Elizabeth Ann Thompson sometimes wore a necktie. When she did, she was occasionally mistaken in a public bathroom for a man. As she made her way through the door, a stranger would look at her for an extra beat or two and ask, with a false note of confusion, “Are you in the ‘right place?’”
Thompson’s run-ins with self-appointed gender gatekeepers reminded her of her childhood and of her parents’ lives under Jim Crow rule. The family resided for a while in Huntsville, Alabama, America’s “Rocket City,” where researchers pored over the details of moon landings and missile launch points. When they drove to Kansas to visit her grandparents, Thompson’s family didn’t stop to use the restrooms along the highway in Tennessee or at gas stations in Kentucky. They knew better. Just in case they forgot, signs screaming “Whites Only” and “No Colored” stood out as shrill reminders of who could go where.
Thompson’s bathroom encounters taught her a vital American lesson. Those in charge used public toilets to sort people into separate and unequal groups. Toilets also taught her that those with better restrooms generally didn’t want to share; they wanted to keep things the way they were. That meant the world was split between those who could make quick work of meeting their bodily needs in clean, well-maintained spaces and others who had to explain themselves or hold it or find a clump of trees or a patch of bushes to do “their business.”
This is the history of the United States, a history that has been marked as much by the bright promise of inclusion as it has by the crueler practices of exclusion. Stacks of books and reels of film have shown how the nation’s schools, housing policies, policing practices, and voting laws have pitted the country’s long traditions of community and sharing against its equally long traditions of building barriers and hoarding access and opportunity. From the arrival of the first Europeans onto North American shores until today, the idea of equality has glowed alongside the bleaker notions of inequality. The public bathroom, that most mundane and ordinary of places, has helped to create this tension, this duality of the American experience. Elected officials and other guardians of the social order from the Reconstruction era forward used the public bathroom as an entryway to the larger society. Some individuals and groups could easily gain access to public bathrooms, giving them unbounded freedom, while others, like Elizabeth Ann Thompson, faced discriminatory laws, blocked entrances, police clubs, and blaring signs that hurt deep down in everyday ways, making them feel less free and less equal.
Elizabeth Ann Thompson’s story of bathroom-made inequality would have been familiar to generations of dockworkers, stenographers, meatpackers, mechanics, teachers, lawyers, and activists. Since the first government-built public bathroom in the United States opened in New York City’s Astor Place in 1869, elected officials and voters have debated who should have access to these places and who should be kept away. Traces of their conversations about public bathrooms and who could enter them pop up in municipal code books, city council records, public health reports, vacation guides, trade journals, the correspondence of mayors, reformers, and activists, and countless newspaper and magazine articles. Just about every autobiography or memoir, especially by people from outsider groups, includes a bathroom story. Bathrooms make countless appearances in films, plays, novels, poems, television shows, and comedy routines. Recovering all these toilet dialogues has taken some digging, but it turns out that it is much easier to find accounts of public bathrooms from the past than it is to find an actual public bathroom today.
As cities across the United States got bigger and more crowded in the 1880s, people faced new challenges in managing their bodies. To go to work or a park or a vaudeville show required, in the minds of most, access to a toilet with a door. By the last decades of the nineteenth century, a coalition of elected officials, sanitarians, and city boosters concluded that the existing private-sector network of toilets in hotels, taverns, department stores, and restaurants couldn’t supply enough away-from-home bathrooms to sustain a bustling urban economy and keep the growing populace safe and on the move. To meet these demands, cities from Philadelphia to Peoria to Portland invested heavily in building public bathrooms. These facilities created new costs for governments, but also a new power, the power that Elizabeth Ann Thompson felt: to open and close off the public.
To nineteenth-century bathroom builders, a well-regulated public began with an individual’s appearance. Looking crisp and clean built trust in a person’s inward capacity for self-control. But trust, to pull down your pants or hike up your skirt with a stranger just a few inches or feet away, also required, in this moment, that leaders sort male and female bodies into two fixed groups with a divider between them. Many white patrons also demanded separation from Black and Brown patrons.
After the first public bathrooms opened, new fears stirred, almost immediately, about the character and behavior of the people using these costly facilities, and especially about people taking advantage of public privacy. Sex between men (and male-presenting individuals) set off the first and loudest alarm bells. Officials responded in ways that redefined public bathrooms and their imagined role in society. Mayors and public safety officers ramped up their surveillance tactics and sent in undercover police officers on stakeouts, turning toilet spaces into crime zones. When the vice patrols didn’t rid public bathrooms of sex seekers, local leaders closed these facilities, beginning in the 1930s. This became the go-to move of twentieth-century bathroom governance. When segregation was challenged, local officials, south and north, closed public toilets rather than integrate them. When people experiencing homelessness became more visible on downtown streets, city councils and parks commissions shuttered public bathrooms. When alcohol and drug abuse frightened municipal authorities, they talked about the bathroom as a breeding ground for germs and disorder and decided to lock the doors. Similar fears were stirred during crises over AIDS and COVID-19. Government representatives responded by shutting down public bathrooms to protect some people from other people. That’s how they justified creating inequality.
The power to divide and discriminate through the bathroom was never hidden. Lawmakers enacted statutes, ordinances, and spending decrees that made these places open to some and off limits to others. Understanding the power of the public toilet, activists for gay rights, civil rights, women’s rights, and trans rights turned the restroom door into a critical, though largely unrecognized by researchers, site of protest. When neatly dressed college students sat down at lunch counters to push for Black freedom, they also took their campaigns to public bathrooms, demanding that emblems of exclusion come down and that spending on toilets and dignity be equal for everyone. Feminists demanded more toilet space and an end to the lines that formed outside women’s restrooms but not men’s, while trans and genderqueer people pressed for facilities and signage that better reflected nonbinary identities. Segregationists, antifeminists, and antitransgender agitators also focused on bathrooms as they tried to block access to these essential spaces, and to the larger society.
In 2024 David Mamet, the Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright, and by then right-leaning gadfly, mocked “woke” ideologues for supporting gender-neutral toilet facilities and for what he labeled as their shady attempts to “politicize the human excretory function.” He was right; this was the intention of trans activists. But there wasn’t anything new here. Public bathrooms—that is, away-from-home bathrooms funded, restricted, and overseen by government—have always been political spaces. From the opening of the very first public restroom, mayors, beat cops, and protesters tried to control who was allowed through the doors of these places and who was not, who was shielded from ridicule and shame and who was not, and who was entitled to the full benefits of equality and who was not. Public bathrooms were always about political power, the seen and unseen political power of infrastructure.
Like roads, sewers, subways, airports, prisons, schools, libraries, swimming pools, and cell phone towers, public restrooms are infrastructure, technologies and policies organized to facilitate or inhibit the flow of goods and people. Although infrastructures are all different, with different purposes and connections and disconnections to communities, each reveals who matters to those with power and who doesn’t. They are sneaky this way. At first glance, infrastructures appear to be neutral and universal, to be physical forms oblivious to ideology and discriminatory practices. Rarely, though, is that the case. White men tended to get more of the jobs creating and building these structures than Black men or women of any race. Sewers made some areas more valuable than others. Public transit linked some neighborhoods to jobs and schools and cut others off from these opportunities. Freeways gouged gaping holes in Black and Brown communities, displacing churches by the dozens and families by the thousands while leaving many white areas undisturbed. Infrastructural value also comes from maintenance. It was one thing to build a new high-rise public housing project or a marble-accented public restroom, as some of the first ones were. It was another matter to maintain these places and invest in the people who relied on them. Deliberate neglect is another of way creating inequality.
No other infrastructure has been as fraught as the public bathroom. When a bridge closes or an airport’s schedule goes off kilter, it inconveniences and irritates users. It can be frustrating and annoying, but it is not personally humiliating or embarrassing. Public bathrooms evoke these more intense feelings because they bring bodies into view and into public conversations: bodies that are supposed always to be under control and never mentioned. Bodies categorized, by some, by sex and biology. Bodies of different shapes, sizes, and abilities. Bodies that convey information about race and identity. Bodies that carry germs and diseases. Bodies that emit noxious smells. Bodies that produce pus, snot, blood, vomit, urine, and feces. Bodies that, just by being bodies, are seen as unsettling and dangerous.
Painters, sculptors, and philosophers from ancient Greece celebrated the body and its form. But by the Gilded Age, artists, architects, and policy makers saw the body, especially unknown bodies, as a source of concern and fear. The world around them reflected these anxieties. Shirts, pants, jackets, bras, and corsets reined in arms and legs, stomachs and breasts. At home, curtains and drapes obscured rooms from the outside. Landfills hid trash far from apartment buildings and single-family cottages. Sewage systems ran underground, out of sight. Perhaps nothing captured the moment more than the flush toilet, which became standard in middle-class homes by 1900 or so. This new device disappeared urine and excrement as if by magic, while the even simpler technology of bathroom doors tried to block the smells and sounds of bodily elimination. Even the definition of human excreta as “waste” rather than as something natural divided the world into halves, the clean and the unclean, the private and the public.
Urinating and defecating had long fallen into the category of a private and dirty activity. In early America, where population density was low and the land could easily absorb urine and feces, excretion could be done outside, in a field. But as cities filled up with families, factories, and trolley cars, using the street or a backyard as a toilet was deemed a public health risk and, even worse, a sign of personal and moral failing. To “go” anywhere other than in a walled space—apart from, in some circumstances, men urinating—indicated something wrong with the individual doing it and the community where it took place. Privacy, the ability to be unseen and undetected, therefore represented what it meant to be decent and middle class. But this world of bodily hiddenness took resources. It took blueprints and new designs, and it took moving bathrooms with flush toilets to the second floor of homes, separated by stairs and a full-length door from the more public areas of the kitchen and sitting room below.
The job of the first public bathrooms was to extend the privacy of the home to the public realm, to keep the sights, sounds, and smells of bodies hidden and undetectable. That made the toilet a prerequisite for individual movement, the very definition of freedom, along with the right to vote, in nineteenth-century America and beyond. Citizens of this nation on the go heralded their liberation on ships and railroads, in shiny cars and sleek jet planes. Artists painted outside the lines on canvases. Novelists celebrated being on the road, and singers sang about getting their “kicks” out on the highways and by-ways. Their followers declared their liberation by dancing and clubbing all night, going out West and moving back East, and by leaving behind the comfort and confines of the shtetl and the farm for the buzz of Broadway and Main Street. Movement defined what it meant to be truly free and truly American, but so did privacy. This latter idea just didn’t make it into as many songs or books.
Again, there was always a duality to American freedom. For some people to move, and have privacy as they did, others had to have less freedom. For decades before and after the opening of the first public bathrooms, white freedom meant not mixing with Black bodies at work, at schools, and in restaurants, pools, and showers, and not on toilet seats. By urinating in parks and alleys, men claimed more freedom of movement than women. Freedom to move also called for unfreedoms of speech. People were expected to adapt to the new motion-filled public sphere: to hold their tongues, cover their “private” parts, refrain from chewing with their mouths open, and avoid picking their noses. In public bathrooms, people had to adhere to an even more rigid set of instructions. Attendants and law officers monitored public bathrooms to enforce rules of speech and movement and punish those judged to be out of order. Ordinary citizens, as Elizabeth Ann Thompson learned when she wore a tie, deputized themselves to police public bathrooms and their patrons. They insisted that these were places for excretion, but not for other bodily actions. Hands had to be washed, but not armpits or clothes. Patrons could take a minute to rest and collect themselves but could not go to sleep. Eye contact, small talk, and singing (as in the shower) were forbidden. Bodies were unshrouded, but sex was unacceptable. Those who violated the rules would be called out and shunned, badgered, and harassed. When eyerolls and putdowns didn’t curtail unruly conduct, elected officials criminalized the actions of those who went off script. When alleged rule breakers couldn’t be brought into line or made to go away, the screws of surveillance and punishment were made tighter, bringing the bathroom in line with the larger twentieth-century project of making the United States a more punitive nation.
In yet another narrowing of the opening of the public, in the years after World War II, public bathrooms and their users were intentionally neglected. By leaving urinals stained yellow and soap dispensers broken, public officials told patrons that they were no longer worth the barest necessities of government investment. Doubling down on these infrastructural attacks, in the late twentieth century, cities yanked off stall doors and tore down walls. Some communities replaced porcelain toilets with prison-style metal ones, implicitly lumping all users together with criminals. But the most violent and far-reaching act of public bathroom governance in the second half of the twentieth century was the closing of these facilities and the squeezing of this critical aperture for public privacy. Officials made these moves, they said, to protect the public. But really they were protecting some bodies from imagined threats by other bodies. Again talk of protection became the justification for ongoing discrimination and bathroom-made inequality. Yet the most common path to inequality in the late twentieth century was outsourcing toilets to the private sector, to the diner and the bar, to Starbucks and REI outlets. These businesses operated only in some neighborhoods and opened their bathroom doors only to some people, usually to customers only.
Without access to a clean toilet with a sturdy door, individuals couldn’t be in motion. This was why public bathrooms were funded in the first place. And this was precisely the point of closing intimate infrastructures. Beginning as early as the 1930s—just a generation after of the opening of the first public toilets and even while New Dealers built countless new post offices and massive rural electrification plants—local leaders were turning to the public spaces of the public bathroom to cull the streets, beaches, and movie houses of those they feared and defined as dirty, diseased, and unruly. Even at this relative high point of liberalism and economic inclusion, police officers, elected leaders, and editorial writers used toilets to fashion a narrower public, converting some bodies and some behaviors into waste that needed to be flushed away and disappeared from view, violently if necessary.
Somewhat ironically, the overseers of bathrooms paired the disappearing of some people with keeping these same people on display to demean them. Those in charge of intimate infrastructures used closures, maintenance cuts, and the withholding of toilet doors, toilet paper, and toilet seats to stigmatize racial others, the poor, and sexual outcasts and to justify their exclusion. The narratives worked like this: If someone urinated in a back alley and left that area smelling of ammonia, it wasn’t because the public bathroom around the corner had been closed or purposely neglected, it was because that person wasn’t in control of their body. Bathrooms were dirty not because janitors were laid off, but because patrons weren’t as clean as they should be. And their dirt could contaminate others. People like this didn’t deserve more investment. They didn’t warrant the protections that government made possible. Under this logic they didn’t face discrimination, they got what was coming to them. Once these people felt the disregard and abandonment, they would, those in control anticipated, stay away. They would disappear themselves. But this could never be complete. The bodily waste of those blocked from public bathrooms often ended up in the streets and in the gutters, as it did more and more in the twenty-first century. Visible traces of urine and feces point to the inevitable tragedy of the bathroom commons where countless acts of making inequality depleted an invaluable resource that everyone needs for their freedom, dignity, and health.
For the past century and a half, the need for a public bathroom has made mapmakers of everyone in the United States. Navigating a world that values being on the go while also being unseen and unsmelled requires precise knowledge about where to find privacy in public. This knowledge can save an individual from shame and rebuke. But the maps that people carried with them in their heads and sometimes in their pockets as actual guidebooks can also be read as reflections of group status and identity. Then as now, white middle-and upper-class men had a dot for the office, one for the corner café, one for the courthouse, one for the lodge, and another for the gas station. If these men looked white enough and clean enough, they could also head to hotels, tailor shops, and downtown restaurants without being stopped or questioned. If they had to, they could duck around a corner and urinate without much risk of having the police lock them up or whack them across the shins with a billy club. These same men could, of course, use the urinals and stalls in any public bathroom still open. By the start of the twenty-first century, many also had full access to the private options at coffee shops and big box stores that made up most of what was left of the bathroom landscape in the United States.
Women had fewer options than men. For much of the previous century, most women wore more layers of clothing than men did. Over a life span, women needed bathrooms more frequently, when they were menstruating or pregnant. Given long-standing parenting norms, they needed places to change diapers and to breast-feed infants, tasks that for much of the previous century were supposed to happen out of the public eye. Many women also felt they needed more privacy than men. Yet as late as the 1960s, some law offices, factories, classrooms at military colleges and elite universities, and the offices of the US Senate didn’t have a single women’s bathroom. Fewer facilities for women, and fewer still for women of color, meant fewer opportunities for decent jobs and a greater probability of waiting in lines, wasting time, and dealing with the awful feeling of hoping to get to a toilet before it was too late.
When in need of a toilet, people dealing with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) needed one right away. Rather than risk embarrassment, some who dealt with Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis stayed home or refrained from drinking an extra cup of coffee in the morning. Unhoused people needed public bathrooms more than almost anyone else, but they got the fewest options, even as their numbers have soared over the past fifty years. For most of the previous century, people with sight and mobility issues also had almost no place for privacy in public. It was as if all these people were rubbed off the maps of access until the law and public sensibilities changed in the 1990s. By then, however, local governments had shut down or stopped maintaining public bathrooms in parks and subway stations, courthouses and libraries, leaving just about everyone dependent on the private sector and the whims of the person behind the counter.
According to a 2011 report, the United States “had woefully inadequate availability of public restrooms,” with just under eight bathrooms per every 100,000 persons: the same number as Botswana. Iceland led the world with fifty-six toilets per 100,000 people. The numbers from the United States speak to everyday pain and discomfort, and to the consequences of decades of trying to disappear people by closing public restrooms. Using the bathroom to make some people unequal in the past has made it so that every single person in the United States, no matter what zip code or income bracket they come from, is now in a similar situation, with empty maps that show no place to go in public.
Excerpted from For Customers Only: Public Bathrooms and the Making of Inequality by Bryant Simon. © 2026 by Bryant Simon. Published by the University of Chicago Press. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.
