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Museum of Menstruation and Women's Health home Former museum - future - visit to the museum comic strip
Ads for Carefree tampon and V.A. Douche Powder Column by Dr. Benjamin Spock (partial): Raising Children by Instinct Redbook magazine, August 1969
| What did this quintessential women's service magazine offer women?
Just what you see below: tampons, vaginal douche material, and advice on bringing up baby. And on two pages! OK, plus a lot of other stuff.
The naked woman covering up the separation between her cheeks - a gesture at odds with her nudity but I guess you have to draw the line somewhere - coyly hints at what might have gone on in its tampon-gynecologist-inventor's office.
She's almost carefree but not quite.
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Below: See the tampon and its box. The word Carefree embodies just what tampons have promised since their commercial beginning, when another doctor invented Tampax.
The ad leaves us wondering what kind of "advanced attitudes toward feminine hygiene" Swedish women are famous for. Tell me, Swedish women, and I'll put them on this site!
| | Below: Flip the page and on the back you see an ad cheering on that urge to douche - here, V.A. Douche is not an incompetent worker at the Department of Veterans Affairs - and America's most famous pediatrician telling a funny story about a future bossy woman.
Don't douche, but see early American douche powder - and another ad and many more. And see this doozee for preventing babies!
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Liasan
(1) genital wash ad, 1980s (Germany) Liasan (2) genital wash
ad, 1980s (Germany)
The Intimate Side of a Woman's Life, douching, by Leona Chalmers, 1937
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