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KOTEX (and Kotex & other ads & products):
Early newspaper articles
about Kotex and Cellucotton
Ads, 1920s, featuring Kotex spokeswomen, living and maybe fictional
Putting Kotex on the counter to sell it (drawing)
Small b&w ad, 1920s
Ads, 1921: January, May, July, November
1920s: skating and small ad
Ad, 15 November 1922
Ad, March 1922
Ad, January 1923
Ad on side of train, 1920s
ad, July 1923, with proof
Car ad, Nov. 1923
Ad, March 1926
"Woman's Greatest Hygienic Handicap" ad, 1927
Ad, January, 1927
Disposing of early pads: Spanish-language booklet & in an English booklet (1928)
Fastening & disposing of 1920s Kotex pads (instructions, 2 sheets)
ad for Kotex dispensers, 1920s
First American menstrual ad with real person: Lee Miller, July 1928
Second real person in a menstrual products ad? October 1928
CONTRIBUTE to Humor, Words and expressions about menstruation and Would you stop menstruating if you could?
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Read 10 years (1996-2006) of articles and Letters to Your MUM on this site.
Leer la versión en español de los siguientes temas: Anticoncepción y religión, Breve reseña - Olor - Religión y menstruación - Seguridad de productos para la menstruación.


MUSEUM OF MENSTRUATION AND WOMEN'S HEALTH

Kotex ad, Woman's Home Companion magazine, 1925
"Every mother should tell her daughter this"
Woodbury soap ad (reverse side of 1927 Kotex ad)
"At the Most Fashionable Resorts"


First page.

I thank the donor of many items, including this ad!

Below: A conversation between people not trying to impress each other - mother and daughter - unlike the women in the later Kotex ad and in the soap ad below.
Mother explains the old-fashioned rags that she used for menstruation and why Kotex is better.
Read more about Ellen Buckland, nurse, quoted in the ad.
The ad measures 10 1/2 x 13 3/4" (26.8 x 35.2 cm).
 SEE THE COLUMN AT RIGHT!

Below: Does the young woman in the ad look like the one below, the daughter of the attorney general of Kansas? The public knew her. This is the American movie actress Louise Brooks, famous for two German silent films the director G. W. Pabst made in 1928. I saw one of them ("Das Tagebuch einer Verlorenen," "Diary of a Lost Girl") in a German theater in Franfurt decades later; I heard gasps from the audience when she made her entrance; I bought a reproduction of the 1928 movie poster in the lobby. That face! For years a fellow in England sold me postcards, old movie magazines and other ephemera featuring her. I was in love. Look at those eyebrows! "The Girl in the Black Helmet" Kenneth Tynan entitled his famous New Yorker article that gave me my first glimpse of her; the magazine had abandoned its venerable policy of never using editorial photos in order to shock readers with her grinning face. I'm still breathing hard.

 

 

Directly above: From a, um, er, OK, so it's on a French postcard. So what! No, I wasn't the only one in love with her. Tynan quotes Henri Langlois, the director of the Cinémathèque Française: "Those who have seen her can never forget her. . . . Her art is so pure it becomes invisible."
Directly above: Famous photographer Edward Steichen took this picture for Vanity Fair. He also took one of a woman soon to be famous who debuted as the - what else? - first real Kotex model.
(The bottom 3 photos come from Barry Paris's packed book "Louise Brooks.")
Louise Brooks said (from Paris's book),
"To paraphrase Proust: how often do we change the whole course of our lives in pursuit of a love that we will have forgotten within a few months. . . . I . . . am unwilling to write the sexual truth that would make my life worth reading. I cannot unbuckle the Bible Belt. [She was born in Kansas.] That is why I will never write my memoirs."
At the beginning of her acting career, the year this ad appeared, the New York Daily Mirror newspaper ran an article on the scandal Brooks caused when nude pictures of her surfaced. She said she posed to get in the movies. This hinted at the wild life to come, which took a steep dive to department store clerk, to call girl and then rose to immoral-, er, immortality.
Below: Well, let's wash our hands - er, face - of the Brooks affair.
This ad appears on the reverse of this Kotex ad and shows the same rich folks
Woodbury hoped would buy his soap. (How would YOU like to spend your
life lying about in expensive magazines?)
Look closely at the lounging ladies at right wiggling their fingers and
pearls at the gentleman assessing the skin Woodbury facial soap has moistened.
 
 
Below: That out-of-control Dr. Woodbury had arranged that HIS face would rub over
ladies' faces - and maybe elsewhere!
 
 

 
See an ad featuring the rich during America's Great Depression.
Speaking of Louise Brooks, I like painting faces.
 
End | 1927 Kotex ad
"Woman's Greatest Hygienic Handicap" ad, 1927
Kotex ad, January, 1927
Disposing of early pads: Spanish-language booklet & in an English booklet (1928)
Fastening & disposing of 1920s Kotex pads (instructions, 2 sheets)
Ad for Kotex dispensers, 1920s

© 2011 Harry Finley. It is illegal to reproduce or distribute any of the work on this Web site
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