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Are
you in the know? menstrual pad
ad for girls, February 1946,
Kimberly-Clark Corp.
Woman's Home Companion
magazine, U.S.A.
Irving Nurick
(1894-1963) illustrated this ad as
he did the whole "Are you in the
know?" series. His girls and boys
are usually blonde, slender and
baby faced. No one's poor - oh,
sure, they may be short
of money now and then
since they're kids dependent on
allowances from their (pa)rents.
(See another feminine
ideal from decades earlier.)
I wonder how much Kotex coached
the artist in creating his WASP
(white Anglo-Saxon Protestant)
kids. "Irving Nurick" sounds
Jewish, not WASPish. He
illustrated other companies' ads
from at least the 1940s on and
nailed the ideal American teenager
for that era. But Kotex (and its
main competitor Modess) had
usually advertised to a
middle-class-and-above clientele
anyway; that would continue for
the next couple decades.
The text, as always, was
sprinkled with funny slang and
solutions to teenagers' problems.
The answer to one problem was
always Kotex. And
always white.
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© 2008 Harry Finley. It is illegal to
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