During World War II, in the U.S., were diapers available?

Question

As is well known, during World War II many consumer goods became difficult to find and with regard to the situation in the United States, after some searches, I observed that, among others:

• U.S. officials imposed a short-lived ban on sliced bread as a wartime conservation measure (→);

• production of whiskey was banned again during World War II, from 1942 to 1946 (→);

• ice cream was unavailable during World War Two due to rationing (→).

However, despite further research I did, I could not find information on diapers, and I began wondering whether they were unavailable at that time. Were they?

Or, rather than not available, were they just hard to find and, if anything, only available through the black market?

Answer 1

Diapers back then were not made of synthetic materials, and thus were not really a "consumer good". The first consumer disposable diaper did not come along until 1948 (right after the war).

Instead, they were made of cloth, and were washed between uses. People of middle-class or better means typically had a service for this purpose. Much like a milk service, the diaper service would daily bring you clean (cloth) diapers and take away the dirty ones to be washed. Perhaps this was a bit more like the milk delivery service in reverse.

Some environmentally-concerned parents have been going back to cloth recently (although in my experience, parents typically don't do this for second or subsequent children)

I would posit that the combination of the preponderance of new post-war babies, and factories with no more wartime call on their synthetic materials products, made conditions "ripe" for the invention of disposable diapers in the wake of WWII. I have no evidence to back this supposition up though