A prominent American
gynecologist said
in 1945 that medical tampons "used to pay
the office rent."
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Early commercial American menstrual
tampons
(See all tampons on this site)
Women have probably used tampons
for menstruation for thousands
of
years, but the first
commercial tampons seem to be
those from the late 1920s or
early 1930s in the United
States.
Most of the tampons you see
below have no
applicators (and fax
doesn't even have a string!); Tampax sold the
first tampon with an applicator
in 1936, developed from
the patent
of Dr. Earle C. Haas of Denver,
Colorado.
Who knows what the first
commercial tampon was? I suspect
someone from Chicago, probably a
man, made it, simply because this
museum has likely candidates from
that city, and because men
generally have controlled business
in America, especially in an
earlier era. (Lydia
Pinkham may have been the
first widely successful
businesswoman.) I wonder if the
first menstrual tampon makers got
their idea from the tampons
doctors used for introducing
medication into the vagina, which
women could have also used for
absorbing menstrual discharge.
(Read the important Tampons as
menstrual guards ("The
Dickinson Report"), from the
September 1945 issue of the
American magazine Consumer Reports;
it was a simplified version of an
article by Dr. Robert L. Dickinson
(who made the office rent comment)
in the Journal
of the American Medical
Association. This report
boosted the tampon industry and
encouraged women to switch from
pads to tampons. Or read the original
report.)
Here's a partial table
of early tampons for
which MUM has original material
(the relative sizes of the boxes
below are incorrect). This museum
has almost 1000 boxes of
tampons, starting in the early
1930s, mostly American, many
from three extraordinary gifts
described at the bottom of
this page.
Site
directories for tampons,
pads, ads for teens, and underwear.
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Is fax the earliest
commercial tampon? I give some reasons
why I think this is possible,
plus the tampon itself and some
packaging. Compare
with Nunap, maybe the same
tampon and both made possibly of
Cellucotton - the Kotex material.
And click here
for a politically very
incorrect ad for the tampon.
Advertising clip sheet
for fax.
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Fibs
- quite a name! - was possibly the
first of several Kotex tampons,
and appeared in the late 1930s. See a bigger
version.
See an ad
for Fibs (long
down
load time!) and
see the Fibs tampon.
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This
museum has only the packaging and
instructions for
Holly-Pax, a company Tampax bought
in 1939, along with the Wix
company (see Wix, below).
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Moderne
Women See an instruction
sheet. This may be
from the same manufacturer as the
maker of the fax tampon,
and may be as old or older.
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MUM has boxes of Tampax with
instructions from each decade
of its existence, starting in the
founding year of 1936. Tambrands
gave many of these boxes to this
museum in 1997.
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THANKS! to . . .
Procter
& Gamble, which
generously donated
scores of American tampons and
other products, dating from the
1930s to the 1960s. (2001)
Tambrands,
the former maker of Tampax, gave
MUM a fantastic
gift of
over 450 boxes of menstrual
hygiene products dating to the
1930s, plus booklets, ads, and
miscellaneous material, some of
which appear above and elsewhere
on this site. (1997)
A woman
living in Illinois
(U.S.A.), who generously donated
many unopened boxes of Wix, Fibs
and fax tampons to this
museum, including those in list
above, and also much advertising
material for these tampons,
including counter-top drugstore
displays for Fibs, and a very
early newspaper advertisement and
an instruction sheet for a late
1930s box of Tampax. Her father
had been an advertising man for
Kotex, and after her mother died,
she found these items in her
effects. She sent them to MUM
after having read the article
about this museum in the Chicago Tribune
newspaper. It's a wonderful gift!
(1995)
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© 2006 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 hfinley@mum.org\
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