Our Utopian Society

From an article on Salon about the history of cleanliness, I found this quote to be interesting:

In the 19th century, Harriet Beecher Stowe, who wrote "Uncle Tom's Cabin," said she dreamed of a time when there would be one bathroom in an American house for every three or four bedrooms. People at the time thought that was just crazy utopian, just so over the top compared to what they were used to. Now a luxury apartment across from the Metropolitan Museum in New York City has more bathrooms than bedrooms.

Last Christmas I visited a great aunt of mine who lives in an old house in rural Ohio. She still doesn't have indoor plumbing; she has an outhouse and a pump in the kitchen for her sink. It's amazing how far we've come in the past couple hundred years, especially in things we take for granted like the number of bathrooms in our houses.