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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A box of Society menstrual napkins (American? 1920s-1930s?)
Were the manufacturers trying to elevate the tone of their embarrassing
product by calling it Society? (See San-Nap-Pak pads
for another example of this.)
Early Kotex ads always featured middle-class-and-above
women, but that's who its clientele was. Maybe that was the case here.
The box bears no patent or trademark information; you see below all
the writing that appears inside and out.
Is it American? The graphics look as if they come from the 1920s or
1930s, obviously from an English-speaking country.
The pad itself matches
exactly the size of the first Kotex
pad, which probably indicates the size necessary for the usual belt. (See some belts from
today.)
See the pad.
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Above: Outside end flap. Whoa! It would
have been a cruel trick indeed if the pads had not
been absorbent!
Left: The largest face of the
box. It's possible women bought the box already wrapped to conceal what
was inside. Several museum visitors, children of druggists or pharmacists,
told me that they helped their fathers wrap Kotex
and other pad and tampon boxes as kids to spare the customers embarrassment.
Some companies shipped their boxes already wrapped in plain paper.
The box measures 9" x 7.5" x 3.38".
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Right: Inside end flap. Plumbing always
challenged pad and tampon makers. Early Kotex instructions also directed
women to flush pads (see a Spanish language booklet),
and, later, other companies made "flushable"
products.
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© 1999 Harry Finley. It is illegal to reproduce
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