“
I WAS TRYING TO DECIDE WHAT WAS
THE LADIES’ ROOM Building community in the basement of Clark Hall.
L
aw School women found solidarity and built community in a surprising corner of Clark Hall: the ladies’ restroom. This small space, partitioned into a restroom and lounge, served as a gathering spot for female law students and staff. Nancy Buc ’69, Elaine Jones ’70, and many of their female classmates recall the lounge as a space to foster friendships in an area away from their majority male peers. Women law students found here a place for impromptu conversation, respite, comradery, and even the chance encounter that later helped
bring about the founding of Virginia Law Women (see page 18). Tucked away in the basement and originally reserved for secretaries and library staff, the restroom lounge underwent a renovation in 1962 under the direction of Frances Farmer to accommodate the growing number of women at the Law School. Women congregated in these spaces because the existing faculty and student lounges felt unwelcoming. A 1962 Virginia Law Weekly article described the fourth-floor faculty lounge as having an “overwhelmingly male, club-
Clark Hall, completed in 1932, was originally constructed with one restroom reserved for female secretaries and library staff. This schematic from the building’s original blueprint shows the layout of the restroom before renovations in 1962.
14
GENDER AND WHAT WAS RACE , IN TERMS OF WHAT I
WAS EXPERIENCING.
”
—Elaine Jones ’70
On November 8, 1962, the Virginia Law Weekly announced that Frances Farmer had supervised a renovation of the “formerly dark, drab and generally unattractive ladies’ room” into a “cheerful feminine oasis.” The renovation partitioned the room into a lounge, shared between female staff and students, and a restroom.
Law School registrar Virginia Haigh (right) and other staff members convene in the women’s lounge in the early 1970s.
like atmosphere,” while the culture and traditions of the ground-floor student lounge “denied [women law students] entrance as effectively as would written law.” The Law Weekly declared the new basement lounge spaces a “common meeting ground for all strata of Law School womankind.” Yet not all women at UVA Law shared the same experience, and the restroom was not a shelter from racial discrimination. Elaine Jones dealt with this complexity during her first year of law school: “I remember the first week there buying the books, and I was sitting in the ladies room downstairs on that sofa. I was the only one in there and I had
the books.... And this white lady comes through the ladies’ room, and she’s just polite to me as she can be, middleaged woman. And she looked at me sitting there. She said to me, ‘I know you’re taking your rest break now, but when you finish, would you clean the refrigerator?’ She saw color only. She didn’t see the books.” As the only women’s restroom in Clark Hall, its location in the basement did present significant inconvenience. The distance from the Clark Hall classrooms to the women’s restroom added minutes of travel time, a particular issue during law school exams. Male students, alternatively, had convenient multi-floor options. 15
