In a paper entitled ‘How bathrooms really became separated by sex’, W. Burlette Carter, a professor emerita of law at George Washington University, demolishes these alternative histories. She demonstrates that sex separation in communal toilets, baths and the like has been common since antiquity, and that a key purpose has always been to protect girls and women from sexual assault and harassment. These dangers were endemic, not a figment of genteel women’s and patriarchal men’s imaginations. The United Nations, and charities such as ActionAid and Save the Children, campaign for single-sex
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