Marjorie May, three
booklets, 1935 main
page
See a Kotex ad
advertising this booklet.
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As One
Girl to Another (puberty &
menstruation booklet from
Kotex sanitary napkins, 1940, U.S.A.)
You see below the cover for
apparently the second major
booklet the Cellucotton
Products Company (which made Kotex
menstrual pads) wrote for girls to
explain menstruation.
Readers must have found the
first booklet, Marjorie
May's Twelfth Birthday,
extremely stuffy. "As One Girl . .
." reads comfortably and easily,
but not slangy like the cartoon ads
Kotex would produce soon after for
teenagers.
But girls would not read why
menstruation happened, as they
could in Marjorie May! Maybe Kotex
left that to the Walt Disney
film, The Story of Menstruation,
made in the 1940s, which school
girls apparently saw when they
received this booklet.
Note in the introduction
that girl
refers both to a girl and her mother, something felt
demeaning today.
And you
see only white people here, a
phenomenon lasting till almost
today in America. Part of the
reason may have been money;
blacks in general earned less
than whites, and probably were
more likely to use washable rags
than the fairly expensive Kotex.
This was towards the end of the
Depression.
Girls saw
the page numbers and captions to
the drawings (which I think are
great) written casually with a
chisel-point pen; it looks like
a felt-tip marker.
Modess
pads published a rather gloomier
booklet
just one year after this one.
The
unattractive dot pattern on the
drawing results from the
printing dot pattern meeting my
scanner.
See an
ad offering this
free booklet! And see a tin of
Quest powder (and
an ad for it). Kotex, on page
10, recommended sprinkling the
powder on pads to stop the
odor. (Read what
causes the odor of
menstruation.) The booklet
mentions Fibs tampon, the Kotex
tampon, developed in the
1930s, on page 16. Fibs had no
applicator, unlike its main
competitor, the two-tube
Tampax (read and see the first
Tampax?).
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Next page
Go to cover,
introduction
("as one girl to another"), page 1
("lollipops to lipsticks"), 2 ("You're
YOURSELF!") and 3
(definition), 4 and 5
(cramps), 6
(use a calendar) and 7, 8 ("you
need never feel the least
embarrassed.") and 9 ("never
give your secret away"), 10
(cleanliness) and 11, 12 and 13
("boys know all about
menstruation." [!]), 14-15
(do's and don't's chart), 16
(tampons) and 17, 18 (how
to attach a menstrual pad to a
belt) and inside
back cover (Kotex calendar
1940-41), back
cover
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copyright 2007 Harry Finley
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