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Are you in the know?
menstrual pad ad for girls, February 1946, Kimberly-Clark Corp. (Kotex tampons
and menstrual napkins, belts and underpants), Woman's Home Companion magazine,
U.S.A.
Irving Nurick (1894-1963) illustrated this ad as he did the whole "Are
you in the know?" series. His girls and boys are usually blonde, slender
and baby faced. No one's poor - although they may be short of money now
and then since they're kids dependent on allowances from their parents.
(See another feminine ideal from decades earlier.)
I wonder how much Kotex coached the artist in creating his WASP (White
Anglo Saxon Protestant) kids. "Irving Nurick" doesn't sound like
a WASP name. He illustrated other companies' ads from at least the 1940s
on and nailed the ideal American teenager for that era. But Kotex (and its
main competitor Modess) had usually advertised to a middle-class-and-above
clientele anyway; that would continue for the next couple decades.
The text, as always, was sprinkled with funny slang and solutions to
teenagers' problems. One answer to one problem was always Kotex.
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