Trickle Down

I saw this at a burger joint, today, and realized I hadn't seen a pay toilet since 1973. The reason I remember it was 1973 is that the whole business of pay toilets was my formal introduction to the idea of feminism as an organized movement in which people people took part.

Ma was home with the new baby (who was born in 1973) and my dad was taking me and my older sister to Wurtsboro, NY, where he was to photograph the artwork of an 85 year old woman who chiseled these amazing figurative sculptures out of marble and stone. We didn't own a car, so we were taking the Greyhound bus upstate, and getting picked up by friends who would drive us the rest of the way. NYC's Port Authority was and still is a miserable place. Toilets on a bus, however, are possibly the MOST miserable places. Dad told me and Lisa to head over to the "girls' bathroom" and try to take care of any business before we boarded the bus.

I was 6, Lisa was 8.

As we headed to the women's bathroom, Dad headed to the men's room. What Lisa and I found was a long queue of women. In those days many women's toilet stalls were coin-operated. One needed to put a dime in a slot to unlock the stall door. Lisa and I knew this because, whenever Ma encountered a coin-op toilet stall, she would pay the dime and all three of us would share one stall. On this day at Port Authority, a huge group of women decided to protest the pay toilet system (which ONLY applied to women, with men using free-standing urinals without stalls) by limiting use to one stall. Evidently, the first woman to have used that stall on that morning held the door open for the next woman when she was done. That second woman did the same, and so on...until every woman who stepped into the bathroom and saw all the empty stalls, with a few women waiting to use the one stall without paying, decided they would do the same. In no time at all, the only stall being used was the one that had been paid for that morning, and held open by woman after woman. Of course, the line became very long.

When Lisa and I got there and saw the long line of women, we didn't know what to do. Dad had given us a dime. One of the women on the line explained to us what was happening, and said she thought we should get in line and do the same, and save our dime. That's what we did. It was, as you can imagine, a long wait. But it was sort of nice, the way a woman would come out of the stall and hold the door open for the next woman. I didn't have the language for it then but, in retrospect, I have to say there was a buzz moving through that queue. Good mojo.

Eventually, it was our turn to go into the stall, which was a good thing, because Lisa and I both needed to pee. We both peed, and then we left, making sure to hold the door open for the next woman.

When we went to find Dad, he looked a little annoyed. He asked what had taken so long, and we explained it to him. He listened, and stopped looking annoyed and said something like, "Oh, yeah...you ran into women's libbers." I'd never heard that term before and asked him what that meant. Dad looked as if the question confused him. He didn't say anything for a few seconds. Then he said, "It means it's not fair that some people have to pay to take a pee, and other people don't."

A short time later, pay toilets were done away with in NYC.