis course emerged du ring the First
World War, in 1917, when the District Health Of cer wrote to the Town Clerk about
the ‘lack of sanitary conveniences for women on business premises’, listing businesses

42 8 A. Cooper et al.
which made inadequate provision for their fe male employees (District Health Of cer to
Town Clerk, 27 August 1917). It was women as mothers who claimed most attention
through the ear ly 1920s, ho wever, establishing an association between public toilets for
women, notions of civic order and responsibility, a nd maternity. In many other parts of
the c ountry, the 1920s and 1930s saw the establishment of re st rooms and associated
cl inics by the Plunket Society, formed to promote the interests o f ‘mothers and babies’.
Typically, Plunket rooms were centred on a mother-and-baby clinic, attached to which
were rooms for moth ers to sit, feed babies and change n appies, and public toilets.
Curiously, while Plunket rooms a re an institution found in almo st every suburb and small
town in New Zealand, they were late to arrive in Dunedin, birthplace of the Plunket
movement, because of the local in uence of its founder, Sir Truby King, who favoured
in creasing the numbers of Plunket nurses rather than acquiring property. In Dunedin
ot her groups organis ed. Th e Women Citizens’ Association asked the council for ‘rest
rooms for women and children’ in 1924 (Mary de Beer to Town Clerk, 12 March 1924).
In 1925, the NZ Tra ined Nurses Association lobbied the council for a rest room in the
Queens Gardens, near th e main shopping area, ‘where pregnant women or mothers with
li ttle ones could rest when in town and attend to their babies’ (Anon., ‘Mothers’ res t’,
19 25); it was built with  nan ce from a local benefactor, in memory of his wife. The New
Zealand and South Seas Exhibition of 1925–26 proclaimed the city’s importance to the
wider world, and a ‘women’s section’ formed to represent and coordinate the interests
and activities of women. The loose association of women’s groups (including the
Women’ s Christian Temperance Union [WCTU] and Young Women’s Christian
Association [YWCA]) agreed to coordinate a kindergarten, girls’ club, Plunket room and
rest room under the umbrella of a Women’s Rest Room Committee. They raised fun ds
fr om voluntary subscriptions, aided by the mayoresses o f country towns around the
region. The rest roo ms were popular, attracting 36,000 patrons over t he period of the
Exhibition. After the Exhibition, the rest rooms and cre`che were d onated to the city to
be relocated to the Botanic Gardens, where they were opened with some ceremony by
the mayor (Of cial Record of NZ and South Seas Exhibition, 1925–26; ‘Women’s gift
to city’, Otago Witness 28 Septe mbe r 1926). Miss Fraser, chair of t he Women’s Rest Room
Committee, pronounced on the signi cance of the rooms for ‘th e interests of the mothers
and children of Dunedin’, and the mayor ‘agreed that it was essential that mothers and
co untry folk with their children should have somewhere to rest when they came to town’
(‘Women’s gift to city’, Otago Witness, 28 September 1926, p. 31). All agreed that t his
sh ould be the  rst of several facilities, and in fact a rest room was established in the
ce ntral city, in Princes Street, the fo llowing year.
There are several points of note here. The  rst is the ex tent to which such facilities,
the public provision of which was the subject of much debate in 1898, had by the
mid-1920s become a signi er both of the proper involvement of women in public life and
of civic responsibility to women (although this responsibility did not extend to the council
fu nding them on this occas ion). A s econd, and we suggest related, point is the shift from
‘public lavatories’ to ‘rest rooms’; towards a more elaborate buildin g, but also with less
emphasis on women as creatures with a need to urinate or wors e and more on women
as mothers, as creatures with a need to ‘rest’. The meanings of ‘rest’ are worth
exploration. The word does ap pear to have signi ed the work of maternity and the nee d
for a space to attend to such things as changing babies’ nappies, feeding, or sitting down
for a while in the midst of a day away from home. Th e speeches at the opening of the
Botanic Gardens rooms emphasised maternity, consistent with the pronatalism of the
in ter-war years (Brookes, 1986). Another implication was to become increasingly evident,

Public Toilets and Gender in New Zealand 429
and probably constituted a development from the waiting rooms provided b y department
st ores. Rest rooms provided more than just the privacy offered by a toilet cubicle; their
co nstruction offered not simply individual privacy, but a privacy for women from men.
They constituted what was increasingly to become a kind of private sphere away from
ho me, a relaxing, women - and children-only enclosure within the public domain. The
need for such spaces—which hotels and clubs provided for men—s eems to have been
in creasingly assumed as the t alk about ‘rest rooms’ continued through the  rst half of t he
ce ntury.
Maternity was not the only element in t he tran sition to ‘rest rooms ’, however. Indeed,
a quite different demographic appears also to have been at work as women’s paid
employment continued to rise gradually in th e early decades of the cent ury (Hickey,
19 98). Changes in clothing suggest that the transitio ns of modernity not only included
acknowledgement of ( particul arly unmarried) women’s employment beyond the home,
but marked a renegotiat ion of the  eld of privacy along with a more public sexuali sation
of women’s bodies. Skirt hemlines rose from groun d to knee length between 1912 and
19 25 and underwear struggl ed to keep pace. Not until the 1920s did closed drawers, or
kn ickers, become common, and both open and closed forms could be found during this
decade. Rising hemlines now effectively prevented women being able to resort to
discreet, concealed urinating if caught short. There is a compl ex transition in women’s
oc cupation of public space here, and an accompanying renegotiation of the mecha nics
and the spaces of public/private b oundar ies. On the one hand, there was an ongoing
in crease in women’s mobility in public space: they were increasingly employed outside
the home, their role in consumption outside the home c ontinued to increase, and a wider
geographical range was available with developments in transport. In Paris, Coco Chanel
articulated the notio n of the mo dern in clothing. Women in cities, she said, needed to
be able to move q uickly, unimpeded by h eavy or bulky clothing (Charles-Roux, 1982,
pp. 95–111). The proliferation of ‘catamenia l’ inventions promising freedom and
mobility mirror such seductions of modernity (Brookes & Tennant, 1994, 1998). On the
ot her hand, this ‘freedom’ of lighter, fewer ga rments diminished the screen between the
body and public world. Privacy in the urban public sphere ceased to be managed by
personal dress, and was taken over by civic buildings. As skirts abandoned responsibility
for privacy, coun cils stepped in. The ‘rest room’ as opposed to the minimal public
lavatory provided an extra space o f privacy: the con cern expressed by the Inspec tor of
Nuisances in 1878 would have been s atisfactorily assuaged by their design; when a
woman entered a rest ro om, who could tell whether she was going to the lavatory, or
si mply to ma ke use of the range of other facilities that became available? For these
fa cilities became extensive.
As new rest rooms opened in the 1920s and 1930s, the city’s annual reports atte nd
cl osely to the wor k carried out by the supervising wo men’ s committee in furnishing and
mak ing them comfortably and even, later, ‘artistically’ equipped. They were hea ted,
and the electric heater at the Gardens’ room was replaced with a brick open  replace
and chimney—just as one might wish for in one’s home. The entr ance of the Princes
Street rooms in the south of the city centre, opened in 1927, was to be protected from
the weather by a verandah;  ve years later the children’s room was converted to a writing
room when it was decided that the children should be provided for in separate nurseries.
The rooms were heavily used, popular especially on Fridays during a regular ‘Com-
mun ity Sing’ and during football matches, and offered an extensive and updated range
of services. By 1936–39, in the Gardens and Princes Street rooms, the annual report lis ts:
telephones, a stamp machine, a post box, a radio, hot water for tea, or at the Gar dens

43 0 A. Cooper et al.
prepared tea and biscuits, a medical out t and ‘other comforts required by ladies’ (as
cl ose as the reports of this time come to alluding to menstruation), clean towels, and a
‘boot box’ (‘most convenient to business girls’). By the late 1920s, the reports did not
st ress maternity so much as the social value of the rooms as space exclusive to wome n.
Women met their friends there, and they served a kind of ‘drop in’ function: ‘lonely
women occupy ing rooms are glad to sit in the cool, dainty rooms in the summer time
or come in to chat with friends be side a cosy  re in the winter’ (City of Dunedin Annual
Reports, 1927 , 1937). The Annual Reports of 1938–39 decl are the civic responsibility
which the rooms display: on Capping [Graduation] Day whe n the rooms were stretched
to capacity, one lady, feeling unwell, ‘was esco rted to the Princes Street rooms by a police
of cer, who was surprised and delighted to  nd  rst-aid assistance so handy and all
provided in a community-owned room’ (City of Dunedin Annual Reports, 1938–39). (The
policeman’s surprise in itself reveals the signi cant divergence, by this time, in men’s and
women’s expectations from publ ic conveniences.) The rest r ooms were facilities to be
sh own, and shown off. By con trast, the now out of date underg round lavatory in the
Octagon, whose single purpose remained so apparent, was altered in 1932–33: a rockery
was constructed to screen its entrance more effectively from the public pathway.
Between the mid-1920s and mid-1930s, the council’s sense of its duty with regard to
rest rooms had ev idently changed. The annual report of 1935–36 noted that ‘ when the
Council gave the Dunedin women these rooms, it was more for the work done by the
women of the city for the Exhibition rather than a s a city necessity’. Now, by implication,
the rooms were regarded as a ‘city necessity’, serving a female population whose
oc cupation of the c ity was substantially normalised, and no longer required justi cation
by maternity.
Conclusion
The discussion of provision for men and for women is marked by a distinction o n the
on e hand between the early concern abo ut the control of  lth and the consequent need
for men’s toilets, and on the other hand, the later sense of duty to provide for women,
who  rst as consumers and then as fellow citizens had an entitlement alongside men. In
the early years of settlement, a pattern of ‘frontier’ behaviour prevailed, where men (and
possibly women) used hotel toilets and open space, evoking no recorde d public concern.
After 1860, the in ux of h eavy-drinking gold miners generated a campaign marked by
co ncern over  lth and the management of unruly men, resulting in the  rst civic
provision of toilets for men. Women were provided fo r in part by facilities in the new
department stores. At the turn of the century, women’s needs were articulated in
newspaper debat es with reference to citizen ship and mode rnity, and by the 1920s,
women’s organisations played an active role in campaigning for and furnishing ‘rest
rooms’ for women. By the post-war period, the provision of toilets for both women and
men was accepted as a council duty.
This story of the provision o f public toilets, then, weaves a pocke t history of gender,
cl ass, embodiment and space, revealing a shift from the disciplining of unruly masculin-
it ies to providing for women as citizens, but also charting a major transition in
oc cupations of space and technologies of privacy. Sites shift from  ax bushes to luxurious
department store lavatories, from underground conveniences to rest rooms. The cam-
paign to curb the bodily practices of men had lost its force by the early twentieth cen tury,
probably because of relative success. As women became more ‘public’, and as clothing
ce ased to operate as a barrier, ‘rooms’ offered increasing levels of privacy. Although

Public Toilets and Gender in New Zealand 431
excretion may seem to be a largely unmediated ‘natural’ bodil y function common to all
human beings, excreting bodies have been variously imagined as n uisances, threats to
New World ideals, shoppers, citizens, tired mothers, or as urban actors requiring a
backstage zone of res t and repair—and always as gendered beings.
NOTES
[1] This research grew out of the involvement of three of us in a large interdisciplinary research project, ‘Sites
of gend er: opportunity and community in an emergent urban-industrial society’, based in the History
De partment at the University of Otago. We are indebted to the members of the larger project for the
co nversation which precipitated this article, to Maureen Hickey, Erik Olssen and Nuran C¸ inlar for their
su ggestions and comments on drafts, and to Emma Beer for last-minute assistance . We list our names
alphabetically to signify our inability to prioritise any author, and the extent to which the research has
emerged out of ongoing conversations. The authors include a historian of the mana gement of dirt (Pamela
Wood), a historian of dress (Jane Malthus), an urban geographer (Robin Law), and a cultural critic with
an interest in notions of the self (Annabel Cooper). Jane and Pamela’s doctoral theses (cited in the
ref erence list) have made signi cant contributions to the article. Louise Shaw’s marvellous research
ass istance and Megan Cook’s ideas have also made substantial contributions.
[2] The most immediately comparable studies are Margaret Andrews’s (1990) usef ul comparison with the
transition from ‘front ier’ practices to municipal provision in Vancouver o ver a similar period, and
Caroline Daley’s study of the campaigns for public provision in another New Zealand city, Auckland.
[3] The exceptions were a small population of Ngai Tahu (the dominant Maori iwi, or tribe, of the South
Is land, whose main settlement in the immediate area was some miles from Dunedin, near the mouth of
Ot ago Harbour), and small, relatively se lf-contained, Chinese and Lebanese communities.
[4] We examined material objects (items of clothing) as well as texts (such as council minutes, architectural
pl ans, and newspapers), and transcripts of oral histories conducted as part of a larger project on the social
hi story of a suburb of Du nedin. City council r ecords were increasingly useful over time as council
pr ovision of public facilities came to be argued and then assumed; by the ea rly twentieth century,
ne wspaper reports submerged the body again beneath new preoccupations wi th the meanings of
femininity. Our sources were often oblique. These bodily functions were usually written about only when
they emerged as problems, and then not always directly. This was particularly the case with regard to
me nstruation and sex (Porter & Macdonal d, 1996, p. 339). Some sources have been lost, some  les in the
Du nedin City Council archives on public conveniences were destroyed by a former archivist because they
we re so clearly unimportant, and police  les have been destroyed. A scrupulous curator of the clothing
co llection at the Otago Museum, concerned to preserve the textiles rather than the stains which would
ha ve been useful sources to us, care fully cleaned away the evidence.
[5] As it was in Vancouver, according to Andrews (1990).
[6] The city’s governing body was the Town Board until 1865, when the Dunedin City Council was
co nstituted. Although the name ‘ City o f Dunedin’ is used in the ti tles of some documents, ‘DCC’ both is
the most frequent term a nd begins the classi cations of the Dunedin City Council archives, where the
fol lowing documents are held.
[7] For el aborate documentation of waste problems in Dublin and other British cities, and their association
wi th urban concentrations, s ee Prunty, 1998.
[8] We borrow the term ‘low-Other’ from Stallybrass & White (1986) .
[9] Our thanks to Raewyn Dalzie l for sugge sting this point.
[10 ] The sewer system begun in the 1870s was relatively comprehensive by 1903, but even then by far the
gre ater number of households (235 of a sample of 274 households) still h ad privies or (l ess commonly)
wa ter closets outside the dwelling, either adjacent to the house or an outbuilding, or separately , usually
by the back fence or in a corner of the section (Wood, 1997, pp. 143–144).
[11 ] Confectionery shops.
[12 ] Wom en formed 49.1% of the city’s population in 1871, 48.5% in 1878, 49.75% in 1881, 51.92% in 1886,
53.4 % in 1891, 53.6% in 1896. Figures compiled from Census New Zealand.
[13 ] Ther e is admittedly some ambiguity about the term ‘lavatory’, which was also often used t o mean, literally,
a place to wash. It seems likely that water closets were meant here, however, especial ly in the light of
trends in department store s elsewhere.
[14 ] By the 1960s, the Frederick Street toilets had acquired this status (personal communication), but evidence
is scarce.

43 2 A. Cooper et al.
REFERENCES
[A
NON
.] (1925) Mothers’ rest, Kai Tiaki, April, p. 71.
A
NDR EWS
, M
AR GARET
W. (1990) Sanitary conveniences and the retreat of the frontier: Vancouver, 1886– 1926,
BC Studies, 87, pp. 3–22.
B
RO O KE S
, B
AR BARA
(19 86) Reproductive rights: the debate over ab ortion and birth control in the 1930s, in:
B
AR BARA
B
ROOK E S
, C
HARLO TTE
M
AC D ON ALD
& M
AR GARE T
T
ENNANT
(E ds) Women in History: essays on
Eu ropean women in New Zeal and, pp. 11 9–136 (Wellington, Allen & Unwin/Port Nicholson Press).
B
RO O KE S
, B
ARBARA
& T
ENNANT
, M
AR GARE T
(1 994) Periods in history, Women’s Studies Journal (NZ), 10, pp.
103–116.
B
RO O KE S
, B
AR BARA
& T
ENNAN T
, M
AR GARE T
(19 98) Making girls modern: Pakeha women and menstruation
in New Zea land, 1930–1970, Women’s History Review, 7, pp. 565–581.
B
UNKLE
, P
HILLIDA
(1 980) The origins of the women’s movement in New Zealand: the Women’s Christian
Temperanc e Union 1885–1895, in: P
HILLID A
B
UNKLE
& B
ERYL
H
UGHES
(Eds) Women in New Zealand Society,
pp . 52–76 (Auckland, George Allen & Unwin).
B
YR D E
, P
ENE LO PE
(19 79) The Male Image (London, B. T. Batsford).
C
AV AN AGH
, S
UE
& W
AR E
, V
RON
(1 990) Less convenient for women, Built Environment, 16, pp. 279–287.
C
HARLE S-
R
OUX
, E
DMO NDE
(19 82) Chanel and Her World (London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson).
C
HAUN C EY
, G
EORG E
(1 994) Gay New York: gender, urban culture, and the making of the gay male world, 1890– 194 0 (New
Yo rk, Basic Books).
C
OST ANTINO
, M
AR IA
(1 997) Men’s Fashion in the Twentieth Century: from frock coats to intelligent bres (London, B. T.
Ba tsford).
Cyclopedia of New Zealand, vol. 4, Otago and Southland Provincial Districts ( 1905) (Christchurch, Cyclopedia
Co mpany).
D
ALEY
, C
AROLIN E
(20 00) Flushed with pride? Women’s quest for public toilets in New Zeala nd, Women’s Studies
Journal, 16, pp. 95–114.
D
OU G LAS
, M
ARY
(1 966) Purity and Danger: an analysis of the concepts of pollution and taboo (London, Ark Paperbacks).
E
DWARD S
, J
UL IA
& M
C
K
IE
, L
IN D A
(19 96) Women’s public toilets: a serious issue for the body politic, European
Journal of Women’s Studies, 3, p p. 215–230.
E
LI AS
, N
ORBE R T
(1 939; trans. 1978) The Civilizing Process trans. Edmund Jephcott (Oxford, Blackwell).
E
LL IS
, H
AV E LOCK
(19 40) My Life (Lond on, William Heinemann).
F
OU CAULT
, M
ICHEL
(19 77) Discipline and Punish: the birth of the prison (Penguin, Harmondsworth).
F
OU CAULT
, M
ICHEL
(19 80) The History of Sexuality vol. I (New York, Vintage).
G
REED
, C
LARA
H. (1995) Public toilet provisions for women in Britain: an investigati on of discrimination
agai nst urination, Women’s Studies Interna tional Forum, 18, pp. 573–584.
G
REED
, C
LA RA
H. (1996) Planning for women and other disenabled groups, with refer ence to the provis ion of
pu blic toilets in Britain, Environment and Planning A, 28, pp. 573–588.
H
IC KE Y
, M
AU RE EN
(19 98) New Zealand’ s occupational structure: a comparison using the 190 1, 1926 and 1936
Ce nsuses, Caversham Project working paper, History Department, University of Otago.
K
ING
, M
IC H AE L
(1 995) Frank Sargeson: a life (Auckland, Viking).
L
EE
, M
AR Y
I
SA BE LLA
(19 92) The Not So Poor: an autobio graphy, ed. Annabel Cooper (Auckland, Auckland
University Press).
M
AC D ON ALD
, C
HARLO TTE
(1 993) The Vote, the P ill and the Demon Drink: a his tory of feminist writing in New Zealand
1869 – 1993 (Wellington, Bridget Williams Books).
M
C
D
ONALD
, K.C. ( 1965) City of Dunedin: a century of civic enterprise (Dunedin, Dunedin City Corporation).
M
AL TH U S
, J
ANE
(1 997) European women’s dresses in nineteenth-century New Zealand, PhD thesis, University
of Ot ago.
M
AY N AR D
, S
TEVE
(1 994) Through a hole in the lavatory wall: homosexual subcultures, police surveillance, and
the dialectics of discovery, Tor onto, 1890–1930, Journal of the History of Sexuality, 5, pp. 207–242.
O
LS S EN
, E
RI K
(1 984) A History of Otago (Dunedin, McIndoe).
P
HILLIPS
, J
OCK
(19 87) A Man’s Country? A History of the Image of the Pakeha Mal e (Auckland, Penguin).
P
ORTE R
, F
RA N CES
& M
AC D ON ALD
, C
HARLOT TE
(19 96) (Eds) My Han d Will Write What My Heart Dictates
(A uckland, Auckland University Press/Bridget Williams Books).
P
RU N TY
, J
AC INT A
(19 98) Dublin Slums: a study in urban geography (Dublin, Irish Academic Press).
R
EEKIE
, G
AI L
(19 93) Temptations: sex, selling and the department store (St Leonards, Allen & Unwin).
R
EP O RTS O F TH E
I
NSPE C TO R O F
N
UI S AN CE S
, Appendices to the Journal of the House of Representatives (AJHR) 1878 H2
vol . 2, pp. 24–26.
S
ENNE T T
, R
ICHARD
(1 994) Flesh and Ston e: the body and the city in Western civiliz ation (London, Faber & Faber).

Public Toilets and Gender in New Zealand 433
S
TALLYBRASS
, P
ETER
& W
HITE
, A
LL O N
(1 986) The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (London, Met huen) .
T
ANKAR D
, K
EITH
(1 996) Municipal waste and management, H-URBAN@UICVM.UIC.EDU, 17 April.
U
NIVERS ITY OF
O
TA GO
, Caversham Project. ‘Sites o f gender: opportunity and community in an emergent
ur ban-industrial society’, oral history archive.
W
AL KO WITZ
, J
UDIT H
R. (1992) City of Dreadful Delight: narratives of sexual danger in late-Victorian London (London,
Vir ago).
W
IL SO N
, E
LI ZAB ETH
(1 991) The Sphinx in the City: urban life, the control of disorder, and women (Berkeley, CA,
University of California Press).
W
OOD
, P
AMELA
J. (1997) Constructing colo nial dirt: a cultural history of dirt in the nineteenth-century colonial
set tlement of Dunedin, New Zealand, PhD thesis, Universit y of Otago.
W
RI GH T
, L
AWRE NC E
(19 60) Clean and Decent: the fasci nating history of the bathroom and the water closet (London,
Routledge & Kegan Paul).
DUNEDIN CITY COUNCIL
City of Dunedin. (1905–1939) Annual Reports, Dunedin.
DCC City of Dunedin Departmental Reports 1913– 14, Dunedin 1914.
DCC City Engineer, Series 7/1/4, 14/2/2b, Architectural Plans.
Gillies, J. (1875) Report on Removal of Sewage, Dunedin.
Report of the Dunedin Sanitary Co mmission, Notes and Proceedings, Otago Provincial Council, Session XX,
1865 .
DCC Correspondence
Mary L. de Beer to Town Clerk, 12 March 1924, DCC TC 33 1925 General M.
District Health Of cer t o Town Clerk, 27 August 1917, DCC TC 1917.
Town Clerk to Messrs Smith, MacGregor and Sinclair, Memo 24 September 1908, DCC TC 33 1912 General
U1 .
City Building Inspector to Town Clerk, 28 Augus t 1908, DCC TC 33 19 12 General U1.
Town Clerk to Councillor Scott, 17 November 1915, DCC Transport T/3 1915.
Town Clerk to Inspector of Police, 12 June 1919, DCC TC 1919 General C4.
DCC Minutes
City Engineer’s Of ce, Minute paper 24 December 1915, DCC Transport T/3 1915.
DCC Gene ral Com mittee Minutes, 1899.
Tramways Department minutes, 1911 , DCC TC33 T/3 1912.
Town Board Minutes, Dunedin.
Dunedin Resident Magistrates Court Fines, National Archives, Dunedin Branch.