Marjorie May, three booklets, 1935 main page
See a Kotex ad advertising a Marjorie May
booklet. See many more similar booklets.
See a Modess True or False? ad in The American
Girl magazine, January 1947, and actress Carol Lynley
in "How Shall I Tell My Daughter" booklet ad (1955) - Modess . . . . because ads (many dates).
 
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Marjorie May's Twelfth Birthday
Puberty & menstruation booklet, Canada, 1932,
with folder and envelope
Pages 1-3
The Cellucotton Products Company, formed
by Kimberly-Clark Corporation to manufacture and market Kotex menstrual
pads and, in the late 1930s, Fibs tampons - K-C apparently
didn't want to associate itself with menstruation - quickly spread to countries
outside the U.S.A. in the 1920s. (See part of an early Kotex booklet in
Spanish and a 1928 Marjorie
May's Twelfth Birthday published in Australia.)
Kotex was eager to teach girls about menstruation because it often led
to the user's buying the product for the rest of her menstruating life.
Most mothers had long since avoided discussing the subject. The company
makes a hilarious appeal (this page) to save
money on something else, but please, NOT Kotex!
I bought this booklet from the descendants of the family that received
it from Kotex in 1934. Someone, maybe the girl's mother, wrote in the booklet.
The handwriting looks very adult.
In this Birthday, one of many editions,
the author, Mary Pauline Callender (her photo)
- if that is the author's real name - has toned down her language and done
other editing of earlier editions. (Compare the first
pages of the 1928 with this 1932 version.) But I still find some of
the writing stilted and just plain bad (more comments here).
I like As One Girl to Another, a slightly later
Kotex booklet, better.
I like the art deco designs on most pages. And unlike the other Marjorie
May booklets at MUM (see some), this one is in
color.
The booklet is about 5.125" x 3.2" (about 12.9 x 8.1 cm).
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The inside front cover, which is blank, comes right before
the above page. I show this beginning of the text in color to show the color
scheme that obtains throughout the booklet, unlike many or all of the other
Marjorie May booklets, which are black and white.
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Next:
cover | text of booklet: 1
2 3 4
5 6 | enclosed
folder | envelope
See the roughly contemporary Cashay and Dale tampons, and very early Tampax
and fax. |