See a Kotex ad advertising a Marjorie May
booklet.
See many more similar booklets.
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!
Read the full text of the 1935 Canadian edition
of Marjorie May's Twelfth Birthday, probably identical to the American edition.
More ads for teens (see also introductory
page for teenage advertising): Are you in the know? (Kotex napkins and Quest napkin powder, 1948, U.S.A.),
Are you in the know? (Kotex
napkins and belts, 1949, U.S.A.)Are you in
the know? (Kotex napkins, 1953, U.S.A.),
Are you in the know? (Kotex
napkins and belts, 1964, U.S.A.), Freedom
(1990, Germany), Kotex (1992, U.S.A.), Pursettes (1974, U.S.A.), Pursettes (1974, U.S.A.), Saba (1975, Denmark)
See early tampons and a list of tampon on this site - at least the ones I've cataloged.
 
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Preparing for Womanhood, menstruation & puberty booklet by Kotex,
1920s, Australia Cover
As you can read elsewhere about the Kotex booklet Marjorie
May's Twelfth Birthday, in America mothers essentially stopped teaching
their daughters about menstruation in the early part of the last 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.)
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 this Australian edition of the Kotex booklet Preparing
for Womanhood in the collection of the Powerhouse Museum. (Please direct
any further enquiries to Megan Hicks at meganh@phm.gov.au)
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This booklet doesn't tell a story, as does Marjorie
May. It's a straightforward discussion of menstruation for girls anticipating
or having their first periods, I would guess from the 1920s; there is no
copyright date, but there is internal evidence, discussed later.
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© 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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