March Fong Eu insisted that she wasn’t a feminist, and that she wasn’t an activist. She didn’t look like one, certainly not a 1969 version of one, not with her beauty shop hairdo, matching checkered skirt and jacket, and sensible pumps. She looked like a mom headed to a PTA meeting or a middle-of-the-road Democratic politician, which she was, even if she was something of a trailblazer: the first Asian American woman to win statewide office in California.

But there she was on a stage, not far from the state house in Sacramento, doing a little guerilla theater. Sledgehammer in hand, she stood next to a toilet chained to a platform, took a whack, and missed. On her second try, she landed a direct hit and shattered the white porcelain fixture. The crowd cheered, and the band played “the best things in life are free …”

The people clapping and hooting for Eu were there to show support for a California Assembly bill that would ban pay toilets across the state and usher in an era of free and extensive public toileting. But the effort fell short in its aims. It outlawed pay toilets without delineating or funding any plans to replace them. The law, the pay toilets, and the problem of where to go to the bathroom together turned out to be quiet emblems of the tensions, hopes, and failed promises of government support for people’s everyday needs in 20th-century America.

Eu’s actual target was a toilet stall lockbox, first patented by an itinerant German inventor before World War I. To open the stalls, patrons had to drop in a nickel or a dime and turn a knob and open the bathroom door. The private companies that owned, manufactured, and serviced the lockbox devices split the proceeds with the municipalities and businesses that installed them.

Walt Disney put in one of California’s first pay toilets in 1935, at his Walt’s restaurant on Hollywood Boulevard. Within a few years, the shiny silver lockboxes popped up in bus stations, court houses, and airports across the state. By 1960, there were 50,000 pay toilets across the United States. The Nik-O-Lok Company of Indianapolis operated around half of them. Its 15 million annual users generated more than $30 million in revenues and prompted the owner of a rival firm to call the company “the General Motors of pay toilets.”

But as much as businesses and local officials loved them, pay toilets infuriated the people who relied on them. Almost everyone had a story to tell about not making it in time, or about pay toilet anxiety. Without the right change, what were your options? Take a chance on finding another bathroom? Slither under the stall door across a sticky, urine-soaked floor? Hope someone would keep the door open as they exited? A newspaper writer in Red Bluff, California, north of Sacramento, declared in the 1950s that “the man that introduced pay toilets . . . should be shunned by all busy people.” A New Jersey resident called pay toilets “an abomination.”

It was no wonder pay toilets gave rise to a political cause. Eu became one of the leaders of the free toilet movement. She likened pay toilets to an unfair “pink tax”: a fee imposed on women, like overpriced haircuts and beauty products, that men—who could use urinals for free—had to pay less than half as much.

Eu had an ally in the Sacramento Bee columnist and merry prankster Tom Horton, who framed the matter as a universal rights issue. With a nod to Berkeley student protests of the early 1960s, he launched the “Free-Seat Movement,” later renamed “Free Latrines Unlimited for Suffering Humanity,” or FLUSH. FLUSH members, Horton said, were in “total opposition to the unjust, if not unconstitutional, taxation of a basic freedom.” As an act of resistance, they pledged to “always hold the door open for a friend.”

Organizing and rabble-rousing eventually paid off. In 1975, California became one of the first of a dozen or more states to ban pay toilets. Scores of cities, led by Chicago, did the same. By the start of the 21st century, lock boxes on stall doors were virtual relics, found only in small-town bus stations and flea markets hugging country roads.

But pay toilets haven’t gone away. They have just changed how they look, how much they cost, and who can access them. Without a steady stream of coins, and with federal funding in sharp decline, city and state governments closed many public bathrooms and cut back on maintenance for the ones still open, leaving these places dirty and off limits to many.  

As it so often does, the private sector stepped into this public void. Starbucks led the way. The coffee giant wedged bathrooms into its store designs and business models. Company officials understood the middle-class psyche: People needed away-from-home bathrooms and didn’t trust the cleanliness or safety of neglected public facilities. Starbucks also knew that customers would pay a premium—the cost of drink—to save themselves from public embarrassment and discomfort.

All of this has made Starbucks the biggest pay toilet firm of the 21st century. The cost of using a toilet, as a result, has gone up 500% since the Nik-O-Lok heyday. By charging the price of a tall latte to use a bathroom, Starbucks filtered out the poor and the unhoused. The end result is both a garish indicator of inequality in America and a looming public health threat. 

This all became tragically clear when a deadly outbreak of Hepatitis A, a strain of the virus virtually nonexistent in the well-plumbed Western world in recent years, hit San Diego in 2016. This public health crisis sickened nearly 600 people, killed 20, and cost the city millions of dollars in vaccines, hospital visits, and new porta potties. And it was caused, experts agreed, by the scarcity of accessible sinks and the closing of several public bathrooms just before the outbreak began. 

This infrastructural gap has some policy makers looking to the past. In 2023, Sean Elo-Rivera, a progressive-leaning San Diego City Council member, floated the old idea of installing pay toilets and using the revenues to keep them decently maintained. “We have heard from a number of people in the community that they would gladly pay a quarter or 50 cents in order to have access to clean bathrooms,” Elo-Rivera told a newspaper reporter. He predicted that tourists, transit riders, and people experiencing homelessness would also benefit. “This is not meant to be a barrier,” Elo-Rivera insisted, “but actually to increase the number of restrooms out there.”

Without saying it outright, he seemed to acknowledge that this was all that voters and his fellow lawmakers would be willing to do to fund and maintain accessible public toilets. But Elo-Rivera’s pay toilet plan, which would require overturning California’s 50-year-old state ban, pointed to how much the playing field had changed and how much social imaginations had narrowed. Widely loathed and acknowledged in their heyday as unfair by everyone from suburban housewives to long-­haired counterculture followers, pay toilets amount to the best government can think to do today.

This is the political moment of now, when the solutions to the privatization of government are more privatization—and the result is steeper inequality.

Bryant Simon is professor of history at Temple University. He is the author, most recently, of For Customers Only: Public Bathrooms and the Making of American Inequality.

Primary editor: Eryn Brown | Secondary editor: Sarah Rothbard