User:JustinePorto/Public toilets in Wisconsin

Public toilets in Wisconsin, commonly called washrooms, are found at a rate of around fourteen public toilets per 100,000 people.

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 fourteen public toilets per 100,000 people.

The John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Sheboygan contain six public toilets, each with a different artistic inspiration.

History
Milwaukee was one of the biggest cities by population in the United States in 1900. 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. In the 1900s, a Progressive Era campaign  by municipalities, academics and socialists resulted in efforts in Detroit, Toledo, Chicago, Cleveland and Madison to replace saloons with comfort stations.

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.

As a result of the passage of the 18th amendment, the Wisconsin legislature passed a state law requiring every municipality to provide residents with public toilets. Such efforts had already been underway in Milwaukee as a result of the local socialists, civic organizations and public health officials. Smaller towns were more resistance to following this law, some in part because of the local costs that needed to be born in order to do so. One solution they offered was to designate the toilets in public libraries and police stations as the municipal public toilets. Others just ignored it. By 1927, fewer than half of the state's municipalities were in compliance with the law.

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.

The Works Progress Administration during the 1930s tried to increase access to public toilets across the United States. Their focus though tended to be on building such facilities in national parks and other civic areas, not at improving access in urban environments.

Milwaukee was one of the largest cities in the United States in 1950. Most cities in the United States operated public pay toilets during this period. 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. 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. By 1980, coin-operated toilets had almost disappeared from the public landscape.