See ads for menarche-education booklets: Marjorie May's Twelfth Birthday (Kotex, 1932), Tampax tampons (1970, with Susan Dey), Personal Products (1955, with Carol Lynley), and German o.b. tampons (lower ad, 1981)
See also the booklets How shall I tell my daughter? (Modess, various dates), and Growing up and liking it (Modess, various dates)
And read Lynn Peril's series about these and similar booklets!
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Leer la versión en español de los siguientes temas: Anticoncepción y religión, Breve reseña - Olor - Religión y menstruación - Seguridad de productos para la menstruación.

The Kotex puberty & menstruation booklet
Marjorie May's Twelfth Birthday, 1929
Next page (cover, pages 4, 11, 12-13, 14-15)

What language! I don't know of any child - or any adult! - who would speak so formally and correctly, especially to a parent. Among other things, this probably indicates the class of people expected to read this booklet in the 1920s, upper-middle class and above, because Kotex was not cheap (see some advertisements later), and it elevates the tone of a "dirty" topic, menstruation. There is also a kind of stage English once thought appropriate for writing; perhaps this reflects that. Maybe also it's just not written well!
By the way, you'll never read the word menstruation in this booklet, nor in any Kotex ad from the 1920s. It would be a valuable project for someone to find the first mention of this word in advertising. (A Kotex ad for the booklet "As One Girl To Another" uses the word in 1942, the earliest mention I know of.)
Not that we have progressed so far today. I don't believe you'll hear that word on television advertising in the U.S.A.
This copy of Marjorie May's Twelfth Birthday is in the collection of the Powerhouse Museum, Sydney, Australia, and is reproduced here with the kind permission of the Curator of Health and Medicine at that museum.
Next page (cover, pages 4, 11, 12-13, 14-15)

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© 1999 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