See Japanese instructions
for making menstrual belts and pads at home in
the early 20th century.
More belt topics
Actual belts in the
museum
See how women wore
a belt (and in a Swedish ad) - many actual 20th-century
belts - a modern
belt for a washable pad and a page from
the 1946-47 Sears
catalog showing a great variety - ad for
Hickory belts,
1920s? - Modess belts
in Personal Digest (1966) - drawing for a
proposed German belt
and pad, 1894
See Japanese instructions
for making menstrual belts and pads at home in
the early 20th century.
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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Ad for Hickory belt for menstrual pads, 1925,
U.S.A.
Some details
Harry Finley annotated the
illustrations.
Follow the
letters on the reduced size ads,
below left, to the corresponding
drawings at right.
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A. Not all
women lived glamourous lives
in menstrual hygiene ads;
some just wore glamourous
clothes filing papers.
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B. At right: an almost
identical situation shows
that she too could type and
wear a menstrual belt - 26
years later.
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From the package for Formont,
the "Invisible Sanitary Belt
and Protector," 1951
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C. The
arrow shows the safety pins,
subject
of much chest puffing from
Tampax and other tampons
(like here from 1938 and 1953).
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Below:
what a later (1970s) belt
looked like, from a Dutch
ad. A clasp probably
held the ends of the napkin,
not pins.
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D.
Safety pins on the
Hickory held the menstrual
pad at either end; the next
surface under the pad was
the loose crotch of the
woman's underpants (here), which did
not firmly support the pad
at all points if at any (tight-fitting
panties apparently
didn't appear until the next
decade). And what
worried many women was that
the next surface was the
chair seat, sofa cushion -
or floor.
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Decades later, the silk
"carrier," below, of the Formont
(1951) supported and gripped
the pad, although a belt still
wrapped around the women's
waist. Beltless
pads wouldn't appear for
almost another 20 years.
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E. Oh,
NO! Just one
more thing to worry about,
below.
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END. See another Hickory
belt ad and Japanese instructions for
making menstrual belts and pads at home in the
early 20th century.
Actual belts in the
museum
© 2006 Harry Finley. It is
illegal to reproduce or distribute
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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