Travel Back in Time: Cloth Hygiene Products
For that matter, I don't know if you've given much thought to what was used in lieu of toilet paper on the Oregon Trail or in the Amazon or even back in Bible times. Women, we know, got to sit on clean straw in a red tent during their menstrual periods. But no word has reached us on exactly how, or even if, they cleansed their private parts after a daily constitutional.
No, I haven't spent a lot of time thinking about the toilet and hygienic habits of our ancestors either. But if I stopped to give it some thought, I would have thought that soft toilet paper and convenient tampons ranked right up there with important advances of the twentieth century. I mean, way up there with air travel and microwave ovens.
So it really boggled my mind when I found that there were people who preferred to use time-honored and ancient forms of personal hygiene products. "Mama cloths" are sold at many alternative boutiques to take the place of pads, napkins, tampons, or pantyliners for a woman's menstrual cycle. Just as the name suggests, these mama cloths are strips of cotton to be inserted in a woman's panties during her menstrual cycle. And just in case, you've thought ahead with me on this: yes, they are intended to be laundered and reused next month.
Apparently, the reasoning behind using cotton cloths instead of disposable paper products is mixed. Some advocates claim that pads and tampons are made from bleached materials and bleach is a bad thing to be inserting into a woman's body. Others claim that tampons and pads are full of asbestos designed not only to create more bleeding and therefore more demand for the paper products, but also to cause cancer in unsuspecting females. And yet another faction who advocates using cotton cloths for monthly menstruation professes a concern for the landfills of the world. By using reusable cloth strips instead of disposable tampons or pantyliners, presumably one saves some space in the trash heap.
But, I reasoned, if a woman doesn't mind handling the mess and doing the laundry, what difference does it make? Sure, I'll keep right on using my bleached and possibly asbestos-filled tampons, but to each her own.
And then we heard about Sheryl Crow promising to help save the world by using only one square of toilet paper at a time. But even that doesn't go far enough for some people bent on saving our planet.
Cloth toilet paper is being used in alternative-minded households in an attempt to halt deforestation, save landfill space, and help the environment. Now, I am a mother, and have become accustomed to cleaning baby poop every day. But laundering a cloth soiled with my husband's fecal matter......nope, I draw the line there.
And I have to wonder something. How much water is being used in all this extra washing? Surely water is a precious resource as well. And how many people using these cotton cloth so-called "hygiene products" drive cars, or fly on airplanes? That's a lot of fuel, and a lot of toxins released into the environment. Surely, that would take a lot of cotton cloth to balance that use of energy.
And as for me and my family, we'll stay right here in the 21st century, at least when it comes to disposable hygiene products.
Published by Marsha Raasch
I am a 44 year old mother of two girls. I am recently divorced and dealing with single parenting, being a working mom, and sending the girls to public school for the first time. View profile
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- "Mama cloths" refer to cotton strips to be used during a woman's menstruation.
- Reusable, washable cloth wipes are to wipe private areas after using the toilet.
- Cloth diapers, instead of disposable ones, have been in vogue again in the last decade.
5 Comments
Post a CommentBerlin: This isn't a blog, and I didn't find this article sarcastic in the least. Even if it was, the writer has the right to freedom of expression. Take it or leave it. Marsha: I agree with you. I couldn't and wouldn't do this for a number of reasons. It takes energy to properly wash and sanitize these types of products, and that would defeat the purpose. People of centuries past used what they had whether it was leaves or rags, but we're in the 21st century. I'm all for saving the environment and conserving energy, but this would require costly energy and other products to sufficiently clean and sanitize these items. Whoever wants to use cloth, I respect your choice, but for these purposes I'll stick with disposable biodegradable products. I'll do my part in other ways.
Since we don't know for certain what the future may bring, perhaps viewing alternatives to disposable toilet tissue and menstrual products as contemporary alternatives that provide advances to current trends would be better than dismissing them for short-sighted and ill-informed reasons.
Those who are interested in these alternatives should know that there are more choices than the few that are presented off-handedly in this blog. These choices include those that don't require much more washing than you might give to your hands and can be done by each of us individually rather than by one designated "housecleaner" in each family.
A simple Internet search will reveal these choices and provide places where they can be purchased. I would encourage anyone to give it a try. Then you can see yourself as a pioneer for future changes in this part of our society.
Interesting opinion piece, although the sarcasm is unnecessarily thick in places. Your point could have been made with less snark and more information.
Advances are in the eye of the beholder and it is clear that, while convenient in a time sense, hygienic products made of paper/cotton are inconvenient in other ways.
Tampons and pads are bleached and are made of cotton. Both of these processes involve poisons that leach into the environment and affect water and air sources. Solid wastes from toilets or garbage cans also don't disappear when they leave our homes, but end up being stored in landfills where they pollute and remove land from other uses. It's clear that while "advanced" in some ways, these hygienic products are "primitive" in others.
Since we don't know for certain what the future may bring, perhaps viewing alternatives to disposable toilet tissue and menstrual products as contemporary alternatives that provide advances to current trends would be better than d
Cloth pads are not bad at all. I use cloth and a menstrual cup. I soak my pads for a few days until the end of my cycle and wash all of them once a month. So its not alot of washing if you have enough pads to last thru your entire cycle. I used disposable pads and tampons for 18 years and made the switch to cloth a few months back and i have to say it was the best thing i could have ever did for myself.
Asbestos-in-tampons. Have they ever heard the words class-action-lawsuit, and the concept that this would have been brought if there was any proof to that? People are nuts sometimes. If I had to use cloth during That Time, trust me, I'd have a lot of laundry to do! I will stick to paper products too (looking for recycled as always) and stay well upwind of Sheryl Crow.