A prominent American gynecologist said
in 1945 that medical tampons "used to pay the office rent."
 
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Early commercial American menstrual tampons
(See all tampons on this site)
Women have probably used tampons for menstruation for thousands
of years, but the first commercial tampons seem to be those from the
late 1920s or early 1930s in the United States.
Most of the tampons you see below have no applicators
(and fax doesn't even have a string!); Tampax
sold the first tampon with an applicator in 1936, developed from
the patent of Dr. Earle C. Haas of Denver,
Colorado.
Who knows what the first commercial tampon was? I suspect someone from
Chicago, probably a man, made it, simply because this museum has likely
candidates from that city, and because men generally have controlled business
in America, especially in an earlier era. (Lydia
Pinkham may have been the first widely successful businesswoman.) I
wonder if the first menstrual tampon makers got their idea from the tampons
doctors used for introducing medication into the vagina, which women could
have also used for absorbing menstrual discharge.
(Read the important Tampons as menstrual guards
("The Dickinson Report"), from the
September 1945 issue of the American magazine Consumer
Reports; it was a simplified version of an article by Dr. Robert
L. Dickinson (who made the office rent comment) in the Journal
of the American Medical Association. This report boosted the tampon
industry and encouraged women to switch from pads to tampons. Or read the
original report.)
Here's a partial table of early tampons
for which MUM has original material (the relative sizes of the boxes below
are incorrect). This museum has almost 1000 boxes
of tampons, starting in the early 1930s, mostly American, many from three
extraordinary gifts described at the bottom of this page.
Site directories for tampons,
pads, ads for teens, and underwear. |
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Is fax the earliest commercial tampon? I give some reasons
why I think this is possible, plus the tampon itself and some packaging.
Compare with Nunap, maybe the same tampon and both
made possibly of Cellucotton - the Kotex material.
And click here for a politically very incorrect
ad for the tampon.
Advertising clip sheet for fax.
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Fibs - quite a name! - was possibly the
first of several Kotex tampons, and appeared in the late 1930s. See a bigger version.
See an ad for Fibs (long
down load time!) and see the Fibs
tampon.
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This museum has only the packaging
and instructions for Holly-Pax, a company Tampax bought in 1939,
along with the Wix company (see Wix, below).
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Moderne Women See an instruction
sheet. This may be from the same manufacturer as the maker of the
fax tampon, and may be as old or older.
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MUM has boxes of Tampax with instructions from each
decade of its existence, starting in the founding year of 1936.
Tambrands gave many of these boxes to this museum in 1997.
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THANKS! to . . .
Procter & Gamble, which generously
donated scores of American tampons and other
products, dating from the 1930s to the 1960s. (2001)
Tambrands, the former maker of Tampax,
gave MUM a fantastic gift
of over 450 boxes of menstrual hygiene products dating to the 1930s, plus
booklets, ads, and miscellaneous material, some of which appear above and
elsewhere on this site. (1997)
A woman living in Illinois (U.S.A.), who
generously donated many unopened boxes of Wix, Fibs and fax tampons
to this museum, including those in list above, and also much advertising
material for these tampons, including counter-top drugstore displays for
Fibs, and a very early newspaper advertisement and an instruction sheet
for a late 1930s box of Tampax. Her father had been an advertising man for
Kotex, and after her mother died, she found these items in her effects.
She sent them to MUM after having read the article about this museum in
the Chicago Tribune newspaper. It's a wonderful
gift! (1995)
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© 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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