Kotex ad emphasizing shame, 1992See ads for Pursettes: September 1972 (letter testimonial) - August 1973 (letter testimonial) - February 1974 (cartoon story) - August 1974 (cartoon story) - October 1974 (cartoon story) See a 1965 ad for a Pursettes school educational kit - Pursettes Getting to Know Yourself booklet for girls - other teaching booklets: Growing Up and Liking It and How Shall I Tell My Daughter?See more 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 pageCONTRIBUTE to Humor, Words and expressions about
menstruation and Would
you stop
menstruating if you
could?
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The blue of the Kotex box was famous - read here - and the many blank sides allowed the woman to store it easily, not letting anyone know what it was at a glance - except those who knew Kotex blue. "[I]nsecure 'sanitary pads' of yesteryear" refers to washable pads, usually homemade, common around the world in the very early 20th century and before and still used today in America and elsewhere (India, for example). Women would wash them, sometimes after soaking overnight in a bucket of water. An African-American photographer for the Chicago Tribune who visited the museum in my house in the 1990s told me he saw washed "rags" hanging on clotheslines in black sections of Chicago in the 1950s. And Kotex was not cheap in the 1920s; the women in the illustration seem to be from "the better walks of life" Ms. Buckland mentions. "[P]ersonal service cabinets in rest-rooms" (lower left corner) refers to the Kotex vending machine; see a pad from these machines dating from the 1930s. |
See the entire ad, small drawings, and
the main illustration.
Kotex ad emphasizing shame,
1992
See ads
for menarche-education booklets: Marjorie
May's Twelfth Birthday (Kotex,
1933), Tampax
tampons (1970, with Susan Dey), Personal Products
(1955, with Carol Lynley), and German
o.b. tampons
(lower ad, 1981)
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