Go Piss, Girl | Kate Wagner

For Customers Only: Public Bathrooms and the Making of American Inequality by Bryant Simon. University of Chicago Press, 376 pages. 2026. As a woman who adheres to contemporary norms of hydration, I need to piss a lot. Every day, there I go, in pursuit of good skin and eternal youth, dutifully carrying my Nalgene as I traverse the city of Chicago. I think myself to be so wise and self-nourishing, so responsible, so with the times—until I get about halfway through the bottle and realize I have made a horrible miscalculation. Suddenly, I am in public and nature is calling. Where can I go? Compared to my neighborhood of Rogers Park, where unfettered bathroom access is basically limited to the public library and Target, my piss map is a little bigger downtown. Union Station has bathrooms. If you’re a little slick with how you’re dressed, you can sneak into the granite-sinked suite in the upper lobby of the Palmer House Hotel. 900 Michigan Avenue, a vertical mall designed by Kohn Pedersen Fox in 1989, has them on the second and fifth floors. Perhaps the best loos, however, are the ones in the Harold Washington Library, which are as teal and pink and postmodern as the rest of the overscaled, overornamented building. But these are paltry offerings. In Chicago, a city of just over 2.7 million, there are only around five hundred publicly accessible restrooms, many of which, such as those in public parks, have strict operating hours and are closed during the winter. That’s one bathroom per every 5,400 persons. This shortage is not unique to the Windy City: From the Big Apple to liberal San Francisco to the Deep South, more often than not, pissing is a privilege with a price tag, not a right. When one in need approaches a promising door, the sign will almost always say “For Customers Only.” This is the title of Bryant Simon’s new book, an edifying journey through what is perhaps one of the most consistent, albeit under-examined, public policy failures in the history of local and national governance: providing the general public with a place to do their business. This isn’t just a matter of convenience or inconvenience; the public restroom is, as Bryant argues, an “entryway” to wider society and, as such, has been the subject of intense debate ever since the city of New York opened the first one in the United States, at Astor Place in 1869. Women’s, civil, and gay rights activists all recognized the loo as a nexus of discrimination and have fought to guarantee access to this most basic tenet of a dignified life. Public bathrooms engage with questions of freedom—of movement in cities and towns and on the road—and privacy, both literally and in terms of the ability to enter one of society’s more vulnerable situations without risk of interrogation or conflict. Bathrooms illuminate the ways those in positions of social power feel entitled over the bodies and actions of others. “Public bathrooms,” Bryant writes, “were always about political power, the seen and unseen political power of infrastructure.” Recent skirmishes over homelessness and trans rights have shown that the fight is far from over. For Customers Only begins with how we all got so wrapped up in public potty discourse in the first place. Though the first public toilet in the United States debuted in New York City, the idea gained wide popularity at the Philadelphia World’s Fair in 1893, where the Clow Sanitary Company offered both free and paid lavatories to the twenty-seven million attendees. But in a world still full of privies, outhouses, and latrines, it was the Workingman’s House model that most captivated fairgoers. This modest two-story dwelling, designed to sell for $3,000 and be paid off by a plumber or a carpenter within ten years, offered something novel: an enclosed bathroom “connected to a network of hidden pipes and traps that brought in clean water and took away what was deemed foul and dirty.” This was evidence of “higher civilization, as well as a truer idea of American life,” as one delighted observer remarked. In addition to offering a history of the public toilet, Simon focuses each chapter on a different struggle in which bathrooms suddenly became a political football. As the population of modern metropolises exploded, there were more people on the go who needed to go. One of—if not the—great ironies of Simon’s historiography is that the problems these original late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century toilet patrons faced are of a kind with those we still face today. People, especially women, were forced to rely on an unreliable network of privately owned spaces: hotel lobbies (Palmer House!), rail stations (Union Station!), and department stores (900 North Michigan Avenue!). Men, meanwhile, had greater access to bathrooms through bars, saloons, and taverns, which were located on every city block and open late into the night. This was untenable. Hence the entry of this history’s only actually progressive thinkers: the literal Progressives of Progressive-era fame. By the 1910s and 1920s, a number of reformers, including prohibitionists and women’s and immigrant rights activists, assembled to campaign in places like Wisconsin and Washington, D.C., for the construction of public bathrooms, or “comfort stations,” as they were euphemistically called. For them, the idea was not just to create civic or social value—to get citizens to feel “the intimate regard for governmental powers” as one reformer put it—but to create, through the sanitary powers of the post-germ theory porcelain bathroom, a sanitary and upstanding American populace. These modern “technologies of excretion,” particularly the flush toilet, which could seemingly disappear your shit into the unknown, “summoned a revolution in government action, class identity, and everyday emotions,” Simon writes. And it was so: A boom never to be repeated in public bathroom construction followed. According to Simon, by 1920, over 160 cities had built comfort stations. Some were exquisitely beautiful, like the Sullivanesque bathrooms at St. Louis Union Station; others were dug underground to hide the unmentionable from view. Unfortunately, gender inequity persisted. Simon cites the astonishing statistic that New York City’s comfort station in Astor Place served one thousand men a day but only twenty-five women, in part because there were more urinals for men than there were toilets for women, and because the stigma around excreting bodily fluids outside the home was much stronger for women. Women’s “biggest gripe,” Simon writes, “was about privacy. They felt the Astor Place bathroom was too public and that they were in plain sight as they made their way to the toilet.” Of course, gender roles impacted this phenomenon—the idea that women can be preyed upon at any second is one that’s still around today. Yet people treated these new facilities with suspicion for reasons beyond gender, cleanliness, or misbehavior. The major question surrounding public bathrooms was who, exactly, was using them, and who was allowed to be in intimate proximity to others. “You never know who is on the other side of [the stall door],” Simon quotes a woman concerned about strangers at the turn of the century—though she could just as easily have been a Republican in Ohio clutching her pearls about trans women in 2026. In addition to offering a history of the public toilet, Simon focuses each chapter on a different struggle in which bathrooms suddenly became a political football. They include the Jim Crow era of racial segregation; the persistent private alternatives to bathrooms, whether through pay toilets (from the 1890s on to the 1970s) or coffee shops today; vice patrols (which reached their height in the 1920s); and scaremongering around crime (with us still today). Consider the Equal Rights Amendment, the proposed amendment at the heart of liberal feminist organizing in the 1970s, which declared that “equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.” Phyllis Schlafly infamously attacked the legislation by claiming that it would end “sex segregation” in bathrooms and put women at risk of being sexually assaulted or otherwise preyed on. This turned the public bathroom into, as Simon writes, “a potent symbol of the traditional social order and the broader chaos that would ensue if some people were made more equal.” One woman from North Carolina feared the end of sex segregation would erase all “protection laws for women” that she argued represented “the culmination of centuries of effort by civilized society.” Perhaps it goes without saying the amendment was ultimately defeated.