Chapter 35
When the Kimberly-Clark Corp. showcased Kotex at a 1927 show in Niagara Falls, New York, it was an act of courage as much as commerce. Many stores refused to sell the feminine hygiene pads while others hid them in back rooms like outlawed hootch during Prohibition years.
The Irving, Texas-based maker of Kleenex had spun off International Cellucotton Products Co. to market Kotex so it could distance itself from the product. Packaged in plain-wrapped boxes with only the product name appearing on them and stamped with easily viewed hospital and scientific icons—such as white crosses on the packages and cut-outs of nurses in the booth—Kotex (the name was a mongrel of “cotton” and “texture”) conveyed an antiseptic and disinfected image of a taboo topic. Note how Cellucotton positioned the boxes of Kotex like many merchants did—below eye level to keep them literally as well as figuratively out of sight.
Kotex wasn’t the first sanitary pad, but it was one of the most successful. Decades before, Johnson & Johnson began including sanitary napkins in an 1897 price list. (Aiming for inconspicuousness, it was the only product category on the list without a large-type heading.) Marketed under the name Lister’s Towels—intentionally associating it with Joseph Lister, the British surgeon who pioneered sterile medical practices—the pads enjoyed the luck of Ayds Reducing Plan Candy in the 1980s. Few, if any, wanted to ask a storekeeper aloud for such an intimate item. Instead of risking embarrassment, many American women relied on homemade pads, often refashioned from baby diapers.
The fear and loathing of a female hygienic product may be laughable now, but in 1927 it was within walking distance of the menstrual hut. Louis Pasteur’s germ theory of disease was by then in its sixth decade, X-rays were more than 20 years old, and the vaccine for whooping cough had celebrated its first birthday. But ideas about the monthly visitor had barely advanced past Leviticus 15:19, in which the biological function was viewed as favorably as an Ebola sundae with a leprosy cherry on top: “When a woman has a discharge, and the blood is her monthly menstrual discharge from her body, then for seven days she is to remain in her menstrual uncleanness. Whoever touches her will remain unclean until evening.”
Kimberly-Clark Corporate Archives
By comparison, though, Leviticus was “Our Bodies, Ourselves” next to Viennese professor Bela Schick. Just seven years before the exhibit, Schick reasoned in his article “Das Menstruationsgift” (“The Menstrual Poison”), appearing in the May 1920 Viennese Wiener Klinische Wochenshrift (“Weekly Clinical Writings”), that menstrual blood was laced with a venomous substance he called “menotoxin,” which caused blooming flowers to wilt. His studies showed this toxin leaked through the skin of menstruating women. Woman, it seemed, was nature’s Lucrezia Borgia, dispensing poison through her very body on a regular schedule.
Even with the mountain-heavy weight of cultural censure, Kimberly-Clark blazed the trail for its sanitary product. Red Cross nurses during World War I discovered that cellucotton, a wood-based substitute for surgical cotton Kimberly-Clark had developed, served nicely as a sanitary napkin. Quick to see profit potential, Kimberly-Clark repurposed cellucotton as Kotex sanitary napkins after the war ended. Forearmed with a keen grasp of its marketing challenge, the company suggested to storekeepers that, paradoxically, they stack the boxes not out of sight in the back, but in the open so that women could grab them without requesting assistance. Soon after, the company also suggested to stores they place a drop box near the stacks of sanitary napkins, so that women could silently approach, insert money into the box, and walk off with a box of Kotex, without once uttering the Voldemort-like product name. (To sidestep such potentially awkward encounters, Kotex was also routinely located in vending machines in women’s restrooms.)
If the experience of buying Kotex was sterile, the marketing of it was euphemistic. “Women’s greatest hygienic problem,” “Meets the most exacting needs,” and “Simplify the laundress problem,” reads a sampler of magazine advertisements then. Many of the ads used illustrations of upper-class women, the kind for whom a husband was a mint and poverty was a Jacob Riis photo, suggesting the possibility of an innate elegance free of coarse bodily functions and smells. (It wasn’t until 1985 that the use of the word “period” was allowed in a TV commercial, spoken by Friends star Courtney Cox Arquette.)
By the end of 1927, the exhibit and marketing strategy had paid off, nudging Kotex from outré to ordinary, reaching $11 million sales in fifty-seven countries. Once Cellucotton Products had blazed the trail, nearly 300 competitors followed. The late-starting rivals, including Johnson & Johnson and its Modess product, instilled women—who’ll use an estimated 11,000 sanitary napkins or tampons over their lifetimes—with the notion that their products would, in the words of one Kotex ad, leave them “Protected better. Protected longer. And a better woman for it.”