A beautiful new community center and pool opened a few months ago in Rainier Beach, and on a recent day I went to check it out. I got there at the wrong time to use the pool, so I picked up a schedule. One thing caught my eye: a “female-only” swim on Sunday afternoon between 4:30 and 5:30.
Why female-only? I asked. A staffer behind the desk explained that it was for women who didn’t feel comfortable swimming with men. And it got quite crowded, the staffer added.
Immediately, I got it. Rainier Beach, indeed all of the Rainier Valley, is home to a sizable Muslim population, comprised in large part of Somali immigrants. Although I didn’t make the connection at the time, a community of orthodox Jews also make their home in nearby Seward Park, and the women-only swim caters to them too, according to Seattle Parks and Recreations spokesperson Joelle Hammerstad.
I realized that this time on the pool schedule was allowing women to swim who otherwise couldn’t, due to religious prohibitions on gender mixing and the showing of female bodies. And that seemed like a good thing. At the same time, it made me a little uneasy to think of sex-segregation in a public facility.
I was made even more uneasy when I learned that Seattle – which maintains women-only swimming sessions at three other pools besides Rainier Beach’s—covers the windows during these times. That’s not an environment I would want for my daughters, both because it would block natural light and because of the message it sends that women’s bodies are to be kept from view.
Others have voiced more pronounced concerns. The Seattle Globalist and
The Seattle Times
both wrote in the last week about a controversy stirring in Tukwila about a women-only swim there, which has led to a gender-discrimination complaint with the state Human Rights Commission. Tukwila, though, has a male-only swimming time. Seattle does not.
The Seattle Office for Civil Rights has received no complaints to date, says spokesperson Elliott Bronstein. And Hammerstad, of the parks department, couches the women-only session in terms of preventing discrimination. “The reason we began offering women-only swims is because the women who requested it could not avail themselves of the city’s amenities due to their religion,” she says in a statement. The city was therefore required to make “reasonable accommodations.”
What’s more, she points out, encouraging women to swim is a “public health issue” because drowning is a big problem in ethnic communities—one reason Seattle Children’s Hospital used to give a grant to facilitate women-only swims. For a decade, the hospital and other organizations provided the money that allowed women to rent out the public pools for this purpose. In April, after one of the funders indicated it could no longer afford to do so, the city made the gender-specific swims part of its regular schedules at its Rainier Beach, Medgar Evers, Meadowbrook and Southwest pools.
Whether the state Human Rights Commission will see the gender-specific swims as in keeping with the law remains to be seen. The ACLU of Washington is also mulling over the issue, according to deputy director Jennifer Shaw.
In the mean time, there is no question that the women-only swims are popular, at least at the Rainier Beach community center. It’s one-of-a-kind facility for the city that boasts not only a lap pool, but a lazy river, a corkscrew slide and windows all around. (The city put in built-in shades with the women-only swims in mind.) While the other pools that offer such swims get at most 30 women per session, according to Hammerstad, Rainier Beach routinely attracts a full-to-capacity crowd of 110.
