DIRECTORY of all topics (See also the SEARCH ENGINE, bottom of page.)some
 
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German instructions for making washable menstrual
pads, underpants, menstrual belts, etc., probably before 1900
Almost everywhere, middle-class women made much clothing themselves
in the early 20th century and before, including menstrual
gear, underwear for cold weather (in an era when underpants for women
was basically two cloth legs tubes joined at the waist and open at the crotch
from abdomen to back) and items to protect themselves
and their beds from vaginal discharge after childbirth (all of which
we see below).
Below is a page entitled "Underwear for special
times" from an unidentified German publication, probably from
the late 19th century, giving housewives patterns for undergarments to be
made from scraps of cloth found in their houses, "the softer the better."
Just as in America, German women could buy books of tips for almost every
domestic need, especially in the era before wide-spread disposable goods
and packaging (read Susan Strasser's Waste and Want:
A Social History of Trash, 1999, Metropolitan Books - buy
it - for a fascinating look at this). As you can see, Germans are gründlich
- thorough, both their strength and weakness.
Menstruation items are illustrations 102-106.
I took the page from Die Unpäßliche
Frau: Sozialgeschichte der Menstruation und Hygiene (The Indisposed
Woman: A Social History of Menstruation and Hygiene), by Sabine Hering and
Gudrun Maierhof (Centaurus-Verlagsgesellschaft, Pfaffenweiler, Germany,
1991). The book is a gold mine of information about German medical and menstrual
culture.
I made the page so big to be mostly readable for those who can read
German, in spite of the Fraktur, the hard-to-read style of type in which
the Germans periodically published their books, newspapers and magazines,
the last time during the Hitler era, when it was considered more "authentic"
for Germans than Roman script. I never had to master the handwriting of
that time - I once did graduate study in German - but it correlated somehow
with the Fraktur, and I have heard Germans, including my brother's mother-in-law,
who learned it in school, chuckle at it.
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