See more Kotex items: First ad
(1921; scroll to bottom of page) - ad 1928 (Sears
and Roebuck catalog) - Lee Miller ads (first
real person in a menstrual hygiene ad, 1928) - Marjorie
May's Twelfth Birthday (booklet for girls, 1928, Australian edition;
there are many links here to Kotex items) - Preparing
for Womanhood (1920s, booklet for girls; Australian edition) - 1920s
booklet in Spanish showing disposal method
- box from about 1969 -
"Are you in the know?" ads
(Kotex) (1949)(1953)(1964)(booklet, 1956) -
See more ads on the Ads for Teenagers main page
As One Girl to Another (complete
booklet, 1940, Kotex, U.S.A.) - Teacher's kit
(complete, early 1950s, Personal Products Corp.,
U.S.A.) - Shame in menstrual hygiene. A very early Tampax ad (1936)
 
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Kotex menstrual napkin box and pad, 1930s? (U.S.A.)
Kotex was the first widely successful disposable pad in the U.S.A. (Read
about its first advertising campaign and see its
first ad.)
Although many pads competed with it for women's attention in the 1920s,
its main challenger was Modess pads, a brand that stopped making its"hospital"
pads with belt tabs in 2001. Johnson & Johnson, maker of Modess, commissioned
a famous study (1927) to find out what women
wanted in menstrual protection, and launched a fierce competitor to Kotex.
The box is huge, as are the pads, two things that the J&J survey
found irritated buyers, who wanted anonymity and comfort besides ease of
buying.
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Look at the faint perforations above the "ote" and to the
left of "x"; these enabled the user to punch open the box to get
the pads. The box measures 15.75" wide x 8.5" high x 5.5"
deep (ca. 40 x 22 x 14.2 cm).
The Kotex blue was famous and mentioned in the 1927
Gilbreth report to Johnson & Johnson; it's not clear if it relates
to the other famous blue, the blue liquid sometimes showing the absorbing
capacity of menstrual products.
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The above end of the box does not have perforations to be pressed to
make an opening for withdrawing the pads; the other end, below, does.
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One end opens along perforations to allow removal of pads.
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I cut off the bottom tab in the picture to save room. The
darkened tabs result from a black background when scanning and show the
coarse gauze, which envelopes the entire pad. Customers often objected to
the discomfort the gauze caused.
The earliest Kotex ad (1921)
states that its pad measured 22" (ca. 55.9 cm) long, tab end to tab
end, with the absorbing part 9" x 3.5" (ca. 22.9 x 8.9 cm). The
pad "body" above is slightly smaller, measuring 8.5" long
x 2.75" wide (ca. 22 x 7 cm); total length, including tabs, which fit
into the clasps of a belt or are pinned to a belt, 18" (ca. 46 cm).
The long tab is 5.5" (ca. 14 cm) long, the short one 4" (ca. 10
cm). The short tab attaches to the belt in front of the body (see a diagram showing why).
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See Kotex pads from the 1960s and 1970s
- As One Girl to Another (complete
booklet, 1940, Kotex, U.S.A.)
© 2001 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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