See a prototype of the first Kotex ad.
See more Kotex items: Ad 1928 (Sears
and Roebuck catalog) - Marjorie May's Twelfth
Birthday (booklet for girls, 1928, Australian edition; there are many
links here to Kotex items) - 1920s booklet in Spanish showing disposal
method - box from about 1969 - Preparing
for Womanhood (1920s, booklet for girls) - "Are you in the know?" ads (Kotex) (1949)(1953)(1964)(booklet, 1956) - See
more ads on the Ads for Teenagers main page
 
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Society sanitary napkins (American? 1920s-1930s?)
The first Kotex pad and this Society pads have identical
dimensions, probably necessary to fit contemporary
belts (and see some from the Sears, Roebuck
catalog).
As far as I know, American women's underpants
at this time were loose leg, meaning there was no way for them to hold a
pad against the vulva in order to absorb the menstrual blood. And of course
many underpants had no crotch at all at the
turn of the century and before, being essentially two loose tubes around
the thighs joined at the waist. To the best of my knowledge, briefs
for everyday wear - see the first in
the Sears, Roebuck catalog - appeared first in America in the mid-1930s.
But pads without belts didn't appear until the early 1970s. I do not know
why they took such a long time. Perhaps the technology wasn't available.
A Swedish ad from the 1970s shows the difference.
The gauze covering, below, is coarse and probably
uncomfortable. It could have rubbed and injured the vulva and thighs,
a common problem the pad companies addressed in decades of advertising.
(See a medical report mentioning this and other
problems with pads - among others, that doctors were worried that women
would be sexually aroused by a pad's moving around. Heavens to Betsy!).
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Below: The absorbent pad,
with a gauze "tail" on each end (folded across the pad in this
picture, and thus hard to see, just as they appeared in the box). Self-adhesive
pads appeared in the early 1970s. They could be smaller because of better
material and the lack of tails.
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Below: Women pinned this gauze
"tail," one of two per pad, to a
belt, front and back. The pad is the white
object at the bottom.
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