Showing posts with label Unmentionables. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Unmentionables. Show all posts

Monday, October 25, 2010

The Ladies Room


Have you ever walked into a public restroom with where the lavatories were exposed with no privacy barriers?  Yes, yes, men we know you use the urinals without a thought many times.  Well, the experience nowadays may send some ladies running for the hills but in bustling 18th century London, these were the types of public restrooms you got if you went somewhere posh.  While public restrooms weren't as common as they are today you could find them in popular watering holes for the rich such as Henry Kingsbury portrayed in his satire of the Vauxhall Garden Ladies Room.  His satire was an excuse to portray well-to-do, fashionable ladies doing something everyone does behind closed doors (just as many satires of women did) but it serves the great purpose now of giving us an idea, however exaggerated, of how ladies did their business in order to avoid lifting various layers of their robe a l'anglaise skirts while hiding behind a bush.