Is the women’s restroom a social space in its own right?

From clandestine conversations to communal vanities, the women’s loo has always had a life beyond its intended purpose

31 Oct 2026

In one of Bandra’s busy bylanes, Late Checkout, owned by Pawan Shahri and Nikita Harisinghani, co-founders of Chrome Asia Hospitality, opened its second restaurant in the city, following its Lower Parel outpost. Somewhere between the lobster fries, a rather beautifully put-together menu, the cocktails eventually caught up, and I excused myself to use the restroom. Now, I’m not someone who makes a habit of lingering in public loos, so I wasn’t quite prepared for what awaited me behind a heavy curtain in a rather dungeon-like corner of the restaurant. Beyond it was a restroom that felt more like a private lounge, with a couch, cosy living-room interiors and a fully stocked vanity bar with mints, water cans and even a tray of mocktails. Plans are also underway to introduce a dedicated butler, ensuring that guests can continue their conversations over a steady round of cocktails without having to immediately return to the bar.

I found myself spending a little longer in there than I had intended. And it got me thinking: are women’s restrooms reclaiming their place as social spaces within social spaces?

I went down a bit of a rabbit hole after that visit. It turns out that women having a place to pee in public was once a surprisingly contentious idea. In Victorian London, public toilets were largely designed with men in mind, and the lack of facilities for women had a very real bearing on how long they could spend outside their homes. There was even a dispute in 1900 over a proposed women’s public lavatory in Camden Town. Architectural historian Barbara Penner writes about it in her paper A World of Unmentionable Suffering (2001). The title, frankly, tells you quite a bit about the state of things. I found this particularly interesting because, somewhere along the way, the ladies’ room also became a place women could actually spend time in.

The Great Exhibition 1851 show-cased the first public flushing toilet, created by George Jennings, who was a plumber from Brighton. The popularity of this invention was such that the first public lavatories opened the following year and were known as ‘Public Waiting Rooms’. The vast majority of these were men’s conveniences; Photography Courtesy of London Museum

We gather here, we line up

Restaurants and department stores had private rooms where women could sit and wait, away from the dining room or the shop floor. And then there is the less formal history of women gathering in washrooms, which I find even more interesting. Anthropologist Rachel Vanessa Lea has written about women in factory washrooms exchanging gossip, personal confidences and union literature. Think about that for a second. A room meant for a quick bathroom break, doubling up as a place to discuss working conditions, share information and find a little solidarity away from the eyes of their employers.

I suppose we’ve all experienced some version of this, even if the stakes are considerably lower. The stranger who offers you a pad, the woman who helps you fix the back of your dress, the impromptu conversation about someone’s lip combo, or the friend who follows you in because you need to tell her something you couldn’t quite say at the table. There’s familiarity between women in these spaces, even when they’re complete strangers. Perhaps, like a Russian nesting doll: a smaller social world tucked inside a larger one, with its own rules and little exchanges. I don’t know if we’re consciously tapping into this history, or if it has simply been noticed that a well-designed women’s restroom makes for a better experience. But I do wonder whether we’re seeing a renewed interest in a space that women have claimed for a very long time.