See a roughly contemporary pad, Society,
and a "silent purchase" ad for Modess,
1928.
Other Modess ads: 1931,"Modess . . . . because" ads, the French
Modess, and the German "Freedom" (Kimberly-Clark)
for teens.
See a prototype of the first Kotex
ad.
 
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The perfect menstrual pad 2 (1 2a
3 4 4a
5):
A college student designs her perfect one, and
how Smith College students behave
"Report of Gilbreth, Inc.," to
the Johnson & Johnson Company, 1 January 1927, about how to improve
the company's menstrual products, especially with regard to competition
with Kotex pads
Gilbreth writes of the response of a Smith College student who wrote
about her dream pad.
"College Girl" wanted the popular artist
John Held, Jr., to
illustrate her INVISOS pad with "a typical
college girl . . . in . . . a close-fitting party dress whirling around
at a dance. The John Held
variety of illustration would be recommended." Held painted
a cover (a section is above) for the humor
magazine Life, 18 February 1926, about a year
before the Gilbreth report appeared, and maybe at the time "College
Girl" invented her dream pad.
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Her "College Girl" invented the "INVISOS"
- invisible, of course, under tight clothing,
a great concern of the women interviewed.
Most pads of the day were much too big
for students' clothing - Kotex, Curads and Venus #5 were 3
feet or more long, tab end to tab end (almost a meter), the absorbent
filler being 2 feet long in the Modess (about
61 cm).
And many students and business women shortened
the front tabs holding the pad to the belt - the back one had farther
to go (see why and see one
in place) - and pushed around the pad filler to
fit it better. Square
ends on the filler rubbed the skin; many women cut them round with
scissors. Some women used petroleum jelly to
coat the edges of pads having coarse gauze to reduce chafing.
The student describes her INVISOS:
"This dainty package contains twelve napkins of a new size so
that one may feel perfectly safe and comfortable while wearing them and
yet be unhampered. The day of the bungling, home made variety is past.
The modern girl cannot be bothered by anything cumbersome. . . .
"INVISOS are shaped to meet your needs, offer you complete security
and a knowledge that you are perfectly well-groomed and neat regardless
of your dress, activity, or company.
"The picture accompanying this should illustrate
a typical college girl . . . in . . . a close-fitting party dress whirling
around at a dance. The John Held variety of illustration would be recommended."
(See the illustration and caption at left.)
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Students at Smith College responded most, by far (at least 436 filled
out questionnaires)
Smith students (Smith College, where poet Sylvia Plath studied almost
three decades later, is in Northampton, Massachusetts) were all female,
and they chose Kotex over the others (as Gilbreth
says students also did at the University of California and Johns Hopkins
University), mainly because it was
well advertised (Kotex marketed its pads
with amazing gimmicks at this time, including store-window-decoration
contests with big prizes) and because of its
"average" size, which seems
to contradict what the author put in her tables (some figures, above);
but the girls could and did open up the Kotex gauze and push the filler
around to make themselves more comfortable.
It was availability, however, the survey
found to be the most important factor in women's
buying pads. If it was there, they would buy it. And Kotex was the most
available.
Kotex ads, as I discovered, predominate in magazines of the mid 1920s,
and Gilbreth comments that the girls' college rooms were strewn with magazines,
which they examined very critically, especially ads directed at them. (Kotex
aimed this ad right at college girls.)
Even though the boxes were always wrapped
with paper to conceal them when they bought them - children of druggists
who visited the physical museum MUM told me that as kids they helped their
parents wrap them - the size and shape were so well known that "anyone carrying a box comes in for much humor and taunting
and this is accordingly not a pleasant feature of the napkin."
(Continued below the pictures.)
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Picture below: This improved box is from a post-Gilbreth
report ad. There is little writing, and at least
one side is blank, letting women store it with that
side showing, making it supposedly anonymous. Note that both Kotex
and Modess used crosses; other brands did too.
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Gilbreth found that companies printed too many
words on the boxes and they were usually too
large, which could give them away as menstrual products.
Not one respondent kept empty boxes of
menstrual pads.
"Hell, no!" replied one girl
when asked if she did.
Another wrote ironically, "I use them to send Christmas presents."
The girls' favorite "box" was for Curads
(below, left, and see ad, 1920), which
was no box at all, but a roll of connected
pads that got smaller as they used them and finally disappeared.
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The disposable pad Curads, left, came in
a roll, making it the respondents' favorite
"box," because it wasn't one. (From an ad in the Sears, Roebuck
catalog, fall 1921)
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The girls - Gilbreth often uses this word
- didn't care about disposability at Smith,
normally a huge problem for Kotex, which advertised
them as flushable and stuck instructions
into each box about how to do this. But few women bothered to take out the
filling, rip it in half, tear the gauze covering apart, and then soak the
filling in the toilet before flushing the parts, as directed; who would?
(See more supposedly flushable pads.)
One student reported the humiliation of stopping
up the toilet of the family of her boyfriend
with a Kotex pad after a football game.
She was eating dinner with the family when the father noticed a stain forming
on the ceiling and had to run upstairs to investigate, finally calling
a plumber, a story similar to those in columns of "My Most Embarrassing
Moment" in women's and girls' magazines today.
When they visited boys' colleges for social
events,
"[t]hen, if ever, . . . [Smith girls] would dispose of Kotex down
the toilets. But knowing that this is not successful they are forced to
wrap them and conceal them until they can leave the houseparty. As a result
many are forgotten, and there is embarrassment for both the men and the
women."
By the way, the author reported that the head nurse, Miss Harris, in
the dispensary of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, who decided which
pads and machines the 7,000 "girls" in her company should use
- they used 4,500 pads a month dispensed only through machines - chose
the machine [and its associated pad, the Hygienic
fiber pad] that would withstand slugs - fake
coins - and damage caused by the women using paper cutters and similar things
to push down the releases on the machines. That eliminated Kotex
and its machines, which couldn't take it. (See some early
vending machines and a 1920s ad for the early
Kotex dispenser - also 1930s Modess and Kotex pads for vending machines.)
Miss Harris also found Kotex unsatisfactory in other ways:
"No girl is taken in to the employ of the company who has any
menstrual trouble [!], but if trouble develops after the girl comes in,
they find the cause and remedy it [!!]. In this way they learned that Kotex
was irritating to the skin. . . . [F]ew of the girls
would read the complete instructions [for disposing of it], and fewer would
take the time to follow them. They had a great deal of trouble with
plumbing [because of Kotex]."
The Smith students preferred to buy from a woman clerk, which meant
they didn't patronize the "College Drug Store" and local shops
but made a "weary trip" to a department store. Kotex solved this
problem in some stores where customers picked boxes from the tops
of counters, putting money into a coin box.
© 2000 Harry Finley. It is illegal to reproduce
or distribute work on this Web site in any manner or medium without written
permission of the author. Please report suspected violations to hfinley@mum.org
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