See Mary Pauline Callender, author of the Marjorie
May menarche booklets for girls.
See a prototype of the first Kotex ad.
See more Kotex items: Ad 1928 (Sears
and Roebuck catalog) - Marjorie May's Twelfth
Birthday (booklet for girls, 1928, Australian edition; there are many
links here to Kotex items) - 1920s booklet in Spanish showing disposal
method - box from about 1969 - Preparing
for Womanhood (1920s, booklet for girls) - "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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Women Representatives of Companies
From the very early days of advertising for menstrual pads and tampons,
sellers used women, fictional perhaps, to pitch their products. Can
you imagine a man, pad in hand, advising women to use them? (Actually, some
have, like here.)
Even though a man probably invented the first modern commercial menstruation
napkin, and certainly did the first commercial
tampon with an applicator, women could better trust another woman to
understand the problems of their "critical days."
"Critical days," by the way, an expression used in several cultures,
will get a separate section of this site in the future. The German Camelia
menstrual-pad people use it in a pre-World War II
ad.
See also Mary Pauline Callender, author of the
Marjorie May menarche booklets for girls.
Below we have two early appearances of the woman-to-woman approach,
even though I suspect these, and later, women may have been speaking with
a male voice. Men run the industry, after all. If
alive, will the real Mrs. Barton and Nurse Thekla out themselves?
The Camelia ad is at the bottom of the page (See later Camelia ads:
German Camelia ad right before World
War ll - Australian Camelia ad (1952) - French
Camelia ad (1970s) - German Camelia
ad touting disposal bag(1990s)
Large files, long download!
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Left: Mrs. Barton advised readers to buy
Fems through her booklet "Personal Daintiness,"
here in an ad from McCall's magazine, September 1921. (Decades later, Sears
portrayed a figure also called Barton to lend her name to menstrual gear.)
Astute site visitors recall that Kotex
started advertising its disposable napkin in January 1921. Even more astute
visitors know that Kimberly-Clark (which Marjorie
May's mother spoke for) sold a product called Fems
decades later, and that a certain Ann Barton
popped up in Sears catalogs at the same time, sweet-talking readers into
buying her pads. Is there a Fems-to-the-left connection with Kimberly-Clark?
And could the Barton-to-the-left be the mother of the Sears Barton?
Folks, this is drama!
Let's assume that an ad man invented Mrs. Barton. Why Barton? I wonder
if the public still remembered Clara Barton,
founder of the American Red Cross? This would make the medical connection
in people's minds; nurses, you will remember, used bandages the Kimberly-Clark
Company made for soldiers in World War I as menstrual pads, giving birth
to Kotex.
Manufacturers loved, and love, to use medical authority, as we will
see in the Camelia ad below, from Germany, where people respected it even more.
The Camelia ad is below.
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Many thanks to Professor Domenico
Pecorari, Director of Obstetrics and Gynecology, Policlinic Hospital
of the Medical School, University of Verona, Italy, for sending me the valuable
article "Befleckte Weiblichkeit - Spuren tradierter
Menstruationsmythen in der Werbung für Produkte der weiblichen intimhygiene,"
by Dr. med. Jael Backe of the Universitätsfrauenklinik
Würzburg, Germany, published in Gynäkologisch-geburtshilfliche
Rundschau 1997; 37:30-38. The above Camelia ad came from that article.
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(Left) Finger-wagging Schwester Thekla (Schwester means sister
in German, the word used for nurse in that
country - in full it's Krankenschwester - , but which Americans use for
nun; nurses' uniforms are related to nun's habits, which remind us of the
origins of hospitals) advised Germans to buy the disposable pad Camelia,
a product available five years after Kotex, and which, like Kotex, exists
today. (But Kimberly-Clark, the maker of Kotex, bought Camelia in 1998).
The word Camelia is one of a long line of flower associations in menstruation and hygiene advertising,
and also in popular culture. (See a flower's use in menstrual
cup advertising, the shape of a tulip mimicking the cup.)
(Germans, I unnecessarily note, wag their fingers
from left to right and back again, whereas Americans move the finger away
and towards their bodies.)
Kotex and other companies used the cross - note again the connection
between medicine and the Christian development of hospitals - on its boxes
and in advertising. This encouraged the connection between sickness and
menstruation in the public mind, as well as the authority of doctors and
nurses. And did it - Good Grief! - subliminally suggest that it
was the Christian thing to use?
Anyway, the words above Camelia translate as "Enables
simplest and discrete destruction."
A woman who bought Camelia found a slip of paper
in the box. When she needed more pads, she silently handed the slip to a
store clerk; signs in drug stores advised women to ask for a female
clerk when buying Camelia. The slip said, "Please
sell me a box of Camelia."
American women buying Modess pads could
also present a slip to clerks they clipped from
ads.
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See Mary Pauline Callender's Marjorie May menarche
booklets for girls.
© 1999 Harry Finley. It is illegal to reproduce
or distribute 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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