See more Kotex items: First ad
(1921; scroll to bottom of page) - ad 1928 (Sears and Roebuck
catalog) - Lee
Miller ads (first real person in a
menstrual 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
As One Girl to
Another (complete
booklet, 1940, Kotex, U.S.A.) - Teacher's kit (complete, early
1950s, Personal Products Corp., U.S.A.) - Shame in menstrual
hygiene. A very
early Tampax ad (1936)
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Kotex menstrual napkin box and
pad, 1930s? (U.S.A.)
Kotex was the first widely
successful disposable pad in the
U.S.A. (Read about its first
advertising campaign and see
its first
ad.)
Although many pads competed with
it for women's attention in the
1920s, its main challenger was
Modess pads, a brand that stopped
making its"hospital" pads with
belt tabs in 2001. Johnson &
Johnson, maker of Modess,
commissioned a famous study
(1927) to find out what women
wanted in menstrual protection,
and launched a fierce competitor
to Kotex.
The box is huge, as are the
pads, two things that the J&J
survey found irritated buyers, who
wanted anonymity and comfort
besides ease of buying.
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Look at the faint
perforations above the
"ote" and to the left of
"x"; these enabled the
user to punch open the
box to get the pads. The
box measures 15.75" wide
x 8.5" high x 5.5" deep
(ca. 40 x 22 x 14.2 cm).
The Kotex
blue was famous
and mentioned in the 1927 Gilbreth report to Johnson
& Johnson; it's not
clear if it relates to
the other famous blue,
the blue
liquid
sometimes showing the
absorbing capacity of
menstrual products.
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The above end of the
box does not have
perforations to be
pressed to make an
opening for withdrawing
the pads; the other end,
below, does.
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One end opens along perforations
to allow removal of pads.
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I cut off the
bottom tab in the picture to save
room. The darkened tabs result
from a black background when
scanning and show the coarse
gauze, which envelopes the entire
pad. Customers often objected to
the discomfort the gauze caused.
An early
Kotex ad (1921) states that its
pad measured 22" (ca. 55.9 cm)
long, tab end to tab end, with the
absorbing part 9" x 3.5" (ca. 22.9
x 8.9 cm). The pad "body" above is
slightly smaller, measuring 8.5"
long x 2.75" wide (ca. 22 x 7 cm);
total length, including tabs,
which fit into the clasps of a
belt or are pinned to a belt, 18"
(ca. 46 cm). The long tab is 5.5"
(ca. 14 cm) long, the short one 4"
(ca. 10 cm). The short tab
attaches to the belt in front of
the body (see a diagram
showing why).
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See Kotex pads from the 1960s and 1970s - As One Girl to
Another (complete
booklet, 1940, Kotex,
U.S.A.)
© 2001 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 [email protected]
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