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 K. Gardner at a meeting in New York City in 1862.
“Any man, and far more, any woman,” he declared, “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.”
But the risk of arrest rarely deterred city residents, men especially. The 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 this time, city saloons offered the closest thing to restrooms for ordinary men, but only if they bought booze. These “vile grog shops,” the New York Times lamented in 1872, made “the profit of a vile dram … the compensation of convenience.” The want of public restrooms, reformers concluded, drove men to drink.
Increasingly, municipal officials promoted public toilets as a way to tame immorality, keep men sober and, increasingly, curb disease. But 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 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 like Maureen Flanagan have argued that 19th-century city planners believed women belonged in the home, only venturing outside for short periods of time. 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.
In fact, 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 wasn’t 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. But the biggest objection, perhaps, 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 explained, they did so on the assumption that women would decide when and where their husbands would stop the car. Though 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 South had no such access to clean bathrooms; they also faced discrimination in other parts of the country. In fact, 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 where public restrooms became more numerous — construction of the interstate system led to more state-funded rest stops — but most people in the US turned to private establishments.
Though 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.
More From Stephen Mihm in Bloomberg Opinion:
• Why Ukraine’s Wheat Fields Sow Dictators’ Megalomania: Stephen Mihm
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• 1970s-Era Inflation Advice Was Hollow and Still Is: Stephen Mihm
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
Stephen Mihm, a professor of history at the University of Georgia, is coauthor of “Crisis Economics: A Crash Course in the Future of Finance.”
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