For Customers Only
Public Bathrooms and the Making of American Inequality
Will be published approx. on 8. September 2026
Book
Hardback
376 pages
978-0-226-83518-1 (ISBN)
Description
Public toilets determine who gets everyday dignity, freedom of movement, and civic belonging-and who doesn't.
Americans have nowhere to go. Nationwide, countless public spaces lack one crucial thing: bathrooms, never mind ones that are safe and functional. Yet in the past, political leaders celebrated the opening of public bathrooms with boisterous press conferences and showy ribbon-cutting ceremonies.
For Customers Only is the first book to tell the larger history of public bathrooms in the United States, a fascinating story characterized by persistent discrimination, squeamishness about unknown bodies, and disinvestment in public amenities. Acclaimed writer and historian Bryant Simon argues that restrooms aren't only an architectural feature, but an emblem of control and inequality. In the late nineteenth century, cities vied for the newest and biggest comfort stations to meet the demands of their bustling economies and accommodate a broad and growing public. They built restrooms with gold-domed entrances and ornamented stall doors to inspire cleanliness and order.
But officials soon grew anxious about who might take advantage of this privacy: gay men, the unhoused, and eventually drug users. And as the civil rights movement challenged segregation, officials in the north and south closed public toilets rather than integrate them. By the end of the twentieth century, only people with means could use private bathrooms while out and about-provided they made a purchase at a business. Today, as the fights over trans rights reveal, bathroom access remains a flash point across the country. Meanwhile, some municipalities are again calling for widely available public toilets, but as a tool for economic revitalization, not a public necessity.
The political and cultural history of a squirm-inducing subject, For Customers Only reveals the real and symbolic power of the most ordinary of things. Bathrooms, Simon shows, have always reflected our fragmented national values. Whether these spaces will ever become more accessible and inclusive is ultimately up to us.
Americans have nowhere to go. Nationwide, countless public spaces lack one crucial thing: bathrooms, never mind ones that are safe and functional. Yet in the past, political leaders celebrated the opening of public bathrooms with boisterous press conferences and showy ribbon-cutting ceremonies.
For Customers Only is the first book to tell the larger history of public bathrooms in the United States, a fascinating story characterized by persistent discrimination, squeamishness about unknown bodies, and disinvestment in public amenities. Acclaimed writer and historian Bryant Simon argues that restrooms aren't only an architectural feature, but an emblem of control and inequality. In the late nineteenth century, cities vied for the newest and biggest comfort stations to meet the demands of their bustling economies and accommodate a broad and growing public. They built restrooms with gold-domed entrances and ornamented stall doors to inspire cleanliness and order.
But officials soon grew anxious about who might take advantage of this privacy: gay men, the unhoused, and eventually drug users. And as the civil rights movement challenged segregation, officials in the north and south closed public toilets rather than integrate them. By the end of the twentieth century, only people with means could use private bathrooms while out and about-provided they made a purchase at a business. Today, as the fights over trans rights reveal, bathroom access remains a flash point across the country. Meanwhile, some municipalities are again calling for widely available public toilets, but as a tool for economic revitalization, not a public necessity.
The political and cultural history of a squirm-inducing subject, For Customers Only reveals the real and symbolic power of the most ordinary of things. Bathrooms, Simon shows, have always reflected our fragmented national values. Whether these spaces will ever become more accessible and inclusive is ultimately up to us.
Reviews / Votes
"Simon's brilliant latest shines new light on the startling ways in which our most basic bodily functions became ground zero in this country's slow and steady move to privatize public space, to exacerbate racial and class inequality, and to gatekeeper morality. This most intimate cultural, political, and unsettling urban history is both masterful and a must read." -- Heather Ann Thompson, author of "Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising and Its Legacy" "Far more than just an engaging history of the public toilet, Simon's book reveals that this humble technology has been used for over a century to amplify the inequalities in American life. Simon traces the restriction of restroom access as a method-sometimes deliberately cruel-of humiliating the powerless. He offers vivid anecdotes about racial segregation, the denial of bodily privacy for the poor, anti-gay vice raids, the gendered denial of 'potty parity,' and the current battles over transgender access-as well as stories about brave individuals who challenged the status quo. For Customers Only suggests that inequality can be felt most painfully within the human body itself." -- Peter C. Baldwin, author of "In the Watches of the Night: Life in the Nocturnal City, 1820-1930" "For Customers Only is a vivid and engaging history of public restrooms in the United States, tracing their rise as proud markers of modern life to their steady disappearance from the civic landscape. Simon shows how disinvestment, privatization, and policies shaped by race, gender, and sexuality turned these essential spaces into flashpoints of fear, surveillance, and exclusion. At once incisive and accessible, the book reveals how something as ordinary as a restroom illuminates the deeper inequalities embedded in American public life." -- Neil J. Young, author of "Coming Out Republican: A History of the Gay Right" "Public bathrooms offer a uniquely revealing lens on modern life-one that brings into focus the everyday structures that shape access, belonging, and exclusion. In For Customers Only, Simon uses this lens to tell a sweeping, deeply researched story of public restrooms in the United States. Where earlier books have focused on gender, Simon widens the frame to trace how something as basic as a toilet has been governed by inequalities of class, race, and citizenship. At once rigorous and highly readable, For Customers Only reexamines public space as a site of ongoing struggles over rights and social justice." -- Olga Gershenson, editor of "Ladies and Gents: Public Toilets and Gender"More details
Language
English
Place of publication
Chicago
United States
Publishing group
The University of Chicago Press
Illustrations
20 halftones
Dimensions
Height: 229 mm
Width: 152 mm
Weight
454 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-226-83518-1 (9780226835181)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Person
Bryant Simon is the Laura H. Carnell Professor of History and the academic chair of the honors program at Temple University. He is the author most recently of The Hamlet Fire: The Tragic Story of Cheap Food, Cheap Government, and Cheap Lives, as well as Everything but the Coffee: Learning about America from Starbucks. He is a regular guest on the History Channel and a contributor to outlets like the New York Daily News, Washington Post, and Philadelphia Inquirer. Simon splits his time between Philadelphia and the Jersey Shore.
Content
Introduction. Bodies, Maps, and Inequality
1. At Home, in Private
2. Building an Infrastructure of Privacy
3. Misbehaving
4. Killers and Closings
5. Jim Crow: Ratcheting Up Inequality
6. Paying for Inequality
7. Outsourcing Everything
8. Protests and Backlashes
9. The Business of Reopening Public Bathrooms
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
1. At Home, in Private
2. Building an Infrastructure of Privacy
3. Misbehaving
4. Killers and Closings
5. Jim Crow: Ratcheting Up Inequality
6. Paying for Inequality
7. Outsourcing Everything
8. Protests and Backlashes
9. The Business of Reopening Public Bathrooms
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index