Other early-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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Small Kotex menstrual pad ad, 1920s,
U.S.A.
Handwritten text
for a similar ad
Part of Kotex's popularity was its
appeal to travelers,
who no longer had to bring containers
for wet pads and supplies to wash
them; sometimes they burned the used
pads. They could just throw the used
pads away.
The company made a series of small ads
like the one below, right, in
the 1920s for newspapers and small
magazines.
No surprise: somebody - or more
than one person - wrote these ads.
The State Historical Society of
Wisconsin holds the text proposal
(or maybe the final text) for an ad,
below. It's part of their papers of
advertising whiz Wallace Meyer,
whose handwriting you might
see below.
See larger ads of the era: January
1921 - May
1921 - July
1921
Courtesy of the State Historical
Society of Wisconsin
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Below:
This photocopy of the original measures 6
1/8 x 9 5/8". The original is in the State
Historical Society of Wisconsin.
Does Nice
mean well to do,
those who can afford not to wash
their menstrual rags but toss them?
Kotex prove their
worth: "Kotex" is used as a
plural much as the British use
"government" with a plural verb. Today
Americans would say "Kotex proves its
worth."
Sold wherever
women trade. Another
outdated usage. Americans would say "shop"
instead of "trade" today.
Look at the K in
Kotex - and then look at the way the
writer of the text makes K.
It's the same. Was that common in cursive
writing of the time or did the writer
imitate the Kotex K?
If accepted, this text was probably fitted
into a graphic as with the text on a
printed ad at right, which has a different
text.
The 50
in lower left probably means number 50 in the
series of ads. Someone
wrote what looks like Extra at
lower right.
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Below:
A printed similar-format ad undoubtedly
from the same time, probably the early
1920s.
See a larger
version.
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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),
© 1998, 2014 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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