User:JustinePorto/Public toilets in Maryland

Public toilets in Maryland, commonly called washrooms, are found at a rate of six per 100,000 people. They have a history of being used to fight disease and improve public sanitation. They have also been used as part of racial segregation policies. After moving to pay toilets in the 1950s in Baltimore, these largely disappeared by the 1980s.

Public toilets
washroom is one of the most commonly used words for public toilet in the United States. Euphemisms are often used to avoid discussing the purpose of toilets. Words used include toilet, restroom, bathroom, lavatory and john.

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

History
Railway stations began building big terminals in the 187s, 1880s and 1890s. One of their features were big public toilet facilities. Train station designer Walter G. Berg said in his 1893 that public toilet facilities should be used to keep undesirable elements out. In the South, this included colored people.

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.

Baltimore was one of the biggest cities by population in the United States in 1900, and a lot of tenement housing in the early 1900s lacks toilet provisions. The Progressive Era saw reformists make a major push to address public hygiene. As part of this push, they sought to improve the toilet and sanitation in tenement housing in cities across the United States.

Starting in the 1920s, middle and upper-class women living in cities stopped using public toilets, and instead shifted to toilets in facilities like hotels, theaters, train stations and department stores. While these toilets were free to use, the cultural expectation was that they would be exclusively used by clients or people who had purchased tickets. This helped ensure that these facilities were not accessible to working class women.

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. Public toilets in Baltimore were racially segregated in the 1920s.

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. Racially segregated public toilets were very common in the 1960s. When the Western Electric Company in Baltimore implemented a desegregated work toilet policy in the 1960s, white members of the union there went on strike.

Baltimore was one of the largest cities in the United States in 1950. Most city operated public toilets in the 1950s and 1960s were pay toilets. The fee to access these toilets was around a nickel or a dime, with the money earned being invested back into toilet maintenance and upkeep. By 1980, coin-operated toilets had almost disappeared from the public landscape.

Gavin Grimm filed a lawsuit challenging Gloucester County School Board's rule that said students must use the public toilet that matches with their sex and not their gender identity or use a single occupancy toilet in 2016. The case saw an appeals court decided that the rule was in violation of Title IX. An earlier court had said it was not a violation. An appeal was made to the Supreme Court decided in June 2021 not to look at the case, and instead left in place the 2020 Richmond-based 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that said it was a Title IX violation. Failure to take the case, with Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito indicating they would have liked to, meant that the decision was only applicable to Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia and West Virginia whose jurisdiction is covered by the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.