The Ultimate Mother's Day Quiz (continued)

ANSWERS

1. The disposable diaper was the brainchild of Marion Donovan, a Westport, Connecticut, mother who was driven to desperation by all the work associated with washing, bleaching, and air-drying cloth diapers. In 1951, she obtained a patent for the world’s first disposable diaper. While she was initially unable to interest any large consumer goods manufacturers on the product potential of disposable diapers, in the end, she managed to rights to her idea for a cool one million dollars. Oh, baby!

2. Marabel Morgan was the bestselling author of The Total Woman, a Christian marriage manual which first hit the bookstore shelves in 1973. In addition to recommending “costumes” such as go-go boots and baby doll pajamas to spice up one’s sex life, Morgan claimed to have the recipe for the perfect marriage: a subservient wife and a doting husband. “It is only when a woman surrenders her life to her husband, reveres and worships him, and is willing to serve him, that she becomes really beautiful to him,” she wrote. “She becomes a priceless jewel, the glory of femininity, his queen!”

3. The actress was Kathleen Turner and the movie was the 1994 cult classic Serial Mom.

4. Anesthesia for first used for pain relief during childbirth in Europe in 1847. Apparently, the first woman to receive chloroform was so delighted by her pain-free delivery that she named her baby daughter Anesthesia. Unfortunately, there was one unforeseen side effect: she had so little memory of the delivery that she required some convincing before she was prepared to believe that the baby was actually hers.

5. Wanda Holloway and Verna Heath each had 13-year-old daughters competing for positions on the same cheerleading squad in their hometown of Channelview, Texas. Holloway ended up doing time in prison for trying to hire a hitman to murder Heath. She did so in the hope that Heath’s daughter, Amber, would be so distraught by her mother’s death that she would drop out of the cheerleading competition, clearing the road for Holloways’ daughter Shanna Harper to make the squad.

6. According to Jerry Oppenheimer, author of Martha Stewart—Just Desserts: The Unauthorized Biography, Martha Stewart was on hand for parts of the filming of the classic 1975 horror flick, The Stepford Wives—a movie in which housekeeping robots take the place of mere flesh-and-blood housewives.

7. Celine Dion is the proud new mom who sang the praises of baby poop to Redbook magazine. “For me, poop says it all. When you want to know the truth, look to the poop….Once Rene-Charles was playing with a vitamin bottle and he ate a little of the paper label off it….I swear, the next morning that paper was in his poop. And I thought, ‘If I don’t watch this kid close enough, one day he’s going to send me a fax in his poop!’”

8. While the devoted viewers who turned into The Donna Reed Show (1958-1966) would never have imagined the quintessential suburban mom becoming active in political protests, that’s exactly what happened in real life. In the 1970s, she co-chaired the anti-nuclear and anti-war association “Another Mother for Peace.” Unlike other TV moms of the same era, Reed wasn’t a mother off-screen. None of her three marriages produced any children.