The Lady and the Library Loafer: Gender and Public Space in Victorian America

Rooms reserved exclusively for the use of women were once a common feature of public libraries built during the last quarter of the nineteenth century in the United States, England, and many parts of the British empire. Small rooms stocked with fashion magazines and communicating directly with the women's toilet, these facilities were relatively short-lived, particularly in the United States, where they abruptly disappeared in the early years of the twentieth century. Yet the ladies' reading room was often considered an absolute necessity for encouraging respectable women to venture into the public library. Recovering the circumstances of the proliferation, and subsequent decline, of ladies' reading rooms offers much to current considerations of the intersection between Victorian gender ideology and the design and use of space. Specifically, this recovery provides a useful means for assessing the metaphor of the separate spheres as a way of understanding the organization of the actual, physical spaces of the Victorian world.