More Camelia ads:
1920s (Germany), 1930s
(Germany), 1940/42 (Germany, with underpants made
from sugar sacks, 1945/46), 1952 (Australia),
1970s (France), 1990
(Germany) - Underpants directory
Booklets menstrual hygiene companies made
for girls, women and teachers - patent medicine
- a list of books and articles about menstruation
- videos
See a Kotex ad advertising a Marjorie May
booklet.
See many more similar booklets.
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.
More ads for teens (see also introductory
page for teenage advertising): Are you in the know? (Kotex napkins and Quest napkin powder, 1948, U.S.A.),
Are you in the know? (Kotex
napkins and belts, 1949, U.S.A.)Are you in
the know? (Kotex napkins, 1953, U.S.A.),
Are you in the know? (Kotex
napkins and belts, 1964, U.S.A.), Freedom
(1990, Germany), Kotex (1992, U.S.A.), Pursettes (1974, U.S.A.), Pursettes (1974, U.S.A.), Saba (1975, Denmark)
See early tampons and a list of tampon on this site - at least the ones I've cataloged.
 
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Camelia, early disposable menstrual napkin, boxes (Monatsbinde), Germany,
1930s
And see one of the nicest
ads ever for a product (just my opinion), Camelia
pads.
Imagine this: a company starts a menstrual
pad factory in a small town in the Midwest, U.S.A. Now, what to name it?
Hm.
Oh, I know, let's name it after the flower associated with a famous
prostitute!
NOT!
Well, the Germans did! Of course, it was
during the Weimar Republic, in 1926, a famously turbulent and liberal period
- oops! - in German history. The wh-, um, prostitute was the heroine of
the famous (in Europe, and in earlier America where it was known as "Camille")
play "La Dame aux Camélias" ("The Lady of the Camellias")
by Alexandre Dumas (which Verdi later morphed into the opera "La Traviata"
- "The Wayward Woman"). Educated Europeans would have understood
the association and maybe smiled at it. Or felt guilty. Europeans accepted,
and accept, these things easier than Americans.
The title character would show a white camellia
when she was willing to receive clients and a red one when - you guessed
it - she was menstruating. Red has been mostly taboo in American
menstrual advertising (but not with Camelia!).
We certainly can't hint at the color of the substance our product is absorbing,
can we? (Some prostitutes in northern Germany today show a porcelain
dog's face when they're available and turn Bowser around to show his [her?]
tail when they're not. Wait, shouldn't it be the other way arou- - oh, forget
it.)
Look! The boxes are about the same blue as, um, Kotex
blue, which Kotex modestly (not Modessly)
called hospital blue! What gives with this color? That's just what Dr. Lillian
Gilbreth wondered in her report to Johnson &
Johnson (maker of Kotex's competitor Modess, which also - Oh, no! - used
Kotex blue, here!) in 1928.
Camelia was an early German disposable pad. Hartmann,
of Germany, made probably the first commercial disposable anywhere. About
the same time (1890s) Johnson & Johnson probably made the first American
disposable, Lister's Towels.
And another thing that hasn't happened in America: an
exhibit about menstruation in a government museum! (See
the catalog, below.) Yes, I had an exhibit
in my house for four years but can you imagine the Smithsonian having
such an exhibit - especially during the Bush administration? But Norway did too.
I adapted the pictures and gleaned information from the catalog "Menstruation: Monatshygiene im Wandel von 1900 bis heute,"
Text und Katalog: Sabine Zinn-Thomas und Walter Stolle. Eine Ausstellung
des Hessischen Landesmuseums Darmstadt in der Außenstelle Lorsch,
26.11.1998 bis 31.7.1999. My translation: "Menstruation: Changing menstrual
hygiene [in Germany, mostly] from 1900 to today [1998]." Text and catalog:
Sabine Zinn-Thomas and Walter Stolle. An exhibition of the Hessian State
Museum, Darmstadt, in the branch at Lorsch, from November 26, 1998 to July
31, 1999.
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Left: The prostitute
heroine of the play "La Dame aux Camélias" wears the red camellia that shows she's menstruating and not available.
This picture came glued to the boxes (below the next picture). She also
graces the cover of a Dutch booklet promoting Camelia.
Just below: There seems to be a bad
woman-good woman connection between the Camelia lady (left) and this
nurse in an earlier Camelia ad, below. The nurse's uniform, after all, derived
from a nun's habit. It's almost as if she's wagging
her finger at the harlot. Read more about the nurse here.
Don't both pictures enforce the Außenseiter - outsider
- side of menstruation as shown here?
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Below: The boxes - these are two different
sizes - allowed a woman to store them with a blank
side facing the viewer, concealing the contents. In the 1920s, American
college women wanted menstrual pad boxes that
had a similar design. Camelia early on put a slip
of paper inside the box that the customer could bring to a female
clerk; the slip's text asked for a box of Camelia. This was similar to the
maker's suggestion that Kotex boxes sit on the counter
next to a coin box. No need to exchange words in either case.
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See one of the nicest
ads ever for a product (just my opinion), Camelia
pads.
More Camelia ads:
1920s (Germany), 1930s
(Germany), 1940/42 (Germany, with underpants made
from sugar sacks, 1945/46), 1952 (Australia),
1970s (France), 1990
(Germany) - Underpants directory
© 2006 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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