Barred from the Barroom: Second Wave Feminists and Public Accommodations in U.S. Cities.(Report)

IN 1968, WOMEN COULD NOT lunch in the Oak Room of the Plaza Hotel in New York City. Nor could they drink at the bar of the famous Russian Tea Room. Other eating and drinking establishments in cities around the country excluded women altogether or served them only if escorted by a man. Common assumptions that equated lone women in public with prostitution or at least with questionable morality encouraged such policies and laws. These, in turn, reinforced a male-privileged heteronormative public space in which women had limited access and needed to perform an appropriate relationship to men (as girlfriend, wife, or mother) in order to "achieve gender" and avoid negative labels and treatment. (1) Etiquette manuals, popular magazines, teachers, parents, and society at large condoned exclusionary laws and policies as a form of "protection"--protecting both vulnerable women from men and society from predatory women. These attitudes communicated to women young and old that "common sense" dictated that it was not safe--morally or physically--for a woman to venture into male domains, especially the barroom. (2) Exclusion from public accommodations, then, helped to write male supremacy and heteronormativity onto the social, physical, and economic landscape of U.S. cities.

Beginning in the late 1960s, feminists successfully began to confront urban gender segregation through sit-ins, pickets, demonstrations, press conferences, legislative pressure, and law suits. "Male-only" bars and restaurants that denied or heavily restricted women's access became the most-popular targets of these challenges. Attacking the legal and social restrictions on women in public accommodations fit well with other goals of early Second Wave feminism, notably equal access and autonomy, but it also reveals a number of key struggles within the movement. Tackling restrictions in public accommodations raised internal and external debates over the respectability of the movement and its members that foreshadowed tensions within the movement over differences among women. A range of feminist organizations, from the National Organization for Women (NOW) and local NOW chapters to self-proclaimed "radical" groups, adopted the issue and used similar tactics and rationales in their efforts, adding further evidence to a growing recognition that there are no simple labels to be applied to Second Wave feminism. Public accommodations attracted feminist activists from across this spectrum because it so readily connected with their other priorities and with emerging theories of the late 1960s and early 1970s concerning the societal limitations placed on women. Policies that excluded women altogether or required women to have a male escort represented an obvious and intolerable indignity, indicative of other, and many more subtle, indignities faced by women every day.

Two main types of public accommodations practiced gender discrimination in U.S. cities by the 1960s. The first were bars, grills, downtown clubs, and many restaurants catering to local and traveling middle-class white businessmen. Restaurants, such as Stouffer's in Pittsburgh, Schroder's Cafe in San Francisco, Whyte's in the Wall Street area of Manhattan, the Russian Tea Room, Sardi's, the London Chop House in Detroit, and, aptly named, The Retreat in Washington, D.C., banned women during lunch hours, restricted them to isolated and sometimes more expensive second-floor dining rooms, or kept them away from the bar area. Other restaurants--less expensive although still reliant on the businessmen's trade--adhered to similar policies. Wales Coffee Shop and the Bull and Bear in Chicago, P.J. Clarke's in New York, and the Clam Broth House in Hoboken, served women, but not at the bar or not if they were "unescorted." "Men's bars" were common in major hotels such as the Biltmore in New York, the Continental Plaza in Chicago, the William Penn in Pittsburgh, and the Monteleone in New Orleans. The Men's Grill in Oakland's Leamington Hotel, the Oak Room of the Plaza Hotel, Trader Vic's at the Beverly Hills Hilton, and the Viking Room of Minneapolis's Radisson Hotel either served only men at their restaurant bar or banned women altogether during "executive" (that is, lunch) hours. "Men's grills" also existed in many downtown department stores--Rich's in Atlanta, Dayton's and Powers in Minneapolis, Burdine's in Miami, Thalhimer's in Richmond. Each of these institutions served a relatively specific clientele in terms of class, race, and, of course, gender. They self-consciously cultivated their masculine atmosphere and reputation as a place for businessmen to unwind or work the social side of a deal. (3) In these spaces, lone women were assumed to be prostitutes and proprietors claimed to be insulating their customers from being preyed upon or distracted by excluding women.

The other major group of public accommodations that kept women out--or opened only their back doors and back rooms to them--were the working-class neighborhood pubs. An explosion of bars around the turn of the twentieth century was bound up with an emerging male culture in U.S. cities. "Here," argues historian Howard Chudacoff, "aided by the inhibition-releasing effect of beer and liquor, men could escape from the pressures of both their work and domestic lives ..., and reinforce class, ethnic, and, perhaps most importantly, gender identities." (4) Any tavern in New Jersey fit in this category, as a state law from the 1910s restricted tavern licenses to male-only establishments. Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Montana also had such statutes, as did several cities. In states and cities where statutory prohibitions did not exist, the exclusion of women stemmed from the social and cultural practices of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which kept women out of everywhere from the Red Door Tavern in Columbus, Ohio, to McCarthy's Bar in Syracuse, New York. (5) In the early twentieth century, Progressive reformers supported codification of these customs, believing they protected women's virtue and reputation in dangerous cities where economic need and a lack of parental guidance made many working-class women vulnerable to exploitation. Although many middle-class urbanites and public officials endorsed mandatory restrictions on women, their interests were often markedly less sympathetic toward women and instead tended to emphasize the need to protect men from predatory women who would break social custom and enter a drinking establishment. Concern over the spread of venereal disease and crackdowns on prostitution during both world wars resulted in the further exclusion of women from many bars. (6)

Americans' relationship to drinking changed after the end of World War I. Proscriptions against women's public drinking loosened and earlier arguments for protecting women from the corrupting forces of the public realm dissipated. (7) New establishments--speakeasies and nightclubs--welcomed women, generally as part of a heterosexual couple, but these coexisted with, rather than replaced, the traditionally male establishments. (8) As late as 1970, for example, a quarter of the licenses in Boston went to male only establishments. Although both types of bars and restaurants that restricted the presence of women constructed male identities within class, race, and ethnic lines, their shared exclusion (or extreme restriction) of women was still alive and well in 1960s urban United States.

Most activists in the emerging women's movement of the late 1960s were familiar with the phenomenon of male-only bars, but most had not applied a political interpretation to their exclusion. (9) By 1968, however, the burgeoning women's movement brought such gendered practices into question and the issue began showing up in both local and national feminist groups. Karen DeCrow had not given restrictions on women in public accommodations a second thought until an acquaintance reported being turned away from the bar of a downtown hotel for being an "unescorted" woman, even though she was in the company of a female friend. (10) Having just helped to form the Syracuse, New York, NOW chapter and started law school, DeCrow recalls immediately knowing "it was discrimination from the racial analogy." Work as a "foot soldier" in the civil rights movement in her native Chicago had left public accommodations discrimination "high on [her] consciousness." She brought the issue to her fledgling NOW chapter and they set about challenging the policy with complaints to management, pickets, sit-ins, and, eventually, lawsuits.

Within months of DeCrow's epiphany, the issue emerged at a NOW national board meeting held in New York City in May 1968. DeCrow reported on the Syracuse chapter's activities and board members realized that the hotel where they were meeting, the Biltmore Hotel, contained a male-only restaurant. They immediately set up a picket of the bar and adopted the issue as a priority for the year. DeCrow introduced it at the national NOW conference in December 1968, at a workshop that typified the way this issue spread throughout the feminist movement. Initially, members thought little of the new issue, but once DeCrow framed the practices as a denial of civil rights, the room exploded in discussion. (11) Everyone seemed to know of an establishment with such policies; many had moving stories of unknowingly encountering these and being embarrassed when turned away because of the always-lurking implication that she might be a prostitute. Not surprisingly, after this workshop, NOW formally added open access to public accommodations to its list of goals and created a task force on the issue (headed by DeCrow). They declared February 9-15, 1969, "Public Accommodations Week," organizing dozens of "eat-ins" and ...