User:JustinePorto/Public toilets in Iowa

Public toilets in Iowa are found at a rate of sixteen per 100,000 people. Pay toilets were banned in the 1970s because they were viewed as sexist.

Public toilets
A 2021 study found there were 16 public toilets per 100,000 people.

History
As the Prohibition effort began to take more shape in the 1910s, large cities in the Northeast and Midwest had women's groups advocating for the creation of large numbers of comfort stations as a way of discouraging men from entering drinking establishments in search of public toilets. This was successful in many places in getting cities to build comfort stations, but the volume of new public toilets built was rarely enough to meet public needs.

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.