See more ads for menarche-education booklets:
Marjorie May's Twelfth Birthday
(Kotex, 1933), Tampax tampons (1970, with Susan Dey),
Personal Products (1955, with Carol Lynley), and
German o.b. tampons (lower ad, 1970s)
And read Lynn Peril's series about these
and similar booklets!
See more Kotex items: First ad
(1921) - ad 1928 (Sears and Roebuck catalog)
- Lee Miller ads (first real person in amenstrual
hygiene ad, 1928) - Marjorie May's Twelfth Birthday
(booklet for girls, 1928, Australian edition; there are many links here
to Kotex items) - Preparing for Womanhood (1920s,
booklet for girls; Australian edition) - 1920s booklet in Spanish showing
disposal method - box
from about 1969 - "Are you in the know?"
ads (Kotex) (1949)(1953)(1964)(booklet, 1956) -
See more ads on the Ads for Teenagers main page
 
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Kotex box and menstrual pad, probably mid 1960s (U.S.A.)
Box, below
Kotex seems to have abandoned some of the suggestions from Dr. Lillian Gilbreth about pad packaging by the time
this box appeared - for example, the injunction against words everywhere.
Maybe women cared less about concealment by the 1950s. But then Dr. Gilbreth
directed her comments to Johnson & Johnson, not Kotex,
This pad, of course, was designed for a belt,
as self-adhesive pads didn't appear until the early 1970s (for example,
Kotex's New Freedom).
The box bears such a white rose! C'mon now, aren't most roses red? Gosh,
might a red one - a rose-colored one! - remind
people that these pads absorb blood? Menstrual
blood? (See a cup-shaped tulip advertising a
menstrual cup.) A German company famously used a red
camelia on its boxes to indicate menstruation; there's
more to the story than just that!
Aside from the color, most American woman want to wind up smelling
like a rose, not menstrual blood! But at least at times in the past
- and maybe today in places - women allowed others
to smell and see her menstrual blood as a sign of fertility and to sexually
attract others, as extraordinary this may seem to most North Americans
and Europeans (and to me just a couple of years ago). (The English feminist
Selina Cooper writes (towards the bottom of the page)
about this among English girls in a cotton mill around 1900, where straw covered the floor to absorb their escaping blood.)
This fact lends credence to my suspicion that many or most women in Europe
and North America prior to about 1900 bled into their
clothing - that is, they did not use rags or tampons or anything
else to absorb and conceal the blood. Times sure have changed - why? Read
more about this.
But I digress.
See the pad.
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See the pad. See Cybill Shepherd appearing in
ads for this pad. See a Kotex pad probably from the 1930s
and one copyrighted 1974.
© 2001 Harry Finley. It is illegal to reproduce or distribute any
of the 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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