Belt topics
See how women wore a belt (and in a Swedish
ad). See 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)
See a Modess True or False? ad in The American
Girl magazine, January 1947, and actress Carol Lynley
in "How Shall I Tell My Daughter" booklet ad (1955) - Modess . . . . because ads (many dates).
 
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The Museum of Menstruation and Women's Health
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As early as the 1890s Germans and Americans
could buy disposable menstrual pads, but lack of publicity killed the American
pad, called the Lister's Towel, made by Johnson
& Johnson. Dr. Lister was the great English proponent of antiseptic
surgery.
Curads (see words), which makes
bandages today, advertised a disposable sanitary napkin at least as early
as 1920 (left, a full page in Vogue magazine), but it was left to
Kotex (the word was created from COTten-like TEXture) to finally
make a widely sold disposable pad for menstruation, in this case made of
cellulose (wood pulp).
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In its first ad, in January 1921, (right;
read words and read about the first Kotex
ad campaign), the company explained the menstrual pad's origin as a
bandage for soldiers in World War. American nurses in France tried it as
a menstrual napkin, liked it, and well-to-do women made another step toward
freedom; it wasn't cheap.
But the new sanitary napkin only sold well after
women were allowed to put money into a container without speaking to a clerk,
and to take a box from a stack on the counter.That was the brilliant
idea of the ad man Albert Lasker,
for whom the Lasker Awards in medicine are named.
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