Marjorie May, three booklets, 1935
main page
See a Kotex ad advertising this
booklet.
 
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As One Girl to Another (puberty
& menstruation booklet from
Kotex sanitary napkins, 1940, U.S.A.)
You see, below, the cover for apparently the second
major booklet the Cellucotton Products Company (which made Kotex
menstrual pads) wrote for girls to explain menstruation.
Readers must have found the first booklet, Marjorie
May's Twelfth Birthday, extremely stuffy. "As One Girl . . ."
reads comfortably and easily, but not slangy like the cartoon
ads Kotex would produce soon after for teenagers.
But girls would not read why menstruation happened, as they could in
Marjorie May! Maybe Kotex left that to the Walt Disney
film, The Story of Menstruation, made in the 1940s, which school
girls apparently saw when they received this booklet.
Note in the introduction that girl
refers both to a girl and her mother, something felt
demeaning today.
And you see only white
people here, a phenomenon lasting till almost
today in America. Part of the reason may have been money; blacks in general
earned less than whites, and probably were more likely to use washable rags
than the fairly expensive Kotex. This was towards the end of the Depression.
Girls saw the page numbers and captions to the
drawings (which I think are great) written casually with a chisel-point
pen; it looks like a felt-tip marker.
The unattractive dot pattern on the drawing results
from the printing dot pattern meeting my scanner.
See an ad offering this free booklet! And see a tin of Quest powder (and an ad for it).
Kotex, on page 10, recommended sprinkling the powder on pads to stop the
odor. (Read what causes the odor of menstruation.) The booklet mentions Fibs tampon, the Kotex tampon, developed in the 1930s, on page 16.
Fibs had no applicator, unlike its main competitor, the two-tube Tampax
(read and see the first Tampax?).
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Next page
Go to cover, introduction
("as one girl to another"), page 1 ("lollipops
to lipsticks"), 2 ("You're YOURSELF!")
and 3 (definition), 4
and 5 (cramps), 6 (use
a calendar) and 7, 8 ("you
need never feel the least embarrassed.") and 9
("never give your secret away"), 10 (cleanliness)
and 11, 12 and 13 ("boys
know all about menstruation." [!]), 14-15
(do's and don't's chart), 16 (tampons) and 17, 18 (how to attach a
menstrual pad to a belt) and inside back cover
(Kotex calendar 1940-41), back cover
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copyright 2007 Harry Finley
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