Absorbing Waste, Displacing Labor: Family, Environment, and the Disposable Diaper in the 1970s

Abstract

Abstract Between 1965 and 1980, disposable diapers became the norm among middle-class American families, altering resource flows as they became more popular. Diapers crafted from wood and water of the United States, primarily from the South—rather than that region’s cotton—covered infant bottoms. The turn to single-use diapers also transformed knowledge production. For the first half of the twentieth century, women had carried out the interrelated tasks of making diapers, caring for children, and laundering diapers. This work informed women’s understandings of children’s bodies and the material world. By the 1950s, pre-folded diapers and home washing machines simplified the acts of diaper creation and maintenance and associated this work ever more strongly with the household. In the 1970s, economic pressures and feminism prompted families to rethink the way they cared for infants’ wastes as disposable diapers simplified household work, and shifting cultural norms encouraged their adoption. Thus, families embraced them. The work of maintaining diapers was replaced with the work of disposal. This history of the disposable diaper centers on reproductive work, tracing the tasks inherent in diapering as well as the shifting social norms and codes that legitimized disposable diapers. Ultimately, the disposable diaper not only offers lessons about the costs of a disposable society but also new insights about changing dynamics of family life and their impact on the environment in the 1970s.