See ads for menarche-education
booklets: Marjorie May's Twelfth Birthday (Kotex,
1932), Tampax tampons (1970, with Susan Dey), Personal Products (1955, with Carol Lynley), and
German o.b. tampons (lower ad, 1981)
And read Lynn Peril's series
about these and similar booklets!
 
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Kotex teaches and wins girls:
Marjorie May's Twelfth Birthday, 1929,
puberty & menstruation booklet for Kotex sanitary napkins
In America, mothers essentially stopped teaching their daughters about
menstruation in the early part of the 19th century. Victorianism made knowledge
of the body shameful, especially among women, and the informal passing of
knowledge from older girls to younger ones was inhibited by changes in the
school system. Physicians and moralists took over by default. (This topic
is treated wonderfully in "'Something Happens
to Girls': Menarche and the Emergence of the Modern American Hygienic Imperative"
by Joan Jacobs Brumberg of Cornell University in the Journal of the History
of Sexuality, 1993, vol. 4, no. 1., and by Lynn
Peril on this MUM Web site. Prof. Brumberg recently [1997] wrote The Body Project, a history of cultural attitudes
toward the girl's body in America - read it!)
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Lynn Peril discusses many of these teachers, and especially the menstrual
industry's seizing the initiative in menarche education,
which is the situation today..
By the kind permission of the Curator of Health
and Medicine at the Powerhouse Museum, Sydney, Australia, I am able
to show you part of an Australian edition of Marjorie
May's Twelfth Birthday (which Peril mentions) from 1928 in the collection
of the Powerhouse Museum. (Please direct any further enquiries to Megan
Hicks at meganh@phm.gov.au. The Powerhouse will get this museum if I can't
find a suitable place for it in the U.S.A.)
This Australian edition is probably identical to the American edition.
Read the entire 1935 Canadian edition.
(See an American ad offering this booklet,
and see other booklets and ads for them, above.)
© 1999 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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