Sun, Jun 26, 2022 page9

• Why is it so hard to find a decent public bathroom?

  The history of the public bathroom in the US is a history of exclusion — of women and of African Americans

  • By Stephen Mihm / Bloomberg Opinion
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  Starbucks, which has long made its bathrooms available to the public, earlier this month announced that it might soon insist, however gently, that you would have to purchase something for this privilege. A latte for the loo, as the Britons might say.

  This is unfortunate. Most of us — unlike Russian President Vladimir Putin — cannot take our toilets with us; we have to depend on private establishments.

  All this begs a larger question: Why are so few public restrooms readily available?

  

  Illustration: June Hsu

  The answer requires going back to the 19th century. Our potty shortage is nothing new. Consider, for example, this long-winded, but otherwise familiar complaint articulated by well-meaning reformer Augustus Gardner at a meeting in New York in 1862.

  “Any man, and far more, any woman, may walk from one end of this city to the other, in the most dire torture, without finding the relief to the necessities of the body, without such indecent exposure of the person as would render the individual liable to arrest and fine by the civic authorities,” he said.

  However, the risk of arrest rarely deterred New York residents, men especially.

  Historian Peter Baldwin neatly captured the spirit of the age when he wrote: “Urinating men, like defecating horses, were an everyday sight on the street.”

  The stench was bad, but that was nothing compared to the real issue: Men were exposing themselves in public.

  One observer writing in the New York Tribune worried how “ladies, passing on the sidewalks, are frequently subjected to indelicate displays that they cannot avoid witnessing.”

  Not that the alternatives were much better. At the time, city saloons offered the closest thing to restrooms for ordinary men, but only if they bought booze.

  The New York Times in 1872 lamented that these “vile grog shops” made “the profit of a vile dram ... the compensation of convenience.”

  Reformers concluded that the want of public restrooms drove men to drink.

  Increasingly, municipal officials promoted public toilets as a way to tame immorality, keep men sober and, increasingly, curb disease.

  However, these early efforts often failed to deliver. In 1883, one writer described the public urinal in Newark, New Jersey, as “a place that reeks with filth and upon whose walls are written the vilest obscenities.”

  There was another problem: Public toilets always shortchanged women.

  A typical public restroom built in Boston around the turn of the 20th century featured 16 toilets and 12 urinals for men — but only 12 toilets for women. Moreover, many public toilets catered to men exclusively.

  London, as late as the 1920s, had three times as many facilities for men than for women, and while men used them for free, women had to pay for the privilege.

  Why the disparity?

  Historians such as Maureen Flanagan have argued that 19th-century city planners believed women belonged in the home, only venturing outside for short periods. A woman walking the streets for hours, never mind visiting a public toilet, was immediately suspect: low-class at best, and quite possibly a prostitute.

  When women requested that men build toilets to accommodate the ladies, many men got, well, hysterical. One official in London described such a request as an “abomination,” while another declared that any woman making such an outlandish demand had apparently “forgot their sex” and “should not have anything provided for them at all.”

  Given the stigma attached to using public toilets, most women looked for other options. By the late 19th century, urban department stores, which focused on female shoppers, made clean private toilets a significant part of their pitch.

  Unlike filthy, crowded and poorly lighted public toilets, department stores offered comparatively luxurious facilities for women of the middle and upper classes — just like home, where indoor plumbing had become the norm. Smaller retail establishments followed suit, offering the promise of clean bathrooms to entice female visitors of all classes.

  Still, this was not the most equitable solution. As women assumed an increasingly visible role in urban reform movements in the early 20th century, they argued that public “comfort stations” should be available to the masses. This short-lived campaign led to the construction of more modern facilities in many cities, but it also went awry.

  Property owners and businesses near proposed comfort stations objected, claiming they would attract crime and disease, or — even more troubling to many — gay men seeking sexual encounters.

  However, the perhaps biggest objection was that they took lots of tax dollars to operate.

  By the 1930s, the idea that government would supply public bathrooms began a decades-long decline in the US. Instead, the older reliance on private facilities remained the norm. It even spread to new venues.

  The rise of the automobile, for example, allowed people to venture far from the privacy of their own toilets. In response, gas stations, taking a page from the department stores, began to make sanitary bathrooms a big selling point.

  As historian Susan Spellman has said, they did so on the assumption that women would decide when and where their husbands would stop the vehicle. Although no one views gas stations as paragons of cleanliness today, they enjoyed a reputation for several decades as the best bet when nature called.

  If, of course, you were white. African-Americans in the southern US had no such access to clean bathrooms; they also faced discrimination in other parts of the country.

  As historian Bryant Simon has observed, battles over access to public bathrooms became very much entangled with the larger civil rights movement.

  Many whites, already reluctant to use tax dollars to fund public facilities, became even more hostile to the idea.

  There were a few places in the US where public restrooms became more numerous — construction of the interstate system led to more state-funded rest stops — but most Americans turned to private establishments.

  Although gas stations stopped making clean restrooms their calling card, other retailers stepped up to the plate. Which is why we go to Starbucks when we need to go.

  Stephen Mihm is a professor of history at the University of Georgia.

  This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
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