IN WILLIAMSBURG, an eclectic neighbourhood in Brooklyn, the bathing times at a public swimming pool are dividing hipsters from Hasidic Jews. For 20 years, to accommodate local Orthodox Jewish women whose religious modesty prevents them from swimming in mixed company, the Metropolitan Recreation Centre has reserved time four days each week for a “women’s swim”. But an anonymous complaint this spring prompted New York City’s human-rights commission to scuttle the arrangement, finding that the women’s-only times—a total of 7.25 hours out of the pool’s 90-hour weekly schedule—amounted to illegal discrimination. That decision was put on hold after Dov Hikind, an assemblyman representing another Brooklyn neighbourhood with large numbers of Hasidic Jews, complained.

“Everybody into the pool,” the New York Times editorialised, in response to Mr Hikind’s successful intervention. Continuing to allow women to enjoy exclusive hours in the pool this summer while the city tries to find a compromise is “a capitulation to a theocratic view of government services”. Donna Lieberman, executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, said that while New Yorkers “have every right to limit their swimming in accordance with their religious beliefs”, Orthodox Jews “have no right to impose a regime of gender discrimination on a public pool”. People whose religious scruples prevent them from splashing with members of the opposite sex, the Times advised, should “find their own private place to swim when and with whom they see fit.”

This is far from the first dispute over who may swim in public pools. Though most municipal pools were desegregated after the second world war, racial tensions continued in the waters. Whites often stopped swimming once blacks were allowed in. New pools were built in white neighbourhoods to, in effect, rope others out. And some cities opted to drain their pools for good rather than operate them as integrated facilities, a strategy that was blessed by the Supreme Court in Palmer v Thompson (1971). At private pools and country clubs, both blacks and Jews found themselves unable to wallow well into the 1960s, prompting Groucho Marx to plead: “My daughter’s only half Jewish—can she wade in up to her knees?”

Unlike these moves to exclude undesirables from the water, the sex-segregated swimming times in Williamsburg cater to people whose beliefs would otherwise keep them at home. A similar aim has moved other cities, including Seattle and St Louis Park, Minnesota, to introduce female-only swimming times—to serve both Jewish and Muslim women. The Times may have condemned the arrangement in Brooklyn as religious intrusion into secular space, but a few months ago it hailed a Saturday-night women-only swimming programme in Toronto as reflecting “an ethos of inclusion” for the city’s Muslims.

In these gender-bending times, agreeing to reserve time for women is itself a fraught proposition. Bill de Blasio, New York’s mayor, was asked whether transgender women were allowed to swim during female-only hours. He had no quick answer. That, he said, is under review.