I keep seeing people posting 100+ year-old photos of men and women praying side by side at the Kotel, examples of an imagined paradise time when everyone prayed together and all was groovy.
The reason there was no mehitza (ritual divider between men and women) at the Kotel was that at various times the Ottoman authorities (and later the British) would not allow it. There is a reason you hardly see any furniture there.
The British at one stage had soldiers stationed at the Kotel to make sure no Jews sat down or brought benches or chairs, even beating Jews who tried to set up a mehitza or bring furniture to the Kotel.
Jews were not allowed to pray loudly and Jews were arrested by the British for bringing and trying to blow the shofar at the site. It was far from being a golden era, Jews prayed at the Kotel in fear and at their own risk.
Haj Amin al-Hussein, the senior Muslim authority at the time in Jerusalem tried to whip up anti-Jewish sentiment by implying that any Jewish furniture or hanging of lanterns at the Kotel was part of a Jewish attempt to eventually seize al-Aqsa and the Temple Mount from Muslim control. This eventually escalated in to anti-Jewish riots and the massacre of scores of Jews, including the infamous 1929 massacre of 69 members of the Hebron Jewish community. The British responded with even more draconian restrictions of Jewish access to the Kotel.
When Israel did finally gain control of the Kotel, setting it up as a place of prayer, with a mehitza, chairs and aron kodesh was a powerful symbol of Jewish sovereignty over this most sacred site after so many foreign rulers had forbidden anything that might be construed as Jewish ownership of the site.
All this isn't to say that the current situation is ideal, far from it, but we shouldn't pine for an imagined golden era that never was nor necessarily ascribe modern ideals and values to our 19th and early 20th century ancestors.
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