See ads for menarche-education
booklets: Marjorie May's Twelfth Birthday (Kotex,
1932), Tampax tampons (1970, with Susan Dey), Personal Products (1955, with Carol Lynley), and
German o.b. tampons (lower ad, 1981)
And read Lynn Peril's series
about these and similar booklets!
Read the full text of the 1935 Canadian
edition of Marjorie May's Twelfth Birthday, probably identical to the
American edition.
 
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The Kotex puberty & menstruation booklet
Marjorie May's Twelfth Birthday, 1929
Next page (cover,
pages 3, 11, 12-13, 14-15)
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In pages 5-10, Marjorie May's mother explains that Marjorie's chum is
experiencing a purification, an interpretation
proposed by Hippocrates thousands of years
ago, and alive today in the thesis of MacArthur Fellow
Margie Profet, who opines that menstruation is partly the body's
way of ridding the uterus of pathogens brought by sperm from the vagina,
which contains billions of bacteria and other micro-organisms. But menstruation
neutralizes the acidity of the vagina, enabling fecal bacteria to invade
and feed on the discharge, causing the characteristic odor of menstruation.
(See the odor page.)
Using the word purification calls forth cleanliness,
health and whiteness, which the Kotex manufacturer promoted. The
company also put a cross on its boxes, reinforcing the medical connection:
Kotex developed from bandages made by Kimberly-Clark during World War I.
But it also played on the public's respect for physicians. (Tampax, in the
late 1930s, claimed an endorsement by the American Medical Association;
it later abandoned this under pressure from that association.) The Cellucotton
Products Company, which made Kotex and which Kimberly-Clark owned, changed
the size "super" to "hospital" (which persists today
with some manufacturers) to firm this connection; and women at the time
felt embarrassed to ask for "super" because of its implications.
This copy of Marjorie May's Twelfth Birthday is in the collection
of the Powerhouse Museum, Sydney, Australia, and is reproduced here with
the kind permission of the Curator of Health and Medicine at that museum.
© 1999 Harry Finley. It is illegal to reproduce or distribute any
of the 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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