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Originally Posted by furball
The first is the Black civil rights movement in America in the 1950s and 60s. Rosa Parks was being deified in the American press only 18 months ago for her refusal to move to the back of the bus because she was black. Now the same situation is occuring again, this time on gender lines.
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While I have no desire to justify any unequal separation of people in the public services, I don't think you can draw a direct comparison between gender and racial segregation.
Women and men are different in a lot more of a substantial way than black and white people. Having separate toilets for white and black people wouldn't make any sense whereas there's some reasoning behind different toilets for different genders. (Although, having said that, in my favourite night club they have unisex toilets which greatly improves the atmosphere / socialising / etc). In a very different way, women only carriages in Japan are one (albeit unsatisfactory) solution to a problem there. I believe the idea has been raised of having a similar thing on certain late night tubes so women feel more safe using public transport. And even now some people will give up their seat to a woman, even if she is not pregnant, holding shopping, elderly, etc.
The point is, I can think of numerous ways I'd personal think it justified to treat a woman slightly differently from a man, but none for someone who was of a different race.
The problem is as always one of power relations. Black Americans wanted to end segregation on buses not because they just wanted to be close to their white brothers, but because the back of the bus equated (as always) to the shit end of the deal. Seperate but equal always almost ends up being unequal if there's no reasonably equal sharing of power behind the arrangement. Segregation is the symptom of the wider problem of patriarchy within the (frankly totally nuts) orthodox Jewish communities (the ones who throw stones at ambulances if they dare work on Yom Kippur).
Anyway, Jewish women deserve some of the blame for all this. A whole bunch of them buy into a religion founded on a text which explicitly grants them an inferior status. No-one likes an Uncle Tom (or an Aunt Tovah).