Culture  /  Explainer

Bathing in Controversy

For a century, school showers have anticipated the current debate about bathrooms.
Steve Viale/Library of Congress

In March, the U.S. Supreme Court vacated a case about whether schools have to let transgender students use bathrooms and locker rooms that are consistent with their gender identity. Similar issues will now be re-heard in courts of law and of public opinion. School bathrooms have become an epicenter in the culture wars, however unlikely they might seem as a civil-rights battleground.

Yet school bathrooms have always been sites of contestation, where prevailing cultural anxieties have been projected onto them. As an amenity, school facilities blur the distinction between private and public, intimate and communal. As a space, they reside in the borderlands between adult supervision and adolescent freedom. Ever since they were introduced more than a century ago, school toilets, showers, and locker rooms have been implicated in major social debates in America. Their history illuminates the current debate around trans students in school bathrooms.

School baths began as a Progressive Era reform to counter unease about public hygiene and disease. Against the backdrop of rapid urbanization, high immigration, and the rise of mass education, municipal authorities installed bathing facilities to socialize the urban poor into the habits of sanitation. This effort was part of a wider public-bath movement, which targeted the lack of bathing facilities in the slums of growing industrial cities like Baltimore and Chicago. In this context, school baths were a pedagogical tool: By teaching students to clean themselves, reformers hoped that children would get their parents to bathe regularly as well.

The public-bath movement faded away, but school baths became an established part of the school routine across the country. When Boston public schools started experimenting with enforced baths in 1901, the Cleveland Plain Dealer wrote that “the bath is a civilizer, and that soap lubricates the rails of progress.” Three years later, the Los Angeles Timesdescribed the introduction of baths at school—taken under the supervision of the school nurse—as “the newest educational innovation” on the West Coast.