The Diaper That Changed Us
Fed up with wet diapers (and wet sheets and baby clothes), Marion Donovan cut off a patch of shower curtain and sat down at her sewing machine. A few prototypes later, she came up with the Boater, a waterproof diaper-cover that was a minor sensation when it went on sale at Saks Fifth Avenue in 1949. Donovan, who died at 81 last year, was a former Vogue magazine editor who had settled down (as the saying went) to full-time motherhood. The Boater gave her the confidence and capital to attempt a bigger breakthrough--a diaper made of absorbent paper. But the chieftains of American industry couldn't see it. A decade passed before grandfatherhood inspired a Procter & Gamble engineer named Victor Mills to develop Pampers.
"Maid service." A case could be made for Donovan and Mills as pioneers of women's liberation. (On a practical level, certainly, they did more than Betty Friedan or Gloria Steinem to help break the chains that kept women anchored at home.) As their achievements remind us, the postwar spending binge went beyond cars, homes, and big gleaming appliances. Consumers were also snapping up things like aluminum foil and paper towels--small-scale domestic amenities that brought "built-in maid service" to middle-class homes, as Secretary of Agriculture Ezra Taft Benson effused.
America was on its way toward becoming the world's pre-eminent throwaway society--and proud of it. "We won the war; we don't have to recycle anymore," proclaimed a candidate for mayor of Los Angeles in 1960. True to his promise, Mayor Sam Yorty ended a curbside recycling program. By then, the big beer companies were selling their wares in disposable cans: One early ad depicted a fisherman blissfully tossing his empty into a lake. The soda companies were the next to go nonreturnable. When Coca-Cola succumbed, in 1960, the reusable was doomed.
Americans got the recycling religion in the '70s, even as they generated more and more trash. (From 1970 to 1993, our per capita output increased from 3.2 pounds to 4.4 pounds a day.)
In the 1980s and early 1990s, the cloth diaper staged a modest comeback. It didn't last. Harried parents wanted to save the planet, but not by going back in time. These days, disposable diapers come in many models. Some feature greater absorbency, some offer a sleeker profile. There are diapers for swimming (Huggies Little Swimmers, which don't swell in water, according to ads) and diapers for adults--a runaway success that has helped the manufacturer, Kimberly-Clark, register five consecutive quarters of double-digit earnings growth.
This story appears in the December 27, 1999 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.
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