Other first-campaign ads: general discussion
and prototype ad - January 1921 - May 1921 - July 1921
|See more ads for menarche-education booklets:
Marjorie May's Twelfth Birthday
(Kotex, 1933), Tampax tampons (1970, with Susan Dey),
Personal Products (1955, with Carol Lynley), and
German o.b. tampons (lower ad, 1981)
See more ads for menarche-education booklets:
Marjorie May's Twelfth Birthday
(Kotex, 1933), Tampax tampons (1970, with Susan Dey),
Personal Products (1955, with Carol Lynley), and
German o.b. tampons (lower ad, 1970s)
And read Lynn Peril's series about these
and similar booklets!
See more Kotex items: First ad
(1921) - ad 1928 (Sears and Roebuck catalog)
- Lee Miller ads (first real person in amenstrual
hygiene ad, 1928) - Marjorie May's Twelfth Birthday
(booklet for girls, 1928, Australian edition; there are many links here
to Kotex items) - Preparing for Womanhood (1920s,
booklet for girls; Australian edition) - 1920s booklet in Spanish showing
disposal method - box
from about 1969 - "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, November 1921,
and the First Kotex Ad Campaign
Washing reusable menstrual pads was a burden
for most women. A woman might soak the pads in a bucket overnight, and wash
them the next day. They reminded people of diapers,
who probably felt they contributed to the subservience of women.
Albert Lasker, the advertising genius who worked on the Kotex campaign,
told Advertising Age magazine (15 December 1952),
"The mean thing about the laundry always has
been the [sanitary] napkins of women."
And Kotex menstrual pads, for women with money, solved the laundry problem.
But tell me, what is going on in the picture
in the ad? Is the mistress of the house the woman at left, and is
she striking terror into the maid, with the feather duster, by asking her
to wash her menstrual pads? Or is it the other way around? (Explain THAT
one!) Visitors to the actual museum and I had gone around and around about
this ad for years, and I can't find a hint in the text. Or is it - gasp!
- that I'm a guy, and just - don't - get - it! What do you think?
[A site visitor sent this interpretation in August
1999: The woman on the right is the mistress; she's better dressed
and is arranging flowers (a proper upperclass duty). The one glowering
on the left is the laundress. The mistress is forced to do other work (like
dusting and maybe other housework) just to keep the laundress, whom she
needs to wash her pads. Once she switches to Kotex, she'll no longer need
unruly, sulking laundry servants (or maybe they won't be sulking any longer).]
The Wallace Meyer archive at the State Historical Society of Wisconsin
has a proof of this ad; printed at the bottom of the ad is "Copy No.
7," probably meaning that it is the seventh ad in the first Kotex series.
Someone wrote on the proof - was it Wallace Meyer? - that Arthur J. Kellor
illustrated it.
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Other first-campaign ads: general discussion
and prototype ad - January 1921 - May 1921 - July 1921
Long download!
See another ad about washing pads. Other
first-campaign ads: general discussion and prototype
ad - January 1921 - May
1921 - July 1921
|See more ads for menarche-education booklets:
Marjorie May's Twelfth Birthday
(Kotex, 1933),
© 1999 Harry Finley. It is illegal to reproduce or distribute any
of the work on this Web site in a
ny manner or medium without written permission of the author. Please report
suspected
violations to hfinley@mum.org
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