6: Attitudes to
privacy, nudity, and exercise
Not everyone
thought that prices alone were responsible for there being fewer women
bathers than men. ‘Penelope’ suggested in the Rochdale Times that,
there
is something contrary to feminine instinct in the gregarious nature
of a public Turkish bath. We like such things best at home, or at
all events at some bathing establishment where we may be residing
for a time…
Penelope’s
solution was the portable Turkish bath which was, she confirmed, easily
assembled at home.
Robert Owen
Allsop, the only architect to write extensively on the bath, understood
that many British women, unlike their French counterparts at
Aix-les-bains, preferred not to get undressed or take showers in
communal areas.
‘In
ladies’ baths,’ he wrote, ’more privacy must be observed. Each
lady bather should have a private dressing and reposing room, even if
only formed by dwarf wooden partitions,’ and ‘private shampooing
recesses’ should be formed with partitions of wood and ‘obscure
glass.’
But many women
probably swam naked in the plunge pools, just as the men did. For
although there are numerous references to ‘full loose robes,’ or ‘a
kind of toga…descending from the shoulders’,
no other garments are
ever mentioned, however detailed the description of the bathing process.
But in
suggesting that ‘a plain, circular bath with steps around’ would be
appropriate because in ‘ladies’ baths… the true dive does not
pertain,’ Allsop was clearly unaware of the
active female membership of the
burgeoning mid-1880s swimming clubs.
The typical male
view was still that women should never undertake physical exercise or
exert themselves in any way. As the pseudonymous author of a booklet
espousing the bath declared in 1858, ‘to ladies, to invalids, and men
of business, whose sedentary occupations preclude the possibility of
healthful exercise,’ the Turkish bath was ‘an inestimable boon.’
Proprietors
reinforced such attitudes, unimaginatively parroting each other. In
1895, Joseph Constantine reprinted advice written several years earlier
‘by a medical man’:
Ladies
need these baths even more than gentlemen, and are more benefited by
them, owing to their being more confined to the house and not
getting so much exercise in the open air as men do.
Incredibly, this
was reprinted almost word for word nearly 80 years after it was first
written, in a booklet published by Derby Council in 1964—the Swinging
Sixties.
7:
The Victorian Turkish bath and women's health
