I don’t know exactly how old I was when a photo was taken of me toddling across the lawn clad only in a bulky cloth diaper, probably just a little past a year. That was standard hot-weather wear for babies in the 1930’s, and the diapers were changed often to avoid diaper rash. In those days, cloth diapers were fastened with big metal safety pins. By the time I had my own babies, the diapers were still made of cloth, but the safety pins had plastic heads in pretty colors and we had the advantage of covering the diapers with plastic pants to keep mothers’ laps dry in church and save the living room upholstery from accidental soakings.
During my own babyhood, diapers were often covered with “soakers’, knitted wool over-pants which absorbed some moisture. They required soaking and washing just as often as the diapers and were not entirely successful at their intended purpose. I remember how pleased my mother was when rubber pants became available. They were used, mainly, for those times when it was necessary to take the baby with her. At home, the rubber pants weren’t generally in use because they were air-tight and promoted diaper rash.
All this came back to me as I contemplated the recent shortages of paper goods and things that we have come to take for granted such as disposable diapers. As it turned out, my baby sister was allergic to wool, so Mother would, no doubt, have loved disposable diapers. I never got to enjoy that convenience, because they came along about the time my youngest child was potty-trained.
As I see toddlers today in their form-fitting disposable diapers and cute little outfits, I figure my mother saved a lot of money when it came to dressing her babies. Because of the frequent wet diapers and endless changes, baby clothes were simple; short dresses, worn in winter with long stockings pinned to tabs extending from cotton knit undershirts. Feet were usually encased in cozy, knitted booties for warmth. Babies, if they wore shoes at all, had soft leather ones without hard soles. The hard soles were deemed necessary when the baby began to walk in order to “help with balance”. It has been my observation that those hard-soled shoes hindered learning to walk more than they helped.
During my toddler days, most homes didn’t generally have warm, carpeted floors and children who were in the crawling stage were warmly dressed in winter. This meant some sort of long pants over the long stockings. Once a diaper was wet through, chances were that ALL the clothing would be wet, so a complete change was necessary.
I remember Mother telling me that, when they were first married, Dad wasn’t real enthusiastic about having children because “babies smell bad.” Mother retorted that a CLEAN baby doesn’t. And she devoted a good many years to making sure that four little girls were scrupulously clean, even if that meant ten baths and twenty changes of clothing every day. There were no clothes dryers or automatic washers. Fortunately, only the pretty little dresses had to be ironed, but there was a load of clothes almost every day, all those little stockings and undershirts in the winter and ALWAYS dozens of diapers.
When I first came to Iowa City as a college student, I discovered the Judy Shop downtown. They had the cutest little baby outfits, some very expensive and impractical. The only baby in my life was my two year old nephew and he was already walking and wearing bib overalls. I couldn’t see him in one of those little Carter sets with a bow tie. My first baby received two adorable outfits as baby gifts, a bright red sailor suit and a “suit” of pants, shirt, vest and bow-tie. Neither of them could be machine washed, both were promptly soaked about ten minutes after I put them on him. He soon outgrew them and spent most of his first summer in a practical diaper and T-shirt.
A former volunteer and substitute teacher in the Solon schools, Milli is an artist and poet who lives near Morse where she also creates unique greeting cards and handmade books.