Abstract
Drawing on feminist theories of parenting and the welfare state, I analyze experiences of diaper need as a case of how gender, class, and race inequalities shape the social organization of caregiving and limited policy responses. Data from in-depth interviews with 70 mothers who experienced diaper need and 40 diaper bank staff revealed obstacles low-income mothers face in managing lack of access to children’s basic needs and how gendered assumptions of parental responsibility thwart public diaper support efforts. I use this case to theorize gender policy vacuums: These occur when gender disparities and ideologies prevent systematic responses to structural problems. Empirically this study contributes to understandings of diaper need as a problem of the gender structure that cannot be solved with alternative diapering methods that assume middle-class, white, androcentric privileges. Theoretically it illuminates key mechanisms by which feminized care labor is devalued and rendered invisible and how this erasure rationalizes lack of redress for gendered inequalities and creates policy gaps around caregiving.
“Disposable diapers are not deemed medically necessary because cloth diapers are available. That was the issue they had with my testimony, and the question about the environment,” said Lucy, a 30-year-old white diaper bank director. Describing her experience testifying to a legislative committee about a bill that would have provided unprecedented public funding for diapers, Lucy explained, Cloth diapers are expensive. Most low-income families don’t have laundry facilities. Laundromats in a lot of states have laws against washing dirty diapers. It’s a major catch-22. Legislators didn’t even think about the laundry issue when it comes to cloth diapers. These parents are working multiple jobs. Who has time to wash 10 diapers a day? But they still ask, “Why don’t they just use cloth?”
Lucy described diaper need—lack of access to sufficient diapers necessary to keep children dry, comfortable, and healthy—as a problem experienced by one in three mothers in the United States (Smith et al. 2013), where almost half of the infants and toddlers live in low-income families (Koball and Jiang 2018). Women disproportionately perform care work involved in diapering and managing diaper need (Randles 2021). Yet no U.S. public program systematically provides diapers, and diapers are taxed as a “discretionary” expense in most states. Lucy’s experience suggested that elites often lack understanding of low-income parents’ constraints and assume that parents can provide for children’s needs by working harder, such as by using cloth diapers presumed to be cheaper and more environmentally sustainable. These assumptions lead to policy gaps around food, housing, diapers, and other necessities managed primarily by low-income mothers of color who must perform additional care work to compensate for meager social safety net provisions.
Women face gendered pressures to engage in intensive mothering practices that are labor-intensive, child-centered, and self-sacrificing (Hays 1996). Increasingly they are also expected to be “intensive green mothers” (Atkinson 2014) tasked with raising happy, healthy children while protecting the environment through their consumption choices and household labor. Failure to address diaper need and the underlying assumption that women’s labor can manage risks to babies and the environment reflect a white, middle-class image of parenthood (Takeshita 2014). Policies—or lack of policy, as with diaper need—perpetuate the gender structure when they ignore how intersecting inequalities shape the social organization of caregiving and reinforce expectations that care labor can compensate for inadequate social supports.
Using the case of diapers to apply an intersectional feminist lens to how such policy gaps form, I draw from 110 in-depth interviews with two key groups involved in managing diaper need: 70 mothers who experienced it and 40 diaper bank staff, most involved in diaper policy advocacy. I answer three questions about diaper need and political inertia surrounding it: (1) How do intersecting inequalities create diaper need and obstacles that prevent mothers from using alternative diapering methods, namely cloth diapers? (2) How do gendered, classed, and racialized expectations of “good” parenting shape mothers’ diapering options and choices? and (3) How do these expectations of parental responsibility thwart public diaper support efforts?
The answers point to what I call gender policy vacuums, which occur when gender, class, and race disparities and ideologies intersect to create a problem and prevent those in positions of power from devising remedies. Here “policy” refers not only to specific laws or regulations but also to the guiding principles and tacit assumptions that shape public responses, or lack thereof, to societal needs. Using gender policy vacuums as a theoretical lens reveals how feminized care labor is devalued and rendered invisible—especially when performed by low-income mothers of color—and how this erasure rationalizes lack of redress for problems such as diaper need that are borne of gender, class, and race inequalities.
Gendered Policy Gaps and the Politics of Diapering
The rising popularity of one-time-use diapers coincided with the influx of American mothers into the paid labor force. From 1975 to 2019, when disposables became the dominant diaper type, the employment rate of mothers with children aged 0–3 years nearly doubled from 34.3 to 63.8 percent (U.S. Department of Labor 2021). Although disposable diapers have always been a convenience commodity that helped mothers manage the dual demands of employment and unpaid childcare, advertising highlighted disposables as a product that allowed mothers to provide optimal care (Neuhaus 2013). Capitalizing on gendered norms of maternal domesticity, cloth diapers were discouraged through messages that soiled cloth diapers were unsanitary and irritated infants’ delicate skin, and hence “good” mothers chose disposables. Cloth diapering never regained popularity in the United States, where more than 95 percent of infants wear disposables (Thaman and Eichenfield 2014), a trend some hope to reverse.
Discontents of Cloth Diapers and Sustainable Mother Discourses
Advocates describe cloth diapering as better for babies due to reduced chemical exposure and as a cost-saving measure that prevents 7.6 billion pounds of annual garbage generated by single-use diapers (Wels 2012). How-to books and websites about cloth diapering abound, and the market for cloth diapers has grown and diversified in recent decades (Odom 2013). Parents who use cloth are more likely to be married, home-owning, stay-at-home mothers living in households that make $50,000 or more annually; almost all wash diapers using in-house washers and dryers, and half invest at least $500 in cloth diapers and accessories (Change-Diapers.org 2016). Still, only a small portion of parents in all socioeconomic groups use cloth diapering.
Although cloth diapers account for less than 10 percent of the U.S. diaper market and are the primary type of diaper used by less than 5 percent of U.S. parents, some predict that diaper need will increase the demand for cloth (Industry Research 2020). Yet the relatively privileged circumstances of cloth-diapering parents and the small proportion of affluent families who use cloth cast doubt on the view that cloth can solve diaper need. Even most of the one in five parents in the United States who stay home full-time do not opt for cloth (Livingston 2018). The push for cloth diapers also ignores the time pressures mothers of all classes face in balancing employment and care work, as women’s labor force participation rates have increased most significantly for middle-class mothers with children of diapering age.
Assumptions that cloth is a cheaper, feasible alternative to disposables fail to account for intersecting inequalities that limit marginalized parents’ diapering choices. In addition to prohibitively expensive start-up costs, the challenges of managing caregiving, housework, and paid work in poverty are not conducive to the demands of cleaning dirty diapers, making “eco-diapering” a class-specific privilege (Takeshita 2014). Low-income mothers are also less likely to receive social support for cloth diapering and more likely to face stigma for using cloth as a marker of poverty (Randles 2021).
Despite this, directives for cloth diapering remain part of intensive sustainable mother discourses among vocal advocates that emphasize “green” consumption and care work practices that are purportedly best for babies and the environment (Takeshita 2014). Moral appeals for pro-environmental behaviors, such as recycling, organic feeding, and cloth diapering, discount an already inequitable division of unpaid and devalued domestic labor that unevenly falls on women, especially low-income mothers of color who disproportionately manage their and others’ household waste (Kennedy and Kmec 2018). Expectations for mothers to reduce environmental burdens through labor-intensive and commodity-based practices represent an ever-growing sphere of intensive parenting that pushes women without resources further to the margins of normative motherhood (MacKendrick 2014). They also ignore the lived experiences of poor mothers who often opt for single-use consumer goods to seem “modern,” avoid the stigma of poverty, and meet their children’s basic needs (Braun and Traore 2015).
Aspirational ideas of cloth diapering for all mothers, and specifically as a solution to diaper need for low-income families, align with intensive mothering ideologies (Hays 1996). They do not, however, accord with actual diapering practices in the United States, where almost all parents across lines of gender, class, and race use disposables all or part of the time (Thaman and Eichenfield 2014). That cloth is not the diaper type of choice for even most affluent mothers suggests that elitist admonitions to “just use cloth” are not rooted in class-based experiences of rationally choosing among distinct, yet equally valid and feasible, diaper options. Rather, the ubiquity of disposables and the strong mismatch between diapering ideology and practice suggest that labor-intensive and self-sacrificial gendered norms of childrearing drive directives that tacitly shame low-income mothers into using cloth diapers.
Gendered Binds of Providing Basic Needs
Framing women’s labor as a fix for poverty and environmental problems delimits political conceptions of need in social provisions. Safety net policies in the United States reflect cultural visions that mothers should be economically self-sufficient parents who do not rely on the state (Hays 2003; Randles and Woodward 2018). Neoliberal ideologies characterize the work of proper motherhood as expertly and actively managing calculable risks to children, and they ignore how stratified access to public and private resources constrains individual mothers’ abilities to do so (Reich 2014). Even safety net programs such as the Women, Infants, and Children Supplemental Nutrition Program (WIC), which specifically support low-income mothers and children, dictate food choices to encourage mothers’ frugality rather than offer adequate assistance to meet families’ full nutritional needs (Mason 2016).
Gender policy vacuums around needs such as food and diapers assume that mothers can absorb the effects of inequities by getting back to what is “natural.” Promoting cloth diapering as healthier and cost-effective when families cannot afford disposables is akin to recommendations for home-cooked meals to address food insecurity when marginalized mothers have limited resources to shop for, prepare, and carefully manage children’s eating (Bowen, Brenton, and Elliott 2019). Similar assumptions infuse breastfeeding campaigns implying that mothers bear responsibility for protecting children from health risks ranging from diabetes to diaper rash (Wolf 2011). This “ideology of total motherhood” presumes that women should sacrifice work hours, leisure time, and their bodies in service of putatively healthier childrearing without accounting for how gender, class, and race inequalities stratify access to supplies, support, and job schedules that accommodate “choices” to cook, breastfeed, and cloth diaper (Wolf 2011).
Gender policy vacuums around unmet needs force mothers into impossible binds. Public programs that primarily support low-income mothers offer insufficient levels of support subject to strict eligibility requirements, time limits, and sanctions. For many families, due to paltry cash aid programs and low minimum wages, neither welfare nor work provides for subsistence living. Low-income mothers must often devise survival strategies to generate supplementary income or resources, including informal jobs, aid from others, and basic needs support from family agencies and charities (Edin and Lein 1997). Even modest increases in income can decrease means-tested benefits, including WIC and subsidized childcare. Few eligible children receive childcare and housing subsidies (Rice, Schmit, and Matthews 2019), forcing many mothers into unstable care arrangements, substandard housing, and evictions that reproduce poverty (Desmond 2012) and risk family separation through the child welfare system (Roberts 2002). These dilemmas are common among mothers of color, who are more likely to experience racialized poverty and encounter racism and nativism when navigating public aid bureaucracies.
Gender policy vacuums emerge when persistent gender gaps in time spent on childcare and housework intersect with meager safety net provisions and classist and racist stigma directed at recipients of public aid, who are disproportionately women and children from families of color (Hays 2003; Scarborough, Sin, and Risman 2019). In this context, neoliberal policy values of personal responsibility and rational consumption prioritize strategies that assume gendered labor and market-based solutions to such problems as diaper need.
Inequalities of Diapers
Mothers of color and mothers who are unemployed or have little education are more likely to experience diaper need, which is associated with maternal depression and anxiety (Randles 2021; Smith et al. 2013). Diaper need exacerbates food and housing insecurity and causes parents to miss school and work (Massengale et al. 2020). Despite these effects and that disposable diapering is near universal in the United States, no federal safety net policy covers diapers. Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) cash aid can be used to purchase diapers, but only one in five poor families receives TANF, and the $75 average monthly diaper bill would use 8–40 percent of the average monthly state TANF benefit for a three-person family (Meyer and Floyd 2020). Federal diaper bills have not made it past committee referrals, and 35 states tax diapers as paper products. Though the United States is not an outlier in lacking diaper support policies, other countries’ more generous social safety nets and distinct diapering norms likely result in lower levels of diaper need (Thaman and Eichenfield 2014).
After 1990s welfare reform, diaper banks proliferated as part of the U.S. community-based safety net to compensate for the policy vacuum around diaper need. Diaper banks distribute free diapers to families in need and partner organizations, including family and children’s services and maternal healthcare programs. Most diaper banks provide a supplemental supply of disposables (around 20–50 diapers monthly), are heavily reliant on volunteers, and are privately funded, with some receiving limited government grant support. Sponsored by the Huggies diaper company, the National Diaper Bank Network was founded in 2011 and connects more than 200 member diaper banks in all 50 states. Many diaper bank staff—self-referred “diaper bankers”—engage in community advocacy to educate about diaper need and political lobbying for diaper proclamations and policies. In 2016, more than 300 U.S. diaper banks distributed 52 million diapers to 277,000 children, meeting only 4 percent of estimated need (Massengale et al. 2020).
As cash aid and the number of families receiving assistance have dwindled, community-based organizations such as diaper banks have helped families meet basic needs through services and in-kind assistance. This shift has disproportionately affected poor single mothers of color who are most likely to be welfare recipients and also the targets of racist and sexist stigma that spurred welfare reform (Allard 2009). Even “gender-aware” maternalist policies focused on combating child poverty through government services and transfers are limited by presumptions of “proper” ways of mothering (Jenson 2015), such as notions that mothers can and should opt for cloth diapers if they cannot afford disposables. The most generous family-supportive welfare states value care work as legitimate grounds for making claims on the state (Misra 1998). Yet androcentric perspectives, such as men’s reliance on women’s care labor, shape views of “need,” “dependency,” and “deservingness” (Lombardo, Meier, and Verloo 2017). Why don’t they just use cloth? is not just a question; it is an ideological tool that deliberately disguises that they are usually women and that to just use cloth diapers requires physical, emotional, and cognitive gendered labor. Interrogating this question and the intersecting gender, class, and race inequities it obscures reveals how gender policy vacuums result in overall lower levels of state provision for families that are inadequately responsive to women’s, and especially marginalized mothers’, needs. Controversies over and experiences of diaper need are a window into how gender policy vacuums emerge based on assumptions of affluent, white, male privilege, and how devalued feminized care labor gets framed as the tacit solution to complex social problems.
Methods
I draw on data collected via in-depth qualitative telephone interviews conducted between August 2017 and December 2019 with 70 parents/caregivers who experienced diaper need and 40 diaper bank staff involved in diaper distribution and/or advocacy. All parents/caregivers resided in California, and sample characteristics related to race/ethnicity, age, and family size were similar to those reported in previous research about diaper need (Smith et al. 2013). I recruited parent interviewees by distributing flyers to family and healthcare service providers, including WIC offices, hospitals, and postnatal support programs, and through social media groups for low-income parents seeking basic needs support. Selection criteria for parent respondents included primary care responsibilities for a child 5 years or younger and self-identifying as struggling to access enough diapers for a child in their care.
Despite the use of gender-neutral language and images on all recruitment materials, only two men responded about participating. Subsequent targeted recruitment efforts for fathers experiencing diaper need through fathering programs, diaper banks, and social service organizations yielded only one additional man-identified respondent. That the sample was so skewed according to gender, despite these efforts, reveals how diaper need is a problem disproportionately managed by low-income mothers. Consequently, I limited my analysis of the parent interviewees to those who identified as women. Given that all caregiver interviewees included in the analysis identified as women and as primary parents/guardians, including two custodial grandmothers, I refer to respondents as “mothers.”
Interviews with mothers focused on familial and financial characteristics (How would you describe your household’s current money situation?); diapering practices and experiences of diaper need (What kind of diapers do you use? If you have ever run out of diapers, what did you do?); and strategies for accessing diapers (How do you get diapers or diaper money?). Based on self-reported characteristics, most mothers were women of color who lived in poor or low-income households (see Table 1). Although I did not ask about mothers’ immigration or documentation status, 10 respondents revealed that they were either born outside the United States or members of immigrant families. Average reported monthly disposable diaper cost was $66 (ranging from $22 to $175), or 8 percent of the mean household income. Mothers received $25 cash as compensation for their time during interviews, which lasted between 45 and 90 minutes.
Parent/Caregiver Demographics (N = 70)
I recruited diaper bank staff from 25 states through the National Diaper Bank Network registry and purposively selected respondents to maximize geographical diversity. Most interviewees were directors and/or founders of their respective diaper banks, which ranged in size from small pantries that distributed 300 diapers monthly to the nation’s largest diaper banks that distributed more than 250,000 diapers weekly. Phone interviews with diaper bankers lasting 50–100 minutes focused on views of diaper need (Why do you think parents struggle with diaper need?); experiences with parents and partner organizations (How does your organization distribute diapers?); and participation in advocacy (What is your involvement, if any, in political efforts to address diaper need?). Most diaper bankers identified as white women (see Table 2). Twenty-seven (68 percent) had been involved in local, state, and/or national diaper advocacy activities, including lobbying and legislative testimony. Seven (18 percent) worked with banks that distributed cloth diapers, and one ran an exclusively cloth diaper bank.
Diaper Banker Demographics (N = 40)
I used an abductive analytical approach that relied on knowledge of prior literature to deductively shape the research questions and semi-structured interview guides, while remaining open to inductive findings and explanations that emerged from the data (Timmermans and Tavory 2012). With respondents’ permission, all interviews were digitally recorded and transcribed. I took notes during and wrote memos immediately after each interview. Using a combination of word processing, spreadsheet, and concept-mapping software, I coded transcripts and memos through a flexible coding process (Deterding and Waters 2021). First, I applied index codes and a priori attributes to each paired transcript and memo, which allowed me to generate cross-case memos and a set of analytic codes, including those related to reasons parents struggled with diaper need; obstacles to using cloth diapers; and diaper bankers’ political advocacy and experiences distributing cloth. Second, I applied analytic codes and generated new attributes (e.g., whether parents had used cloth diapers, how often, and why; policy makers’ comments about cloth reported by diaper bankers; and misalignment between these comments and mothers’ experiences) by comparing respondents’ references to these themes across the body of data. Finally, to ensure that data met the threshold for theoretical validity and cross-case reliability (Deterding and Waters 2021), I reviewed all respondent accounts for alternative explanations and negative cases (e.g., what conditions enabled a few mothers to use cloth).
I employed numerous strategies to ensure trustworthiness of the data (Shenton 2004). For credibility, I recruited respondents who experienced diaper need and those working to address it from a variety of diaper distribution organizations. During interviews, I positioned respondents as the experts of their own experiences and used probes, iterative questioning, and on-the-spot member checks to confirm the accuracy of the data. To reveal the extent of transferability, in what follows I provide contextual information about respondents. For dependability and confirmability, I provide in-depth methodological detail should a similar study be conducted.
Findings
Jointly analyzing the perspectives of both mothers and those working within diaper distribution organizations allowed me to identify how experiences of diaper need aligned with common framings used to advocate for public diaper support. Bringing these two viewpoints into analytic conversation revealed why cloth diapering is neither a feasible nor a cost-effective solution for diaper need and likely reasons diaper support policies have yet to gain more political traction. Drawing on data about diaper bankers’ experiences with diaper policy advocacy, I first describe why diapering as a vital need of early childcare has been minimized in many U.S. policy circles. Next, I draw on mothers’ views of cloth diapering to show how lived experiences of diaper need contrast with political assumptions that stifle public diaper aid. Finally, I integrate mothers’ and diaper bankers’ perspectives about how gender, class, and race inequalities shape diapering practices and policy inertia surrounding diaper need. This illuminates how gender policy vacuums created by norms of mothering that assume white, middle-class privilege lead to policy failures rooted in the stigmatization and stereotyping of low-income mothers of color.
“How Many Legislators Have Ever Changed a Diaper?” Pink Taxes and Green Politics
Diaper bankers reasoned that diaper bills did not get more policy traction due to legislators’ beliefs that parents could readily use cloth, concerns about fiscal and environmental impacts, and stereotypes about parents in poverty, especially poor mothers. Many diaper bankers had encountered lawmakers and other public stakeholders who believed that disposables were a discretionary expense too costly for government budgets. Diaper bankers shared stories of lawmakers who expressed discomfort about diapering rooted in gendered stigma. Kristi, a white 62-year-old founder of a baby supplies organization, noted, When we put this bill [to remove diaper taxes] into the legislature this year, we got an opportunity to talk during a committee meeting when an assembly member presented it. Some comments out of mouths of our lawmakers were, “Ew, I don’t want to talk about it,” or “Why don’t these people line their babies’ diapers with newspapers or use cloth?” People can be really out of touch. “Why don’t these mothers just put newspaper in there, and why do we have to give them disposable diapers? It’s an entitlement.” They don’t look at it as a safety net. They see poverty as a character flaw.
According to diaper bankers, legislators’ comments reflected stereotypical beliefs about poverty and views that governments were not obligated to provide disposables as one of many available diapering options. That most failed diaper bills in recent years have attempted to remove diaper taxes suggests that lawmakers fear losing the government tax revenue generated by disposables, which are believed to be an optional expense.
Many diaper bankers described common misconceptions that federal and state programs already provide diapers. Emily, a white 31-year-old diaper bank founder, said, A lot of people think cloth because they don’t understand that SNAP [Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program] and WIC don’t cover anything for personal hygiene, diapers, or bottles even, just formula and regular groceries. They tax them too, just like tampons. Sorry, let me just go rip my uterus out! What does it say that anything hygiene related needed to take care of what comes out of a uterus, blood or baby, is taxed?
Emily emphasized how designating diapers as a “discretionary” expense increased their cost for consumers, mostly mothers, in their capacity as primary caregivers of infants and toddlers. Several diaper bankers critiqued this “pink tax,” the extra economic burden laid on menstruators and caretakers of young children, primarily women, who purchased most period supplies and diapers.
Diaper bankers frequently encountered questions from public officials and community members emphasizing the environmental ramifications of distributing disposables. Jane, a multiracial 30-year-old diaper bank manager, shared, I’ve had people yelling at me while dropping off [cloth diaper] donations about how wasteful we are and that low-income families need to understand what they’re doing to the environment . . . It’s hard for me to educate someone like that, to talk about how privilege influences people’s assumptions about families living under the burden of poverty. It would be great if that could influence actual social programs, but the media and mommy diaper blogs talk about how people need to have a smaller impact. It doesn’t account for context, what some families are living through.
Criticism that families in need should only receive cloth diapers, diaper bankers reasoned, was rooted in limited perceptions of gendered work and parenting constraints.
Many bankers commented on how legislator demographics that skewed toward older white privileged men meant that such perceptions were prevalent among lawmakers. Gail, a white 46-year-old diaper bank director, noted, I testified on behalf of [a state] bill. Most of the Ways and Means Committee, there were a few women, maybe two young men. The rest were all old men, who perhaps because of their age and the time when they were probably having children, a lot of families back then had wives who stayed home and could do cloth. One gentleman did say, “In light of equality between men and women, you guys realize that Viagra is tax exempt, but diapers and tampons are not?” But it’s usually an older generation that grew up with their babies in cloth diapers because they had stay-at-home wives and never worried about buying or cleaning diapers.
If necessity is defined by elites who never required affordable and accessible diaper options, diaper bankers explained, then legislative processes were bound to result in a void around diaper need. Paula, a white 68-year-old diaper bank founder, concluded, “We need more gender balance in government . . . How many legislators have ever changed a diaper?”
Diaper bankers also speculated that policy makers’ lack of experience with poverty and racism shaped narrowly defined notions of public support for basic needs. Rochelle, a Black 37-year-old diaper bank founder, experienced diaper need with her son. She noted how sexism, classism, and racism intersect to shape political stigma about parents who cannot afford diapers: Legislators think of food, shelter, clothing, and leave basic needs at that. We tend to look down on people when they are lacking things like diapers, undergarments, period supplies, toothbrushes, also basic needs. I think people will go without food but try to get diapers because they’re visual. I can see when a child’s diaper is full or smell when a diaper is dirty. You don’t want to be judged. You don’t want people to say, “Look at that baby’s diaper hanging off. Who is this woman, this poor parent? Why have these children if you can’t take care of them?” I think it’s easy to disassociate or to look at a child’s dirty diaper and just assume it’s the parent. It’s gendered and racist to just say, “Why did these women have these kids if they can’t afford them?”
Rochelle called out racist stereotypes that mothers experiencing diaper need are promiscuous and profligate parents whose choices justified denying them support for basic needs required for cleanliness and dignity. Other diaper bankers similarly described how beliefs about undeserving poor mothers who deliberately have more children undermined political will for diaper policies.
Diaper bankers had encountered policy makers and public stakeholders who implied that supporting diapers meant endorsing bad family planning choices, laziness, and dependency on government benefits. Heidi, a white 40-year-old diaper bank director, explained, Senators and staffers we’ve talked to had no idea how [diaper need] was affecting families. It falls along the stereotype of pull yourself up from the bootstraps, don’t ask for handouts. But 84 percent of the families we serve have a working parent, and 6 percent have two working parents. But minimum wage in [state] barely covers their rent, if that.
Diaper bankers implied that neoliberal political values shaped a shrinking U.S. welfare state that rendered problems like diaper need invisible. Paula, a white 68-year-old diaper banker, said, The subtext is, “If you’re poor, you shouldn’t have babies you can’t afford. Why make it easier for people to have babies?” That’s the undercurrent of federal thinking about welfare. Emphasize work and self-sufficiency, not dependency. Here we are 20 years later, and a lot of lower-income parents are working but not self-sufficient.
Tellingly, considering Heidi’s and Paula’s comments about work, efforts to pass diaper policies have been most successful in California, where starting in 2018 some TANF recipients with children aged 0–3 years became eligible for $30 monthly diaper vouchers as a supportive service for welfare-to-work requirements. Diaper need seems more amenable to policy redress when framed as an impediment to work and less so when framed as compromising care labor. Against a backdrop of assumptions about the availability and feasibility of cloth diapers, mothers’ diapering experiences reveal that gender policy vacuums derive much of their ideological power from how gender, class, and race inequities intersect to conceal and devalue care work.
“If a Woman’s Time and Work Aren’t Worth Anything”: Hidden Costs of Cloth Diapering
The most common reason mothers gave for not using cloth diapers was the labor involved, especially given how few had in-home washers and dryers. Amber, a Latina 29-year-old mother of two, said, “Why use the kind I have to pay for so I can just wash them later? That’s so difficult and time consuming.” Mothers lacked the resources and support cloth diapering required. Brandy, a Black 28-year-old mother of five, explained, “They’re far too messy. I already do eight loads of laundry a week, and I don’t have anyone to help me with housework.” Mothers of multiple children and children with special needs especially felt that cloth diapering would require too much of their limited time. Martha, a Latina 45-year-old mother of two, including a son with cognitive and physical disabilities, shared, “Cloth won’t work for us. I only get to do things when he’s asleep. All my time is taking care of him.” Martha did not want to spend her son’s few sleeping hours when she was awake cleaning diapers.
Mothers who tried cloth described the physical, emotional, and cognitive labor required to store and wash soiled diapers, dry and fold clean diapers, track diaper supplies, plan around washing/drying schedules, and worry if cloth diapers leaked, smelled, or appeared insufficiently clean. This labor was compounded by other unpaid care labor and paid work mothers performed. Maria, a Latina 30-year-old mother of four, said, “I tried but couldn’t keep up with it. I had to keep up with the kids, the cooking, the cleaning. It was overwhelming. I think if you have help, it’s easier, but it’s too hard if you’re by yourself.” Other mothers similarly stressed how adding cloth diapering to an already tightly calibrated juggling act of employment, housework, and care for young children was impracticable.
The second most common set of reasons mothers gave for not using cloth were start-up, cleaning, and laundry costs. Joanna, an Afro-Latina 18-year-old mother of one, noted that any potential long-term savings were offset by the initial outlay and on-going laundromat expenses: “I have to pay $2.25 per load. I can’t pay that every day, after paying $100 or more to begin. Even if that would save me money in the future, I can’t afford that giant chunk right now.” Sonia, Latina, 33, and a mother of two, tried cloth, but “couldn’t afford the special baby detergent. I don’t have the luxury to just go wash them. Two months of washing eight diapers by hand every day with the generic detergent I could afford was starting to peel my skin.” Several mothers discovered that it was monetarily cheaper to purchase disposables. Their calculations did not account for the value of laundering labor or mothers’ stress when they realized their child was wearing the last clean cloth diaper or when they had to construct makeshift diapers out of other household items when they ran out. Leslie, a Black 28-year-old mother of one, said, That’s probably why programs don’t cover diapers, because they think cloth are free. But then you have to spend on washing, detergent, water, electricity, and all the work and worry. You still have to pay for it in some way.
Tia, a Black 31-year-old mother of three who lived in a shelter with her infant son, similarly explained, “My son has eczema bad. How do I make sure it doesn’t hurt him? How is that not wasting my time and money on something that you can’t get fully clean?” Like Tia, many mothers worried that cloth diapers were unsanitary, inefficient, and irritating to babies’ delicate skin. They assumed cloth diapering would require expensive barrier creams that, when combined with laundry costs, made cloth diapering even more expensive than disposables that held more and leaked less.
Other mothers expressed how only people who had never diapered a child or parents who could stay home full-time or afford diaper services would see cloth diapering as a viable, cheaper alternative. Tracy, a multiracial 25-year-old mother of three, noted about the cloth diapers she received through a former foster youth program: They use them up so fast, and if you run out, you have to wash all of them. You have to constantly think if there’s pee or poop and clean them out right away. The social worker told me it would be easier and cheaper, but then I spent $40 once just to wash diapers for twins. That’s not easier or cheaper.
Terri, a white 30-year-old diaper banker, compared how privileged people talked about cloth diapering and breastfeeding as cost-effective and convenient without accounting for the value of women’s labor: “People say, ‘It’s easy and free.’ Yeah, but only if a women’s time and work aren’t worth anything.”
Diaper bankers often encountered these perspectives. Rosemary, a white 48-year-old family services case manager, said about giving public presentations on diapers: The older men say, “Oh, I don’t deal with diapers,” or “My wife does that,” or “Why don’t they use cloth?” We have that option, but it’s not as simple as, “Here’s a cloth diaper. You can just use that.” You need water, detergent, the right equipment. It could be an economical way to diaper your child if you had the right resources, but that’s where people get stuck. They think everyone has the resources to cloth diaper, but they don’t. Some people don’t even have water.
Rosemary introduced her colleague Melissa, a white 32-year-old mother of three, as their “cloth diapering expert.” Melissa described the multistep process she used to clean cloth diapers, which involved a toilet sprayer for removing feces and a prewash bucket scrub, followed by a second wash in a machine with towels or blankets for the right agitation. Melissa bought special detergent for hard water to prevent “mineral burns” on her baby’s skin. She laundered at least every other day, often daily, and purchased supplementary disposables when she did not have time to clean cloth. Although Melissa had not noticed significant increases in her water, sewer, or electricity bills, her washer and dryer, special detergent, water softener, bathroom sprayer, plunger, and bucket cost $2,000. She concluded that “It definitely doesn’t work for everyone, not if you don’t have privilege.” As a middle-class white mother, Melissa also never worried about how a leaky cloth diaper might invite skepticism about her parenting.
“A Kid in Rags”: Cloth Diapers, the Stigma of Racialized Poverty, and “Good” Mothers
Respondents described a structural and cultural shift in the class dynamics of diapering. When cloth diapering was near universal a few decades ago, affluent mothers who could afford to purchase throwaway diapers drove the change to disposables as mothers’ employment hours increased and more children received care in nonfamilial childcare organizations than by stay-at-home mothers. Now the small share of parents who use cloth are likely to be higher income due to costs and care arrangements involved. Rising cultural expectations of cleanliness and half a century of advertising that depicted disposable diapers as an extension of maternal love stigmatized cloth diapering as a less hygienic option that “good” mothers would not choose. As disposables became a marker of middle-class affluence, cloth diapering became associated with deprivation, dirtiness, and negligent parenting.
Mothers therefore associated cloth diapering with despair. Trinity, a Black 42-year-old mother of three, said, “I did it with my son because I was at home when I was young, but I work now with her. I’m thankful I haven’t been desperate enough for that, that I can use normal diapers.” Similarly, Faith, a Black 32-year-old mother of two, shared that “People think using regular diapers is a luxury, that if you can’t afford them you have no choice but to use cloth.” Audra, white, 33, and a mother of five, described using cloth diapers as “a disaster, especially when you’re working, worried about how you’re going to get the next meal for your kids, put gas in the car, get to work, get the kids to school. Then you have to wash poop out in the middle of all that? No, I’ll continue with the usual ones.” Like Trinity, Faith, and Audra, mothers used the language of “normal,” “regular,” and “usual” to describe disposables, which had become synonymous with diapers and cloth with the economic extremes of desperation and luxury.
Mothers also associated disposables with “modern” childcare methods and parenting unburdened by adversity. Esther, a Latina 36-year-old mother of two, distinctly remembered washing her younger siblings’ cloth diapers in a bucket in her hometown in Mexico: I still remember being nine years old washing diapers to help my mom, only wanting to go play with my friends, go to school. I wanted to cry. When I washed the diapers, I was imagining another kind of life, a good life. In Mexico, we use cloth on babies. I imagined growing up in America, buying diapers in the store, not having to wash them when I grew up. But now I work in the field, I’m up at 6:00, and I’m too tired to wash cloth. I buy diapers, but life isn’t much better. I still have to work so hard.
Diapering had specific class connotations for mothers like Esther who, as a child, associated disposables with upward mobility and the American Dream. Yet as an adult immigrant, a large portion of her low wages paid for disposables because she lacked energy and time for cloth.
Mothers also feared they would be judged as unfit parents if cloth leaked while in public or if others assumed their children were wearing “rags.” Mothers of color were particularly concerned about lingering smells and stains after washing that could be interpreted as signs of parental neglect. Solange, Black, 24, and a mother of four, noted, “I find myself throwing them away when they get stained. I just don’t feel right reusing them, definitely not out of the house.” Natalie, a multiracial 29-year-old mother of three, described why she avoided cloth: I’m always in a rush on the way to work, getting the kids and baby ready, making sure I have enough clean diapers. When we’re in public, I get so worried that other people think my son doesn’t have a real diaper on. They’d likely say, “That lady didn’t put a diaper on her kid. What’s wrong with her?”
Mothers of color especially worried that publicly using cloth diapers could trigger surveillance by the child welfare system. Aisha, a Black 20-year-old mother of one, said, They might see it as a kid in rags . . . I’m sure they can take your kid based on what you believe, and if you believe using cloth diapers is better than using Huggies, well . . . I wouldn’t use a cloth diaper on her because of diaper rash, and I just can’t be seen in public with her in a cloth diaper.
Beyond preventing leaks and rashes, mothers believed that disposables protected them from unfounded concerns about their parenting abilities.
Employed and student mothers were disinclined to use cloth due to the labor involved and time spent outside their homes. Several mothers missed work or school because they did not have the requisite number of disposables for daycare. Diaper bankers described diapers as a necessary means to upward mobility and self-sufficiency for mothers who relied on childcare to pursue education and employment opportunities. June, a white 70-year-old diaper bank codirector, said, People always ask, “Why don’t they just use cloth?” The most significant issue from a child welfare and economic stability viewpoint is that you have to take disposable diapers to most daycare centers. If you can’t, you can’t get job training, can’t work, can’t go to school. How do you pull yourself up and out?
Veronica, a Black 60-year-old diaper advocate, shared, You get old ladies like me who write asking why these young girls won’t wash diapers. “Hold on, that’s not what this is.” Even if I have a voucher for daycare, even if I can go to school, if I don’t have eight disposable diapers a day, I can’t do any of that.
Diapers bankers noted that expecting cloth added another burden to already overextended parents facing classist, sexist, and racist stigma. Heidi, a white 40-year-old diaper bank director, contrasted her privileged circumstances with the racialized poverty, low-wage work, and high-cost childcare faced by families she served: Families are transient, living in shelters, living with an aunt, a sister. They don’t have washing facilities or money for laundry . . . I did cloth diapers for twins. I know about the amount of work involved, and families have way more on their plate than I did. But older men and women in these meetings, they always go to, “Why don’t you do cloth diapers?” Well, because it’s just not feasible right now for these families. I wasn’t trying to work. I wasn’t struggling to buy groceries. I could sit at home and change them every hour. That never even entered their minds. Diapers don’t really enter anyone’s mind unless you’ve needed them and been without them.
Heidi knew that her economic advantages and white privilege enabled cloth diapering and prevented racist criticism about her diapering choices. Yet few she encountered in her diaper advocacy recognized the class and race privileges embedded in the “choice” to use cloth.
The one cloth-only diaper banker I interviewed framed her work in these terms. Sierra, white and 33, ran a cloth diaper bank that sought to “break down barriers of race and class that make cloth diapers inaccessible for certain parts of the population.” Sierra questioned the common messaging from other banks that low-income families cannot use cloth: Cloth diapers used to be associated with poverty, but now they’re being co-opted by this white elite with the method needing a special detergent, all these perfect steps . . . It’s been framed as expensive, time consuming, something that working families and families in poverty don’t have access to . . . The first disposables ever thrown away are still sitting in a landfill . . . We can’t fix poverty through solutions that trash our planet.
Sierra believed that cloth diaper banks addressed the sexism, poverty, and racism that created diaper need, while preventing the disparate effects of environmental degradation on low-income families of color most likely to experience that need.
Although mothers and diaper bankers acknowledged these environmental impacts, they stressed how the shift to disposability combined with low wages, a meager social safety net, and excessive employment and care responsibilities among marginalized mothers made cloth impracticable for most poor families. Gail, a white 46-year-old diaper bank founder, articulated the sustainability dilemma: I’m not sure what the solution is to helping people have babies in drier bottoms so they can work, support their families, and protect the environment too. The way our society is set up, the cycle of poverty keeps going without help with [disposable] diapers . . . We need sustainable families just as much as a sustainable environment.
Most diaper bankers understood their work and advocacy in these terms, as part of empowering marginalized women whose employment, education, and caregiving were most affected by diaper need. Janine, a white 50-year-old diaper bank founder, concluded, We expect so much more of poor mothers, so why not cloth, many ask. For families for whom that works, great! But why do we expect the poorest parents to do the most work? I want people to have what they need. Most of them need disposable diapers.
Conclusion
In early 2021, two federal diaper bills were introduced in Congress. The End Diaper Need Act of 2021 proposed federal funding for diapers and official designation of diapers as a tax-exempt medical necessity. The COVID-19 Diaper Assistance Act earmarked $200 million for federal diaper assistance. The bills’ supporters underscored the costs of parenting, diaper need as a growing public health crisis, and increased demand on diaper banks during the pandemic because of illness, job loss, and financial stress. Because structural gendered racism marginalizes them in households and the labor market, low-income mothers of color have borne the brunt of the pandemic’s harms (Pirtle and Wright 2021), including increased diaper need. Like all other federal and most state diaper bills, neither bill made it past referrals to congressional committees, fortifying a gendered policy vacuum around a basic need of childcare.
The intersectional theoretical lens of gendered policy vacuums explains the slow progress toward addressing diaper need and creating more sustainable, affordable, and accessible diapering methods. Gendered expectations for “intensive mothering” (Hays 1996) and its pro-environmental corollary “green intensive mothering” (Atkinson 2014) shape gender biases in U.S. social policy that favor paternalist approaches to social provisions that presume white, middle-class breadwinning fathers and full-time, stay-at-home caregiving mothers—the rare privileged families who are most likely to use cloth diapers. Gender policy vacuums that assume individual-level solutions to complex structural problems are deeply entrenched around many parallel issues in the United States—period poverty, lack of paid family leave, increased childcare demands in the wake of COVID-19—that result from the invisibility and devaluation of feminized bodies, needs, and labor.
The low status of care work, especially the labor of poor mothers of color, creates gendered binds around providing for children’s basic needs in the context of poverty. Hidden costs of cloth diapering are prohibitive for marginalized parents. Just as mothers’ home-cooking cannot compensate for food system inequalities that converge at the dinner table (Bowen, Brenton, and Elliott 2019), inequities on the changing table cannot be solved by just using cloth. Gendered neoliberal ideologies of motherhood intersect with elitist and racist stigma to create gender policy vacuums that stifle a sense of social accountability for children’s health and the care work it requires.
Beyond the economic costs of cloth diapering, gendered ideas of proper parenting infused with stereotypes of racialized poverty limit mothers’ agency in using alternative diapering methods that might alleviate diaper need. Mothers of color are more likely to be surveilled, cited, and punished by the child welfare system for parental “neglect” defined by the conditions of poverty (Roberts 2002). Gender policy vacuums around diapers and other basic needs exist alongside an extensive U.S. child welfare system that governs and disciplines poor parents. Resources used for policing poor families could be allocated to providing for their needs instead. But public strategies for addressing childrearing inequities like diaper need seem neither feasible nor reasonable in a vacuum created by gendered, classist, and racist ideologies of individual maternal responsibility.
Why don’t they just use cloth? as a response to marginalized mothers’ diaper struggles illuminates how white, affluent, androcentric privileges get codified in policy, and especially lack of policy. Although this study did not directly analyze conversations about diaper need in policy arenas, it suggests why diaper bills rarely get far enough in the legislative process to prompt such conversations. The case of diaper need illuminates how gender policy vacuums develop as well as the gendered mechanisms of political invisibility around feminized care labor. Such vacuums undercut our collective ability to envision, design, and implement policies that could equalize the social conditions of childrearing and ensure that families’ basic needs are met. To fully understand how policy and social provisions are gendered, we must focus not only on the policies that exist but also on those that fail to make it to the (changing) table.
Footnotes
Author’s Note:
I thank Daisy Rooks, Jennifer Sherman, Jennifer Utrata, Laurel Westbrook, and Kerry Woodward for their feedback on earlier versions of this manuscript. This research was funded by the American Sociological Association Fund for the Advancement of the Discipline supported by the National Science Foundation and the College of Social Sciences at California State University, Fresno.
Jennifer Randles is a Professor and Chair of Sociology at California State University, Fresno. She is the author of Proposing Prosperity: Marriage Education Policy and Inequality in America and Essential Dads: The Inequalities and Politics of Fathering. She is currently writing a book on diaper insecurity, the diaper bank movement, and diaper politics.