IN-PERSON: Prague – Section B

Abstract

In 1896, the International Hygienic and Pharmaceutical Exposition of Prague named Pullman, Illinois, “the most perfect town in the world.,” due in large part to the town revolutionary sanitation system that allowed each of the planned-town’s dwellings to have access to water and toilet facilities. This award highlights a growing, international concern with hygiene and sanitation at a time when the social forces of urbanization, industrialization, and immigration combined to increasingly lure people out of the private realm and into the public. At the turn of the twentieth century, people required dedicated sites to perform private bodily activities while out in public. Public toilets and restrooms emerged at the boundary of the public and private during this era in order to accommodate bodies in public. These sites became acceptable because they were designed to create a sense of privacy in public. Early public toilet designers sought to impose their understanding of privacy through the physical regulation of users’ bodies. Interrogating the physical construction of these sites allow us to explore how gender, race, and class exclusion made it socially acceptable for people to relieve themselves in public. This presentation combines social history with a material-culture-based analysis to examine the growing importance of these private spaces in public places. This presentation utilizes case studies from the United States and Europe to offer a comparative analysis of the emergence of these sites dedicated to “public relief.” The traces of these spaces and their creators’ intentions continue to inform our everyday experiences in public places.