Over time, the luxury of privacy morphed into a must-have. It became not only desirable to be alone on the can, but necessary for anyone who wanted to stay on the right side of morality. People who did not practise solo toileting were regarded as lacking in decency. And that went double for women. An inescapable physical function became shameful. It’s difficult to overstate the impact this prudery had on Western culture. It’s front and centre today in our toilet humour, and in the epic number of euphemisms we employ to talk about excreting. A notion grew along with the status-symbol toilet: sharing a bathroom with those outside your family was something to avoid. It’s even come to the point, today, that we don’t want to smell, hear, or feel any evidence, such as warm toilet seats, of those who’ve gone before us. Bathrooms remain one of our central taboos. So, by early in Queen Victoria’s reign, private pooing had become a mark of prestige. The masses, of course, wanted it. And George Jennings would give it to them.
Jennings, a sanitary engineer, installed the first public flushing toilets in London – for both men and women – at the Great Exhibition of 1851. Jennings installed his ‘monkey closets’ at the Crystal Palace, the almost one-million-square-foot temporary building set up in Hyde Park from May through October to house the exhibition. These inaugural public conveniences boasted lush waiting rooms and two dozen attendants. Users paid a penny or halfpenny for access to small private cupboards with flush toilets inside. The monkey closets were a marker of national pride and a banner of English technological progress to show off to the twenty-eight countries represented at the fair. Historian Lucinda Lambton notes in her book Temples of Convenience & Chambers of Delight that women in the nineteenth century suffered embarrassment at the idea of water closets. No doubt – they lived in a society that told them to act that way. (A history of Thomas Crapper & Co. says women were given to fainting at the mere sight of his window displays.) But some, at least, overcame their shame. Jennings’s closets were used more than eight hundred thousand times over the course of the exhibition. The Crystal Palace toilets were a watershed. They gave many Londoners their first look at (and first chance to try) flush toilets. They also gave regular citizens the idea that flush toilets and urinals could – and perhaps should – be a matter of public concern.
Public bathrooms increasingly became conveniences of moral, political, and hygienic necessity – not to mention sparkling exemplars of nation-building. Little expense was spared in building them in the UK’s major centres. Public toilets in England’s largest cities became a proud part of the urban landscape (though many were actually underground, often in response to surrounding business owners who linked public bathrooms with impropriety). Their entrances were magnificent, their urinals and countertops marble, their windows leaded stained glass, and their fixtures ornate. Dignitaries dedicated them. Americans and Canadians swelled with the same pride – and no dearth of competitiveness – in providing public health benefits to city dwellers. In the second half of the nineteenth century, free public baths and pools were built in major US cities. Toronto constructed lavish underground on-street public conveniences with attendants and services like shoe shining and boot cleaning.
Jennings’s Crystal Palace monkey closets were what pushed toilets into the spotlight, allowing them to transform in the public imagination from private luxury to urban necessity. And seven years later, London’s Great Stink was the movement that turned the bowels of the city’s jury-rigged sewer system into a public project and a civic responsibility.
But it wasn’t all guts and glory.
As the twentieth century progressed, on-street bathrooms mushroomed in the UK, and their installation became common in the US and Canada in transit stations, shopping centres, airports, and other commercial and public buildings. Built into all of them were design and access barriers, and built into those impediments was a series of fights about the right to public space that would continue through that century and beyond. Despite the publicgood zeitgeist that surrounded them, early-twentieth-century Western public bathrooms cemented themselves as places for able, adult, white men. And not many others.
Crystal Palace aside, women were largely left out of this provision parade. In fact, it wasn’t until four decades after the Great Exhibition, in 1893, that the first permanent public toilets for women were installed on London’s Strand. In Toronto, early onstreet public bathrooms were, likewise, built only for men. Even in locations where women later enjoyed conveniences alongside men’s, the number of water closets for them were dwarfed by the number for men, who also had urinals. Women’s public conveniences were diabolically chicken-and-eggish at this time. The dearth of toilets both reflected that women weren’t out of the house as much as men and reinforced that women could not go out, lest they be caught short due to the lack of provision. In any case, very few working-class women were able to afford the common penny or halfpenny fee. (Men were only required to pay for the use of water closets; public urinals were free.)
In reality, women had begun to travel urban areas in great numbers as part of the growing workforce many years before, during the Industrial Revolution – but they weren’t always visible. A certain level of denial was at play here, on the part of men and women who couldn’t handle the upheaval to women’s ‘natural’ place in the home – quite simply, people refused to acknowledge that women were part of city life. There were also myriad measures in place that hid women in plain sight. For example, the main branch of the Bank of Nova Scotia in Halifax was built in 1931 with a separate ‘ladies’ banking room.’ (Today, I understand, it’s someone’s office, so though I am a lady – ha! – I was allowed to pay the balance of my car loan at a regular teller.) Early children’s public bathroom needs were even more unspoken than women’s, so family bathrooms and changing tables were unthinkable. Forget ‘seen and not heard’ – when it came to public toilet provision for children in the nineteenth century, it was more like not seen and not heard.
It’s not surprising that the first of the great post-Victorian public bathroom campaigns argued that women needed provision that at least mirrored men’s. But women and children weren’t the only ones being left out of the potty party. Aids for people with mobility challenges started to creep into private homes and institutions mid-twentieth-century, but few, if any, grab bars, deep sinks, or larger stalls were found in public bathrooms. In the US, standards for accessibility were laid out in 1961. The rules were the world’s first, which deserves some ballyhooing, but they lacked any accompanying legal stipulations. It wasn’t until the 1990s that accessibility regulations were actually enforced throughout the US, the UK, and Canada. Up to that point, wheelchair users took a chance when they left their houses; they could find themselves in any public building or on any downtown street without a bathroom to use. And as we’ll see, the fight is far from over.
The challenging of racially segregated public bathrooms wasn’t quite so slow-moving, but what it lacked in red tape, it made up in blood. A bathroom-by-bathroom, drinking-fountain-bydrinking-fountain movement took place across the US starting in 1961, when groups of self-organized Freedom Riders travelled by plane, train, and bus through the American South. Along their travels, they undertook the deceptively simple acts of loitering in waiting areas or using public facilities – white Freedom Riders used ‘Coloreds Only’ public spaces and African-American Freedom Riders used facilities labelled as separate for whites. Their actions were to ensure that the December 1960 Supreme Court ruling forbidding discrimination in transportation services against interstate passengers was being upheld.
It wasn’t.
Many Freedom Riders were beaten and aggressively arrested. In rural Alabama, a mob attacked a Greyhound bus carrying Freedom Riders and others. The gang of men firebombed the bus and tried to barricade the door. They then beat passengers as they escaped. Throughout the 1960s, the patchwork of Jim Crow laws that kept segregation in place legally, and allowed it to flourish socially, was dismantled. But segregation dies hard. Black and Hispanic Americans still report being denied access to public bathrooms. It’s rarely overt racism these days. But the actions of store employees, who can choose who gets to use locked bathrooms and who doesn’t, can amount to the same thing.
What all this toilet strife points to is how culturally constipated we are when it comes