The Last Sanctuary of Man Vanishes
In 1925, women were taking over previously all-male spaces like bars, barbershops, and smoking cars on trains, journalist George MacAdam lamented in New York Times Magazine.
The male sex had four sanctuaries – the barroom, the bootblack stand, the barber shop, the smoking car.
The barroom has been snatched away from men, just as a dangerous plaything is snatched away from baby. The two sexes, or what is left of those two old-fashioned differentiations, share the bootblack stand and the barber shop. And now they are to share the smoking car.
These days, one of those four things doesn't even exist, while the other one barely does.
Bars and barbershops are still a dime a dozen – getting your hair cut is just a human need, after all, otherwise we'd all have hair down to our knees. But shoeshine stands are mostly a remnant of time gone by (although I've seen an occasional one at an airport). And smoking cars on trains seem to have disappeared: Amtrak banned smoking on most trains in 1993.
MacAdam wrote "barber shop" as two separate words, which I've never seen in the modern era. According to Google Books Ngram Viewer, which tracks the use of words and phrases in books over time, the two-word phrase "barber shop" peaked in the 1910s, 1920s, and 1930s, slowly becoming less popular starting in the 1940s and for several decades after.
Yet the single word "barbershop" didn't eclipse it in popularity until... 1996? That's way later than I would have guessed.
(And the tipping point actually occurred slightly later for the pluralized versions, "barber shops" versus "barbershops." There, the one-word version didn't become more popular in books until 2002.)
MacAdam yearned for the bygone era when men ruled the barroom, shoeshine stand, barbershop, and smoking car. At the same time, he recognized that he was behind the times, repeatedly self-deprecating by calling himself and other men of his age "antiquated" and "narrow-minded, hidebound troglodytes."
He wasn't even that old. He died less than five years after this article's publication, in November 1929, at age 53 – which would have put him in his late 40s at the time of this article's publication. There were men still alive who were more than twice his age.
The Last Sanctuary of Man Vanishes: Woman Invades Those Sacred Havens of Masculinity, the Smoking Cars
Published: Sunday, January 4, 1925