User:JustinePorto/Public toilets in New Jersey

Public toilets in New Jersey are relatively rare at four per 100,000 people. Women stopped using government public toilets in the 1920 in favor of toilets located at private businesses. A push in the 1970s saw many public pay toilets disappear because people thought they were sexist.

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

History
Railway stations began building big terminals in the 1870s, 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.

Discussing the state of public urinals in Newark in 1883, a New Jersey newspaper said they were, "a place that reeks with filth and upon whose walls are written the vilest obscenities."

Newark and Jersey City were some of the biggest cities by population in the United States in 1900, a time when a lot of tenement housing lacked 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.

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 1900s and 1910s, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Denver, Detroit, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Seattle, Toledo, Worcester, Salt Lake City, Providence, Binghamton, Hartford, Wilkes-Barre, Scranton, Portland and the District of Columbia all built underground public toilets, most located in the city center in the local business district. The prestige of building underground public comfort stations was so high that some towns and cities who were unable to afford underground public toilets opted for none instead.

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.

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.