In the 1920s mothers wouldn’t tell their daughters what they were wearing under and what for when they had menstruation. It was taboo that women should talk about it.
And what they should wear then was something women have to wash clean themselves before using again. It was even anathema for their maids to wash or if they do sometimes it was after some cajoling or forcing.
Thus there arose the expression “dirty linen”, as in, “Don’t hang your dirty linen in public.”
Menstruation was an impurity, a natural cycle that was held as a disorder rather than a sign of growing womanhood. It was treated not differently as one treated leprosy, if only that the last needed to be housed in a leprosarium in isolation.
It did not take educating women about menstruation for the old habit to die. It was as you can call a twist of event, an invented need, for something to develop so that this attitude changed.
During World War I Kimberly-Clark, a company supplying varieties of papers to variety of industries, decided out of patriotic motives and, of course, profit, to supply the war efforts of materials to stop and patch the bleeding of wounded soldiers.
When the war ended, Kimberly-Clark found it trebled with unusable stocks of wadding materials, not because it wasn’t of any use but because the war for which it was meant had ended. They hadn’t decided about women, although during the war they received reports of hospital nurses using the wad to patch their menstruation.
As early as 1914, the company had developed processed woods chemically into cellular product as fluffy as cotton, but five times more absorbent for medical dressing and more resistant to infection. It had gained acceptance in hospitals and at the war fronts.
When Kimberly-Clark decided to market the product primarily as sanitary napkins, it did not gain immediate acceptance, not for another thirty-something years.
The consumer market was tapped, but the company decided that it had to distance itself from the product and that’s why they had to form another company, International Cellucotton Corporation, to carry the product. And to name the product “Cellunap”—“a trade name which in no way would reflect its purpose.” So, you see, even the makers were totally in denial.
And so it was that the taboo wouldn’t die down. The advertisers wouldn’t advertise it; dealers wouldn’t stock it; stores wouldn’t display it; men wouldn’t go to the extent of rallying women for it; and women—for whom it was intended for – wouldn’t discuss it at all.
The first magazine and it was a women’s magazine, to accept to print about the subject was the Ladies’ Home Journal, but it refused to carry out ad about it. Think of that. Any reader of that era accepted the Ladies Home Journal for the read as Bible truth, but the Journal wouldn’t accept about this “Cure to Women’s Greatest Hygiene Problem” from any advertiser as truth.
It was a trick the like of Betty Crocker for cookery book that did it. The Advertising genius of Albert Lasker and copywriter Claude Hopkins of the advertising firm Lord & Thomas (forerunner of Foote, Cone & Belding) that did the trick. They signed their ad about this hygiene problem—by “Ellen J. Buckland, Registered Nurse.”
Inventing Nurse Buckland paid immediate dividend and rousing acclaim among women. Here it was a medical authority discussing candidly this most painful periods in women’s life.
The Company female staffers did the jobs of signing for Nurse Buckland and sending booklets of basic information about menstruation.
By 1929, sanitary napkin made it to the mail catalog. In the 30’s Nurse Buckland was retired and her place was taken by a socialite and advice columnist “Mary Pauline Callender”; the better-class women took notice and the unnoted wad became the pad.
Today, the advertisers of women hygiene had taken to the billboards and other printed forms all kinds and makes of sanitary napkins for all women in the professional fields, athletics and sports, and homes.
Drugstores, convenience stores, supermarkets carry rows and rows of feminine protection products in assortment of sizes, shapes, formulations and colors. The lowly wad, the dirty linen, the veteran of war, has now become the celebrated pad.
//end here
Posts
