In honour of International Women’s Day, I want to write about a place that is very special to me: the locker room. More specifically, the women’s locker room.
As a swimmer, I’ve spent hundreds of hours in these spaces over the years. A lot of my learning and formation as a woman has happened there. My first introduction to the women’s locker room was as a five-year-old going to the pool with my dad. I was so little that I couldn’t yet tie the top of my bathing suit by myself, so he would ask any adult woman heading in if she would help me. They always did, and I felt special being a big girl going to the “ladies” side.
As an adolescent, my older sister told me to take off my bathing suit to shower properly and said, “We’re all women here.” Suddenly I was considered a woman among women! What an empowering message for an early teen.
Over the decades, I’ve come to recognize the locker room as a special “third space” – not home (the first space) and not work or school (the second), but somewhere in between. A place people gather voluntarily and where informal community forms. A place where we see and acknowledge each other through small conversations about everyday life.
The “bare naked ladies” aspect of women’s locker rooms has been hilariously parodied (see Baroness von Sketch’s locker room), and there’s truth in it. There is freedom in just letting it all hang out in a safe space. And we do.
Bodies of all shapes and sizes. Tattoos. Scars from caesarean sections. Hip replacements. Beautiful pregnant bellies. Bodies that move easily and those that need the support of a walker. In the women’s locker room, you see it all—and it is normal and wondrous and grounding. This is us.
Seeing older bodies when I was young had a special impact on me. I remember a swimmer in her 80s who had been a dancer. She wore bright red lipstick and a red bathing suit. Seeing her do leg lifts at the barre along the wall her grace was so evident. Her body was old, but it was also clearly well used and well loved. Watching her helped me anticipate what a life of movement and adventure might look like decades later.
What I’ve come to appreciate is how much we see and exchange in those chlorine-scented spaces.
The first time a woman openly and unashamedly told me about an unwanted pregnancy, it was a fellow lifeguard in the locker room. Over the years I’ve had plenty of regular and everyday exchanges about the weather or whether the showers were warm or admiring someone’s sweater. There are women with whom I don’t share a common language but we still see each other. We smile and nod and exchange a few words.
But I’ve also heard about celebrations, fertility struggles, birth stories, menopause, illnesses, recovery and death. The locker room is the place to get recommendations – whether for a for physiotherapy, brow threading or fitness gear. We exchange, bit by bit, about the stuff of life. And sometimes we don’t have time and just say a quick good-bye and run out the door.
We know this place is good for us. We hadn’t seen one swimmer for a long time. When she came back she shared that she had suffered a debilitating depression and had been off work for months. Her return to the pool was a sign of recovery. It was a shared joy to see her laughing and joking again. Even though we had no contact outside of that space, she clearly felt the welcome and support within it.
So on this International Women’s Day, I want to say thank you to the many women who have shared and made the locker room a special place. Thank you for the conversations, the laughter, the honesty, and the quiet inspiration.
All of you helped teach me about being a woman, and what it means to be in community.