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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Kotex sanitary napkin ad, U.S.A., July 1942
Kotex, like Tampax tampons and many
other menstrual products companies,
played up any medical connection they
could find to bolster the image of
their product. In a perfect stroke,
nurses wrote from France during World
War I claiming they used
Kimberly-Clark's bandages for sanitary
napkins because they were so absorbent
and cheap enough to throw away, unlike
the typical cloth sanitary napkin -
rag - that women mostly used.
Actually, Curads, known for its
bandages today, made a disposal pad
(see an ad)
in the years before and during Kotex's
debut. And the German company Hartmann
made a disposable menstrual pad in the
late 19th century (ad here).
Kotex celebrated its past in this ad
but owned up to the uncomfortable pads
it made, which were huge (see another
uncomfortable-looking pad from
that era. No wonder tampons became so
popular - see a very early Tampax -
partly because of the Dickinson
report of 1945.).
And, of course, the ad makes the
connection between Kotex's birth in
World War I to the was then being
fought, World War II. Look at the
woman military person on the
motorcycle, who might have been
sitting on a Kotex pad at that very
moment - and she's smiling.
(See the old Kotex ad pictured
enlarged here,
made from the image below.)
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See a prototype of
the first Kotex ad.
© 2006 Harry Finley. It is illegal to
reproduce or distribute any of the 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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