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!
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Kotex teaches and wins girls:
Marjorie May's Twelfth
Birthday, 1929,
puberty & menstruation booklet for Kotex
sanitary napkins
In America, mothers essentially
stopped teaching their daughters
about menstruation in the early
part of the 19th century.
Victorianism made knowledge of the
body shameful, especially among
women, and the informal passing of
knowledge from older girls to
younger ones was inhibited by
changes in the school system.
Physicians and moralists took over
by default. (This topic is treated
wonderfully in "'Something
Happens to Girls': Menarche and
the Emergence of the Modern
American Hygienic Imperative"
by Joan Jacobs Brumberg of Cornell
University in the Journal of
the History of Sexuality,
1993, vol. 4, no. 1., and by Lynn Peril
on this MUM Web site. Prof.
Brumberg recently [1997] wrote The Body
Project, a history of
cultural attitudes toward the
girl's body in America - read it!)
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Lynn Peril discusses many of
these teachers, and especially the
menstrual industry's seizing
the initiative in menarche
education, which is the
situation today..
By the kind
permission of the Curator of
Health and Medicine at the
Powerhouse Museum, Sydney,
Australia, I am able to
show you part of an Australian
edition of Marjorie
May's
Twelfth Birthday (which
Peril mentions) from 1928 in the
collection of the Powerhouse
Museum. (Please direct any further
enquiries to Megan Hicks at
meganh@phm.gov.au. The Powerhouse
will get this museum if I can't
find a suitable place for it in
the U.S.A.)
This Australian edition is
probably identical to the American
edition. Read the entire 1935 Canadian
edition.
(See an American
ad offering this booklet,
and see other booklets and ads
for them, above.)
© 1999 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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