"Making the Mundane Astonishingly Beautiful": American Mothers and Contemporary Cloth Diapering.

Diapering a baby might seem to be one of the least rewarding chores of early childhood care. Indeed, this task often serves as a cultural shorthand both for parental sacrifice and for the gendered “dirty work” of childcare. But self-described cloth diaper “junkies” speak playfully about their diapering choices, employing the language of consumerist addiction, religious conversion, and personal transformation. In the words of members of online cloth diapering boards: “I literally became obsessed.” “I’m a convert.” “I am a diaper junkie.”

My paper explores the politics of parental (but mainly maternal) commodity activism through a study of contemporary American cloth diapering.  This practice is one of the most visible components of “attachment parenting,” a parenting style that celebrates so-called “natural” parenting traditions, including co-sleeping, “baby-wearing” (the frequent use of baby slings and carriers), extended breastfeeding, home birthing and midwifery, and gentle discipline. While the contemporary cloth diaper movement has been largely unexplored by academics, my paper uses diapering as a lens for examining debates about the best (and most personally satisfying) parenting practices, and for reflecting on parental consumerism.

Toward this end, I use an archive of several online cloth diapering boards that have operated over the past decade to explore the cloth industry’s growth in recent years among very diverse groups of American parents.  I also consider the history of countercultural consumerism from the 1960s onward in order to set contemporary parenting and purchasing ideologies into conversation with longer-term parenting trends.