Marjorie May, three booklets, 1935 main page
See a Kotex ad
advertising this booklet.
See Kotex items: First ad (1921;
scroll to bottom of page) - ad 1928 (Sears and Roebuck catalog)
- Lee Miller ads
(first real person in a menstrual hygiene ad,
1928) - Marjorie May's
Twelfth Birthday (booklet for girls, 1928,
Australian edition; there are many links here to
Kotex items) - Preparing
for Womanhood (1920s, booklet for girls;
Australian edition) - 1920s booklet in Spanish
showing disposal
method - box
from about 1969 - "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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THE
MUSEUM OF MENSTRUATION AND WOMEN'S HEALTH
Growing Up
and Liking It
A Primer of
Period Pedagogy, 1868 - 1996
by Lynn Peril (bio at bottom of
page)
(click for Part 2 or Final Part), (©1997
Lynn Peril)
From
Mystery Date
(more at the bottom of this page)
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©1946, revised 1981, Kimberly-Clark
Corp.
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It was a small booklet, its aqua
cover brightened with splashes of
feminine pink. My best friend Ruth's
older sister kept it in her sock
drawer, a hiding place that was no
match for two prying ten-year-olds.
Ruth was the one who found it. At
first, I feigned polite interest in
her discovery. But disinterest soon
gave way to disbelief and then to
outright foreboding as I listened to
the information she imparted, barely
believing that such a thing could be
true. For years afterwards, even the
booklet's title, Very Personally
Yours, was guaranteed to give me
the willies [see two covers].
For those of you not in the know -
males, or females whose grade schools
used materials provided by a different
manufacturer of feminine hygiene
products - Very Personally Yours
was a pamphlet published by the caring
capitalists at Kimberly-Clark,
manufacturers of Kotex, designed to
teach girls all about menstruation.
Relentlessly cheerful, it glorified
the "miracle" that was about to befall
our young bodies, and peddled a
particular vision of womanhood along
with a certain brand of sanitary
napkin. In fact, it wasn't the cold,
hard facts of menstruation that upset
me so much (although those were
something of a shock to say the least)
as the idea that I was turning into
this thing they called a
"woman."
Of course, from the safe distance of
adulthood, all bodily functions, no
matter how messy, are really quite
fascinating, and those associated with
reproduction even more so. But at the
time, it seemed as if my body was
betraying me. One day, everything was
fine, and I ran around in my
underwear, boxing and wrestling with
my dad and my brother.
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The next day, we wormed our way
through Ruth's sister's bureau and
discovered that our future was filled
with breasts, hips, pubic hair and - blood!
And, as if this weren't disconcerting
enough, according to VPY, one
was actually supposed to be happy
about these absurd bodily changes:
From your earliest
chalk-and-blackboard days, you've
looked forward to your graduation -
dreamed of it, with stars in your
eyes. It's as though all your young
life, you've been waiting on tiptoe
for the very special day that would
mark the commencement of a wonderful
adventure: your debut into the adult
world.
So, too, your physical self has
been preparing for another momentous
adventure: your graduation
from"little girl" to grown-up. This
slow body process has been at work
so quietly you were scarcely aware
of it. Then, one day, you knew. You
began to menstruate.
The VPY pamphlet was but one
prong of a Kimberly-Clark juggernaut
aimed at instilling brand loyalty in
soon-to-be-consumers of their sanitary
products. If you are of a certain age,
you remember the day in the fifth
grade when the boys went out to play
kickball, while the girls stayed in to
watch a special film presentation. It
wasn't Hemo the Magnificent - but it
wasn't entirely unrelated, either.
Segregated in a darkened classroom,
the girls were treated to The Story of
Menstruation (here),
a
Walt Disney Production originally
released in the 1950s but still being
shown at least as late as the early
1970s, when I saw it. My memory is
rather sketchy as to what the film was
actually like - I was much too
overcome by guilt and shame to pay
adequate attention. Thank goodness
there wasn't a quiz afterward.
Luckily for us all, Janice Delany,
Mary Jane Lupton and Emily Toth
provided the following synopsis in
their wonderful book, The Curse: A
Cultural History of Menstruation
(Urbana and Chicago: University of
Illinois Press, revised edition,
1988):
In the Disney world, the menstrual
flow is not blood red but snow
white. The vaginal drawings look
more like a cross section of a
kitchen sink than the outside and
inside of a woman's body. There are
no hymen, no clitoris, no labia; all
focus is on the little nest and its
potentially lush lining. Although
Disney and Kimberly-Clark advise
exercise during the period, the
exercising cartoon girls (who look
like Disney's Cinderella) are drawn
without feet; bicycles magically
propel themselves down the street
without any muscular or mental
direction from the cyclist. The film
ends happily ever after, with a shot
of a lipsticked bride followed
immediately by a shot of a
lipsticked mother and baby.
In fact, it was just this connection
between menstruation, marriage and
motherhood that left me confused at
best, and horrified at worst. I mean,
I was ten years old! At that age, fed
on a diet of Bewitched (where Darrin
didn't let Samantha use her powers)
and I Love Lucy (where Ricky treated
Lucy like some sort of imbecile
child), getting married didn't look
like any fun at all. And having a
baby? I didn't even like baby dolls
(see note
1). But historically, this is
the connection that has been used in
teaching girls about menstruation.
Not that science even knew how the
menstrual cycle worked until
relatively recently. Dr. George
Napheys, a 19th-century authority
whose The Physical Life of Woman:
Advice to the Maiden, Wife and
Mother was published in 1870,
offered the following explanation of
why women menstruated:
Perhaps it is a wise provision
that she is thus reminded of her
lowly duty, lest man should make her
the sole object of his worship or
lest the pride of beauty should
obscure the sense of shame. But this
question concerns rather the
moralist than the physician, and we
cease asking why it is, and shall
only inquire what it is.
Another medical man of the time,
Burt Green Wilder, threw up his hands
and admitted in What Young People
Should Know: The Reproductive
Function in Men and Lower Animals
(Boston: Estes & Lauriat, 1875)
that "no satisfactory explanation has,
as yet, been offered" as to the
purpose of menstruation.
Of course, this lack of knowledge
didn't keep medical and advice writers
from offering myriad behavioral
restrictions to menstruating women.
Authorities stressed that women needed
to avoid bathing (except for the
"afflicted part"), as well as
strenuous exercise, such as dancing or
long walks. More ominously, at least
according to James Ashton in his 1865
tome The Book of Nature (note 2),
young wives, innocent though they
might be, could "give [their]
husband[s] the disease called
gonorrhea" through sexual contact
during their period. Dr. Napheys even
related the tragic tale of a young man
who, after contracting "gonorrhea"
from his apparently virginal bride on
their wedding trip, committed suicide.
But is our old friend Pye Henry
Chavasse (see MD #4), who used
language astonishingly similar to that
found in Very Personally Yours and
The Story of Menstruation in his 1878
Advice to a Wife. The italics,
by the way, appear in the original:
Menstruation - "the periods" - the
appearance of the catamenia or the
menses - is then one of the most
important epochs of a girl's
life. It is the boundary-line, the
landmark between childhood and
womanhood; it is the threshold, so
to speak, of awoman's life.
Her body now develops and expands,
her mental capacity enlarges and
improves. She then ceases to be a
child and becomes a woman. She is
now, for the first time, able to
conceive.
Just because many books discussed
menstruation didn't mean that mothers
shared them with their daughters. In
fact, many of these texts remarked
upon the necessity of young women
being given truthful explanations of
the menstrual and reproductive
processes, which suggests that most
girls weren't getting the information
they needed. The "Self and Sex Series"
did much to alleviate such ignorance.
Published at the turn of the century
by adherents of the social purity
movement (which advocated abstinence
before marriage, and "continence" -
limiting sex to its procreative
function - afterward, as well as sex
education), these books sold in
numbers that would make Barbara
Cartland weep with jealousy. (Click
for Part Two)
NOTES:
1 And
oh, how the worm has turned regarding
both these subjects. See MD #4 for my
paen to wedded bliss, and if you pause
right now and listen hard, that's my
biological clock you hear ticking.
2 Or,
if you'd like to look for it in your
local library under its full title:
*The Book of Nature: Containing
Information for Young People Who Think
of Getting Married, on the Philosophy
of Procreation and Sexual Intercourse;
Showing How to Prevent Conception and
to Avoid Child-bearing*. A reprint
edition is available as part of the
series Sex, Marriage and Society:
Birth Control in Nineteenth-Century
America. New York: Arno Press, 1974.
Oh, the Peril(s)
of Mystery Date!
 Lynn
says this about herself:
I have a
masters in history from San
Francisco State U., with a
concentration in Gender and a minor
in American history.
I'm a free-lance writer whose
work has appeared in the San
Francisco Bay Guardian and Slant,
among other publications. Mystery
Date is a zine devoted to my
obsession with used books -
particularly old sex and dating
manuals, etiquette and self-help
books, and health, beauty and
fashion guides.
Two essays
from Mystery Date will appear in The
Zine Reader, to be published the
spring of 1998 by Henry Holt &
Co.
By the way, about the cover of
MD#5: it's from an ad for whatever
brand bra it is. The full ad
featured a really sad woman (without
a crown) whose only sin was wearing
the wrong bra. Wearing the right one
gets you a crown and Mystery Date
cover girl status!
Mystery Date costs $1.50
each for the five so far. Order from
Lynn Peril, P.O.
Box 641592, San Francisco, CA
94164-1592
and this is the Mystery
Date
Web site.
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