See early tampoms Wix
and B-ettes and a bunch of other
earlier ones.
See some 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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Nunap menstrual tampon, U.S.A.,
early 1930s
The Nunap tampon might be the fax
tampon, possibly the first commercial
tampon; look at the identical drawings
(below)! And both have the same
manufacturer's address, although
different company names. Actually,
the addresses for Moderne Woman,
Nunap and fax tampons are all
within 9-15 minutes driving
distance of each other - today,
anyway, as was at least one
Chicago Kotex pad address in 1922
- and another!
All within a tight radius in
Chicago. Why did Kotex (so to
speak) hop from one address to the
other?
Note, too, that the tampon is made
of Cellucotton, which Kimberly-Clark
created and made for bandages in World
War I and then later made for Kotex.
It then sold Kotex from its subsidiary
company, Cellucotton Products Company,
located in Chicago, which is where so
many other early tampons were
headquartered. And as demonstrated by
the creation of Cellucotton Products
Company, Kimberly-Clark was not averse
to creating separate companies for its
products.
Did K-C make Nunap and fax
before it produced the Fibs tampon in
the late 1930s? If so, the company
could claim to have made the first
widely successful disposable menstrual
pad in the United States as well as
probably the first commercial tampon!
As with the fax, there are
no dates on any of the material, but I
suspect both were made in the early
1930s. And the name Nunap probably is
short for "new napkin," using the same
reference to a napkin, not a tampon,
that fax uses, probably
because the public would not have
known what a tampon was. The company
name, Neway, emphasized this newness.
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Instructions
in Nunap box (above). See
interior pages at bottom of
this
page.
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Back of fax box
(above); drawing
is
identical to top drawing.
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Inside of Nunap
instructions (above). Cellucotton was a
product of Kimberly-Clark.
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See early tampoms Wix
and B-ettes and a bunch of other
earlier ones.
© 1998 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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