The article has been automatically translated into English by Google Translate from Russian and has not been edited.

Shameful secret and family disgrace: how feminine hygiene products have been popularized in the USA and the world

'10.03.2020'

Source: Air force

"If only someone could explain to me what Kotex is!" These are the words of a young American who asked a similar question during a dinner party. It was in the 1920s in America. Nobody did it then, of course, because Kotex was a code word - a hidden reference to what was supposed to remain a secret. Air force.

Photo: Shutterstock

Kotex has been and remains one of the most popular brands of sanitary towels for women in the United States.

But, as Sharra Vostral writes in her book Under Wraps, one of the main purposes of goods such as pads, tampons and caps is silence, secrecy: everyone around does not have to know if a woman is having her menstrual days or not. not.

And women had reasons to keep it a secret.

In 1868, the vice president of the American Medical Association warned that medical women should not be trusted during their monthly "ailment."

Five years later, the American doctor and educator Edward Clarke said that girls should not be present during their period because it is too much of a burden to expect them to think during their period.

Writer Eliza Duffy sharply answered Dr. Clark: why doesn’t he object to women doing heavy housework during menstruation? Perhaps he just wants to deprive girls of education?

It is possible that it was so. Therefore, it is hardly surprising that women preferred to keep their menstrual cycle with them.

Ancient tampons

Tampons, meanwhile, have a thousand-year history: it is believed that in Ancient Rome they were made from wool, in Indonesia - from plant fibers, in Japan - from paper, in Africa - from grass, In Ancient Egypt - from reed papyrus, and in Hawaii - from fern.

It is also known that women have long used improvised means, such as pieces of cloth, which they washed and reused. Now we know that reusing the same pads can lead to infection and even cervical cancer.

It is also known that at the end of the XNUMXth century, many household products for various purposes were superseded by industrially produced goods, but why didn't this really affect the pads? The problem was how to advertise and sell a product that society considered “indecent”.

In fact, the first officially recorded attempt to sell disposable pads dates back to the 1890s.

Johnson & Johnson in 1896 marketed Lister Pads in the United States [after the British surgeon Joseph Lister, who taught the world to sterilize surgical instruments], and in London Harrods department store in 1895 advertised “sanitary napkins” produced by the German company Hartmann ...

But these products didn't have much of an effect. It seemed that women believed that making sanitary napkins with their own hands from any material at hand was cheaper or more convenient, and perhaps less embarrassing.

An important technological breakthrough occurred during World War I, when the paper-producing company Kimberly-Clark began using new crepe paper for the production of dressings.

Crepe paper was made from wood pulp. It was much cheaper than cotton, and much more hygroscopic.

By the end of the war, Kimberly-Clark began to search for new markets, and then a letter came from the nurses saying that they use their products not only for dressings ...

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Risk justified

It is clear that new business prospects were opening up here. But there was also a risk: didn't Johnson & Johnson's experience show that such a product was too taboo to sell well?

The Kimberly-Clark company took the risk by selling new products under the obscure name "Kotex". Meanwhile, it is composed of the first syllables of two words - "cotton" (cotton fabric) and "texture". But most importantly, young people at secular parties had no idea what it really was.

The new product quickly became popular. For several decades, women have been finding jobs in factories and offices, gaining more and more independence.

Despite the fears of Dr. Edward Clark, it turned out that they could think and menstruate at the same time, but they needed a convenient, disposable product. To everyone's surprise, Kimberly-Clark hit the nail on the head.

The first detailed study of the growing market for women's hygiene products was conducted in 1927 by Lilian Gilbreth. She was one of the first to apply a scientific approach to work organization, design and motivation in the workplace.

Gilbreth said that a modern woman has become mobile, she spends a lot of time outside the home. She emphasized that women just need a neatly packaged hygiene product.

However, despite the fact that these products were produced for discreet use, there was nothing secret about their marketing. On the contrary, the growing demand kind of encouraged manufacturers to shower customers with advertising, even if it was camouflaged.

Whereas in the 1920s men were at a loss to guess, by the early 1930s some felt themselves under siege. Nobel laureate, writer William Faulkner complained: “I seem to be so far behind the times with this“ Kotex ”era that I can't think of anything else.”

You need to have a lot of arrogance to blame hygiene pads advertisements for not writing to you, but still it says something about how quickly the previously not mentioned novelty suddenly entered the cultural mainstream.

"Blue blood"

The first crepe paper pad was followed by the patented tampon in 1933, which was marketed under the name “Tampax”.

Soon, the first menstrual cap appeared - in 1937 - patented by a woman, Leona Watson Chalmers.

And then the war came, and feminine hygiene products were advertised as a means by which women could mobilize their efforts and help in hostilities.

One Kotex ad depicted a girl in a bad mood, with a mop and broom lying on the floor: “Who would have imagined that you would desert and refuse dusting and washing a few dishes when your mom is counting on you like that?”

Nowadays, according to one study, in the US alone, women spend about $ 3 billion annually on hygiene products that have long been a part of everyday life.

From the point of view of the Western mentality, one can only laugh at the once prevailing bashfulness in this matter. And advertising of the XXI century more than once ridiculed old stereotypes, when frames of blue "blood" creeping on a pad somewhere in a sterile laboratory, interspersed with pictures of women in tight white shorts, galloping on white horses.

But in many parts of the world this issue is still not up to jokes.

Consider the story of Arunachalam Muruganantham, a school dropout in the southern states of India who decided in 1998 that his wife deserved affordable sanitary napkins rather than a dirty old rag she had to use.

“I wouldn't even wipe my moped with such a rag,” he admitted.

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Expensive pleasure

He began to design a simple machine for the production of pads - to simultaneously create jobs and produce pads for all women in India.

Then his wife Shanti left him. His widowed mother turned away from him. From their point of view, what he was doing was too shameful.

Now Arunachalam triumphs with his invention, and Shanti returned to him. However, the difficulties of the first time, which he had to face, show how much more in many parts of the world the stigma associated with female menstruation is great.

This, according to UNESCO, is the reason why one in ten girls in sub-equatorial Africa skips school during their period. Dr. Edward Clarke would probably approve of this, although there is no time for jokes: because of such passes, some girls find it difficult to catch up with the material later - and they generally stop going to school.

The point is not only stigma, but also the lack of clean water and showers in which you can lock yourself.

Well, of course, we must not forget about the very problem that Arunchalam tried to solve: there young women simply can not afford to buy those hygiene products, which in richer countries many take for granted.

William Faulkner may have felt divorced from life during the Kotex era, but after almost 100 years, many women are still waiting for this era to finally come to them.

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