User:JustinePorto/Public toilets in Florida

Public toilets in Florida are found at a rate of six per 100,000 people. They were initially used to combat public health issues. They were later part of racial and feminist battles.

Public toilets
washroom is one of the most commonly used words for public toilet in the United States.

A 2021 study found there were six public toilets per 100,000 people.

In 2018, Lonely Planet labeled the Art Deco toilets in Miami Beach as one of the fifteen most interesting in the world. Some of the toilets have been listed on the US National Register of Historic Places.

Tampa International Airport spent several million dollars renovating their public toilets. After that, they were a finalist for Cintas's Best Bathrooms Award.

History
The Rockefeller Sanitary Commission was founded in 1909 to combat hookworm disease in the South. A survey was done of 11 southern states, which confirmed the presence of hookworm in 700 countries. A chief cause of spread of hookworm disease as open defecation in farmland. The Rockefeller Sanitary Commission program helped install public toilets and promote their use as part of their efforts to reduce hookworm disease. This was coupled with offering free exams and health treatment for hookworm disease.

Because Prohibition saw an increase in the construction of public toilets to address the new found demand, many municipalities located outside the South built sex-segregated public toilets that were essentially the same construction inside, with the same number of stalls and layout for each. In the South, public toilet facilities tended to have four toilet sections that reinforced racial segregation, one for white women, one for white men, one for colored men and one for colored women.

When NASA was designing toilets for the space program in the late 1950s, they had considered throwing solid waste out of the capsules. In the end, they determined this would be diplomatically unacceptable so that plan was not followed through.

Racially segregated public toilets were very common in the 1960s. There was a push back against building public toilets in Jim Crow states during the period between 1865 and 1960, because it meant that local governments were not just required to build two toilets, one for men and one for women, but four toilets, one each for men and women who were white and who were colored.

Florida and North Carolina had dealt with the desegregation of public toilets. This likely made state residents more open to claims by Equal Rights Amendment opponents to the passage of the constitutional amendment on the grounds it would lead to unisex public toilets. Illinois, Oklahoma, Florida and North Carolina did not ratify the Equal Rights Amendment. It is possible the opposition framing the constitutional amendment as requiring all public toilets become unisex played some role in the lack of ratification.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, public pay toilets were viewed by feminist activists as sexist because public urinals were free but public sit style toilets were not. The Committee to End Pay Toilets in America, more commonly known as CEPTIA, tried to change this by getting municipals on public pay toilets. Their first success was in Chicago in 1973. This was then followed by municipal and state wide success in a strong of additional states including Alaska, California, Florida, Illinois, Iowa, Michigan, Ohio, New Jersey, New York, Tennessee, and Wyoming.

Pensacola based Gulf South Industries president Kathie Jones invented a urinal for women that could be used in women's public washrooms in the late 1980s that would allow women to pee standing up by using a cup on the end of a flexible tube.

The Tampa Bay Bandits in the United States Football League were so broke by the end of their history that the coach paid for toilet paper in team facilities out of his own pocket.