Through some accident of birth or babysitting, almost every woman, at some point in her life, comes in contact with the business end of a baby.
This may be the essential difference between the male and the female. The idea of an American man diapering a child is a classic Hollywood joke. From Charlie Chaplin to ”Three Men and a Baby,” the notion of anyone with a Y chromosome replacing an infant`s underwear is as instantly funny as a banana peel on a sidewalk.
This side of the silver screen, however, the situation is quite a bit less humorous. The Alan Alda-ization of America notwithstanding, there still remains a number of American fathers who are happy to take over such child-care chores as knee-bouncing, peek-a-booing and the occasional burp, while leaving the less fragrant tasks to feminine hands.
One father, apparently trying to set an early precedent of diaper incompetence, blithely offered to babysit his newborn daughter for a few minutes while his wife went out for supplies. She returned home to a screaming infant. The child`s father (a Phi Beta Kappa with a law degree), had been unable to figure out the complexities of a disposable diaper, and so had taped the tabs to the baby`s tummy. He explained that he didn`t think he could ever master such a complex containment system. His wife responded with an expression of displeasure she had sworn never to use in front of the baby.
Such paternal attitudes remain common, says Michael Kimmel, a former assistant professor of sociology at Rutgers University and a member of the aptly named National Organization for Changing Men.
”Diapers in some way encapsulate the relationships of husbands to wives as well as parents to children,” says Kimmel, now a sociology professor at State University of New York at Stony Brook, who specializes in the sociology of gender roles and sexuality. ”It`s the least pleasant aspect of having a child.”
In his course at Rutgers, women students decided to illustrate a point about sex roles by bringing in a doll and a cloth diaper. They asked the male students to demonstrate how to diaper a child. ”Not one of the men could,”
Kimmel reports. On the other hand, all of the women students knew just what to do, although none of them had children. ”They all had a kind of knowledge that the male students did not.
”It was a matter of anticipatory socialization,” Kimmel explains. ”The ability to diaper is not a genetic characteristic. There is no real magical trick to diapering a baby. I don`t think diapers have nearly as much to do with manual dexterity as they do with power relationships.”
Certainly there is a female mystique to diapering as well. For every microsurgeon who has found himself unable to clasp a diaper pin, there is a supermom who has whisked the baby away to some mysterious destination, returning seconds later with a magically clean and smiling cherub on her lap and a slightly condescending smile on her face.
”Diapering has the capacity to reaffirm a woman`s feeling of superiority and her privileged position next to the baby,” Himmel notes. ”But it also is a way to allow men to get out of doing the dirty work of family life.”
The various issues contained in the diaper cut across all cultural and sociological lines. In fact, the problem of integrating infant hygiene into adult society is one that reaches back to the dawn of time.
For some reason, prehistoric cave painters never thought to chronicle the Neanderthal version of Dr. Spock. So we can only hypothesize about Ice Age diapering techniques. One hypothesis offered by Jean Auel, author of ”Clan of the Cave Bear,” suggests that the nomadic Neanderthal mother carried her baby in a pouch next to her skin, in a sort of Flintstone-style Snugli. When the mother felt that first drop of wetness, she simply whipped the baby out of the sling and held it at arm`s length until the crisis had passed.
That method-which posed a few technical difficulties-persisted among some Native American tribes until the Europeans arrived, says Martha Gray, who designed a diaper exhibit for the Children`s Museum of Holyoke, Mass.
Other groups used different, more reliable methods, Gray says. The Plains Indians, who kept their young children confined in cradle boards, packed the babies in a mixture of moss and buffalo chips pulverized into a fine powder. The mixture worked on the same principle as super-absorbent disposable diapers, soaking up much more moisture than an equivalent amount of cloth.
Other tribes, in which the children were more independently mobile, used animal skins pounded into pliability to contain the mess, in a method more closely related to plastic pants than diapers.
The exhibit also included examples from India, where naked babies traditionally were placed on sheets, which were changed as they became soiled. Because of that practice, still used in remote areas of India, toilet-training began as soon as the babies learned to move off their sheets, well before each child`s first birthday.
Gray also has learned of a Lebanese community in which babies were placed in cradles with a strategically-placed opening for wastes.
”I think for me, what really was interesting was to see how people all over the world had this common problem, and what their solutions to it were,” Gray says. ”I wanted to provide for our parents an exhibit on this subject they`re totally immersed in but don`t give that much thought to, to show that something we think of as a pain really has an interesting social perspective. We wanted to give people information on where diapers have come from, in other areas and ethnic groups and in our own culture.”
A look at the history of the Western diaper, for example, shows the premium that Europeans have come to place on personal freedom. Up until the 17th century, European children were wrapped in swaddling bands that rendered them ”as stiff as a log of wood,” according to a recent article on diaper history in Colonial Williamsburg, the Journal of the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation. The tight swaddling made it easy to keep diaper-like padding in place, because the child couldn`t move enough to displace it.
But that tradition began to change with philosopher John Locke. Much of Locke`s writings explored the freedom of human thought and the
interrelationship of mind and body. It makes sense, therefore, that Locke, writing in the mid-17th century, was passionately opposed to tight swaddling and other physical child restraints.
By the 18th century, swaddling was almost completely abandoned, and diapers were listed as a necessary part of the layette.
The word diaper actually refers to a kind of linen cloth often used for that purpose by wealthy families; poorer mothers used recycled linen and rags (which actually may have been more comfortable for the child). The square diapers usually were folded into a triangle, with the points brought forward and pinned at the child`s belly with a straight pin.
”The more enlightened mothers sewed ties to their children`s diapers to avoid the use of dangerous straight pins,” Linda Baumgartner writes in the Colonial Williamsburg article.
As plastic pants had yet to be invented, colonial mothers relied on wool flannel squares known as ”pilchers” to provide a moisture barrier, especially at night. (Incidentally, the concept of a wool diaper cover has been revived for organically-minded consumers and is now being marketed by a Portland, Ore., company as the ”Portland Soaker.”)
Over the next century or two, most scientific minds were preoccupied with inventing cotton gins and containing nuclear reactions, pursuits that only tangentially affected diapers. Certainly, the increased availability of cotton made that the preferred fabric for most babies. But the basic routine remained the same: Mothers (or, in some cases nannies) had to buy or make a layette of about 50 to 70 diapers for their newborn babies. Then they had to maintain their diaper supply until that glorious day when the child was toilet-trained. In the era before every home had an automatic washer and dryer, creating a clean diaper from a dirty one required a process close to alchemy. One expert remembers her routine in the late 1950s, after she and her young husband splurged on a wringer washer, ending their innumerable midnight trips to the laundromat.
”In order to get the diapers from the diaper pail condition to the washing, a lot of pre-rinsings had to occur, most of which were done by hand,” recalls Jane Austin, mother of two Baby Boomers. ”Then you had to drain the hot, sudsy, dirty water out and then refill it or use a rinse tub. I did both at various times. Then every diaper had to go separately through the ringer. Then there was drying. In summertime on a nice day, no problem. But in the winter, I had to string diapers through the basement. We had miles of diapers in the basement.”
Sometimes pediatricians would suggest boiling the diapers as a way to kill the bacteria that cause diaper rash. The boiling process was implemented in a mammoth kettle on the kitchen stove, a ritual repeated two or three times a week in almost every post-World War II household in America. There were some lucky mothers who used diaper services. (One of those was Louise Shepard, whose diaper service man was viewed as a valuable source by the press when her husband, Alan Shepard, became the first American in space in 1961.)
But for most American moms, the routine remained the same until a day-a few months after Shepard`s historic flight-when the world really changed: the day Procter & Gamble introduced Pampers disposable diapers, in Peoria, Ill.
P&G admits that it didn`t actually invent the disposable diaper-an honor the firm concedes to an obscure product called Chucks. However, P&G was the first to mass-market disposables.
As it first played in Peoria, the disposable plastic-coated paper diaper was not much different from the cloth ones it replaced. Compared with current disposables, the originals were awkwardly shaped and barely absorbent. In addition, they were fastened by regular diaper pins, which tore the plastic coating. But to any mother who had endured cross-country trips locked in a station wagon with a diaper pail, the new disposable seemed to be a miracle of convenience.
So much did disposable diapers reform American motherhood, in fact, that they were featured in a recent Smithsonian Institution exhibit of products and services that have ”revolutionized our lives”-products such as antibiotics, the Pill, smoke detectors, shopping malls and latex paint.
The new diapers hit trash cans with a plop that was heard `round the world. In Soviet writer Julia Voznesenskaya`s ”The Women`s Decameron,” a fictional account of a group of Russian women in a maternity ward talking about their lives, one woman complained that her country`s spies were slow in infiltrating American diaper pails. ”In the West, they had invented disposable nappies and plastic pants long ago. Our people were supposed to be involved in industrial espionage, so why couldn`t they steal some useful secret instead of always going for electronics!”
This side of the Iron Curtain, however, the disposable diaper became a symbol of America`s disposable culture. Some parents started wondering whether their convenience was worth the possible deforestation of the nation. In addition, they questioned the ecological wisdom of littering the nation`s landscape and clogging its landfills with a product that, by some estimates, can take up to 500 years to decompose. (By comparison, a cotton diaper gives up the ghost after about six months of exposure to the elements.)
One watchdog group estimates three-fourths of U.S. children wear disposables, with each child using an average of 5,000 diapers by the time he or she is toilet-trained. That works out to 2.5 million tons a year. Those kinds of statistics are convincing a growing number of parents to consider cloth diapers again, at least for home use.
Controversy notwithstanding, disposable diapers apparently have become an integral part of society. And in this era of specialization, there now are sex-specific disposable diapers. Luvs, a division of Procter & Gamble, is introducing color-coded Luvs Deluxe Disposable Diapers for Boys (blue) with extra padding near the waist, and for Girls (pink), padded in the middle.
Disposable diapers even made political history when U.S. Rep. Patricia Schroeder (D- Colo.) was sworn into office in January, 1973, while carrying a disposable diaper in her purse.
”To be perfectly honest, it didn`t mean much to me, because it would have been a whole lot worse to have been sworn in without diapers in my purse,” recalls Schroeder. ”If one has a toddler who is not toilet-trained, it is always advisable to have disposable diapers in your purse. It`s amazing how that makes life a lot more pleasant.”
Schroeder, who was carrying the diapers for her daughter, Jamie, now 17, admits that her box of disposables helped to put her on the political map in Washington. ”For a couple of years after that, every now and then we`d have someone show up in the office absolutely panicked, asking if we had diapers.” Schroeder adds that her tenure as a congresswoman also helped her to put her guilt over using disposables into perspective. She used cloth diapers before she went to Washington, but couldn`t quite handle the idea of installing a diaper pail in her congressional office.
”I was a purist at the beginning,” she says. ”I always had the diaper service and cotton diapers. But after I got elected, I said, `This is for the birds. I`ve done my bit for the environment for four years.` My rationale was that they were killing a lot of trees to cover my desk in paper, so a few more to cover my child`s bottom wasn`t going to hurt.”
Her diaper experience makes Schroeder an obvious candidate for a Diaper Hall of Fame. But there are other contenders as well. Debbie Reynolds made diaper history when she faced reporters for the first time after the affair between her husband and Elizabeth Taylor became public. Ever the perfect wife and mother, Reynolds appeared at the door of her home with a (clean) diaper over her shoulder and a couple of diaper pins attached to her shirt.
A generation later, actress and new mother Nastassja Kinski granted an exclusive interview to People Magazine, then proceeded to spend most of her time showing off her proficiency with Italian-style tie-on diapers.
And Diane Keaton made cultural history in the recent film ”Baby Boom,”
when she demonstrated that even a woman can turn a diaper change into a pratfall.
But the all-time diaper hero has to be the Chicago diaper man, a novice to the trade. As hundreds of mothers anxiously awaited his arrival, the anonymous delivery man made the first stop of his new career. He dropped off his sweet-smelling load of fresh diapers, picked up the laden sack of returns, lugged it back to the truck-then abandoned the truck and walked away from diapers forever.
