it out.
The story of how Clara Greed became the UK’s ‘Toilet Lady’ finds its genesis at Paddington Station with a pay-toilet turnstile and an ill-mannered station manager. When the central London transit station was refurbished in the early 1990s, pay gates were installed at the entrance to its basement-level public toilets. The facilities had been free since 1963’s Public Lavatories Act made it illegal to put pay turnstiles in front of any public convenience. The turnstile part of that statute was repealed in 1981, and then, one day, without warning, there were nasty mechanical gates staring at Clara Greed.
Something lit a fire under her that day. She passed through Paddington regularly and just as regularly used the toilets there. She was furious. But not just about the twenty-pence fee. She was furious that the toilets had been renovated but left down a steep set of steps into the basement. She was furious that the turnstiles were excluding people from freely going about their natural bodily business. She was furious that the toilets were suddenly no longer the province of anyone visiting Paddington. She was furious that public bathroom provision – which she knew intuitively was a human right, even if her work and her teaching hadn’t brought her to the point of saying it outright yet – was being hacked away when it ought to have been improving. She phoned up the station manager when she got home. They fought. He ended the call with a suggestion for Greed. ‘If you want to go to the toilet,’ he told her, ‘you can go round the hedge!’
Greed calls this her ‘conversion experience.’ The urban planner and rock-ribbed feminist launched an inadvertent career as a defender of free and abundant public bathroom access, focused particularly on the needs of women. ‘Through no fault of my own,’ she says, ‘I became the Toilet Lady.’ Today, Greed is an emerita professor in the Architecture and the Built Environment faculty at the University of the West of England in Bristol. ‘I don’t look like a dirty-minded toilet campaigner,’ she jokes. But that’s never stopped others from looking at her that way. Because almost invariably, Greed has found herself delivering a difficult truth to architects, planners, and municipal governments: when it comes to public bathrooms, you’re really screwing up.
One of the most visible problems is, ironically, one few in those professions seem able to see – the leagues of women waiting for the can in public buildings. What that’s about, Greed says, isn’t the women. It’s the washrooms. Try this counting trick next time you’re out: even when floor space is equal for men’s and women’s restrooms, men often get more provision. Where women get six cubicles, men might get four cubicles plus four urinals. Consider the Pavilion toilets I spent so many days trying to get into with my kids – three toilets and two urinals on the men’s side and four toilets on the women’s.
But that’s not where the inequality ends. Women, biologically, need more provision. For one thing, they take longer to empty their bladders. I’ve been rhyming off the most-cited numbers since I first started researching toilet design problems in the early aughts: men take, on average, forty-five seconds to pee; women, ninety-six. A 2017 study out of Ghent University in Belgium cites times of sixty seconds for men and ninety for women. Pretty close and point taken. But women also spend more time because they have to squeeze into a stall, close the door, lock it (if you’re a man, ask a close-by woman how frequently bathroom slide locks are misaligned). Women must take down or remove clothing to urinate. Most men walk in, unzip, and let ’er rip. And third: women use the bathroom more frequently than men. Again, biology: women menstruate, women can be pregnant. But also, society: women are more likely to be caregivers for children, the elderly, and the disabled. ‘The men, as you know,’ Greed says, ‘waltz in and out.’
Or don’t. In the absence of a toilet, desperate men, by virtue of simple mechanics, can easily pee en plein air. This biological ace card also adds options to the provision men get inside buildings. Men can use toilets, regular urinals, and trough urinals – pretty much any hole with a sewer-heading drain will do for an able-bodied man. Women pee in toilets; ergo, they need toilets in their bathrooms − which helps contribute to the unequal ratios in men’s versus women’s rooms. Urinals simply take up less room. So where square footage for men’s and women’s bathrooms is equal, men usually get more opportunities to go.
Urinals are efficient and effective, no question. But urinals for women have largely been a non-starter. American Standard sold one in the 1950s, but uptake was slow, probably because of the increasing popularity of women wearing trousers. It was discontinued. Portable urine-diverting devices like the P-Mate – which we’ll meet again in a later chapter – are considered by most women articles of last resort. And cisgendered women aren’t the only ones left out. While some trans women might have the bodily equipment to use urinals, if they’re using the women’s rooms that match their gender, they won’t find any urinals in there. Some trans men will not have the equipment to use urinals, even when they find them in the men’s rooms they are rightly using. Short take on the universal usefulness of urinals? It’s a toilet, toilet, toilet, toilet world.
Compounding the problem: men dominate planning, design, and construction. When Greed studied architecture and planning at Cardiff University in the 1980s, she was one of only four women. And all the professors were men. The male-to-female ratios in these fields aren’t much better today, especially among the ranks of ‘starchitects’ whose splashy, celebrated art can fall shy of practicality, particularly when it comes to women’s needs. Off the top of her head, Greed cites Jonathan Adams’s Wales Millennium Centre in Cardiff and Paul Andreu’s Dubai International Airport Terminal 3. ‘Huge queues. It’s atrocious. A major thing like this and they can’t even provide toilets.’
Men, Greed has discovered, don’t appreciate her investigations into their bathroom business. ‘Talking about how many urinals should be provided or how long it takes men to urinate – some people probably think a girl shouldn’t know these kinds of things.’ And pee is mild on the spectrum of Greed’s favourite topics. Periods, Greed says, make men go red. ‘I used to be very professional and technical,’ she tells me, ‘and now I don’t care. I just say what I want to say.’
How much money, I wonder, would you have if you tallied up all the dimes collected in automated stall-lock pay toilets in the 1970s and 1980s across North America? Pay-to-pee, for a time, wasn’t unexceptional in the United States and Canada. The early twentieth century saw the burgeoning of this trend, which spiderwebbed its way across the continent by way of transit terminals and shopping malls. By the 1970s, it’s estimated there were fifty thousand pay toilets in the United States. Ten cents a tinkle.
Pay toilets were flushed out of America by the efforts of a small committee of free-weeing advocates known as CEPTIA – the Committee to End Pay Toilets in America, about which the journalist Aaron Gordon wrote a colourful narrative history in 2014 in Pacific Standard magazine. Cooked up at a Howard Johnson pay toilet off the Pennsylvania Turnpike by two brothers and proselytized by their friends and family, CEPTIA argued that elimination is inevitable – dime or no dime – and demanding money for a basic bodily function is a violation of human rights. Moreover, CEPTIA argued, stall locks represented discrimination against women, since urinals usually remained free. The feminist argument was the one that hit hardest in Equal Rights Amendment−engrossed mid-seventies America. First city – and soon state – governments banned the locks.
Locks were part of the scenery at the local mall when I was growing up in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, a suburb of Halifax. I remember always stopping in to get a dime from my grandmother, who worked at the House of Bridal Fashions. Other times, I slithered under the stall door to avoid the charge (a dime clearly meant more to me then). Apparently, I wasn’t alone: Gordon’s history notes the four techniques of foiling stall locks, rolled out by CEPTIA (who, besides being a grassroots social-justice powerhouse, was also delightfully jocular) at a press conference in 1973. There was my own ‘American Crawl’; the ‘Doorman,’ where one user holds the door for the next; the ‘Stick It,’ in which a piece of Scotch tape invisibly covers the lock, preventing it from engaging; and the ‘Stuff’ – same idea, but with toilet
