Once upon a time… women menstruated too. The history of pads and tampons

What did it look like back then?

Our female ancestors had a much harder time coping with their monthly bleeding. Not so long ago, in the 50s or 60s, women managed their periods without access to modern hygiene products. What replaced a pad or a tampon? Most often, cotton pieces of material, pads sewn from sewing scraps, or cotton wool, and sometimes a piece of sponge.

Ask your mothers or grandmothers what methods they used - I guarantee it's a real eye-opener. The history of the female side of my family included lignin, pieces of too-small skirts or shirts, cotton wool that supposedly creaked when you walked, or cotton wool in a gauze mesh, considered a luxury solution. Previously, modern solutions were replaced by even more original substitutes - from wood pulp, through sand, grass, to pieces of sheep wool.

Menstrual Revolutionary - The Story of the Sanitary Pad

The pads we use today are most often made of compressed cotton wool covered with a thin film or cellulose layer. They usually have wings and a self-adhesive layer of glue to help keep them in place. However, the modern pad has gone through many stages before it reached its current form.

Their forerunners were reusable fabric pads, often with the owner's initial embroidered in the corner of the fabric. Such a pad was more like a fabric cloth - it was folded in three and fastened with a special tape that women fastened around their waists. Such a menstrual belt was supposed to prevent the absorbent part from moving - but it was quite ineffective. Imagine walking with something that resembled a diaper stuffed into your underwear... Brrr.

Who invented sanitary pads as we know them?

The first disposable pads were invented by accident by nurses in France who were looking for a way to stop excessive bleeding... on the battlefield. They were made of bandages and wood pulp, which gave them a surprising absorbency. It was quickly discovered that this invention would also work great to stop the flow of menstrual blood.

The idea was picked up by commercial manufacturers and in 1888 the first models under the Southall name appeared on the market in Great Britain. Later, after World War I, Kotex introduced to the market sanitary pads made from unused stocks of dressings. Despite the initial reaction of outrage, the company soon gained a crowd of regular customers and in 1927 earned as much as 11 million dollars on sanitary pad sales.

The first pads were still far from the comfortable models of today. The earliest disposable pads usually took the form of cotton wool or a fibrous rectangle covered with an absorbent wrap. The ends of the pad were still mounted on a special strip. The first self-adhesive models did not appear until the 1970s. Pads with wings were also revolutionary, and they did not begin to be mass-produced until the early 1990s.

Disposable Pads - Reusable Embarrassment

In 1897, Johnson & Johnson developed its own product. The problem was that its name was too literal, and women were ashamed to ask for the product. For this reason, in the early 1920s, the name was changed to a neutral and unassuming one - Nupak . This was not the only difficulty that sellers of sanitary products had to face at that time. After all, women's periods were a taboo subject at that time, so any advertising of sanitary pads was out of the question. Advertising such products was simply impossible! Until 1972, there was a legal ban on advertising feminine hygiene products in the United States. The first information about new products for women was therefore presented in a veiled, indirect way, and the word "period" was first used in a television commercial only in 1985 in an ad for Tampax. At that time, actress Courteney Cox found the courage, and the echoes of the aforementioned commercial did not fade for a long time. By the way, it was similar in Poland. When the first ad for sanitary pads with the famous sentence " With a certain shyness " appeared on television in the early 1990s , the public was in an uproar.

The Bloody Story of the Tampon

A modern woman will use over 16,000 tampons in her lifetime. For thousands of years, female genitalia have accommodated various very strange and sometimes disgusting objects or rolls of material. Ancient Roman women protected themselves with reusable tampons made of sheep's wool, while in some regions of Africa, women managed by creating small rolls of plant fibers, such as grass. However, according to historians, means similar to today's tampons, even in the 18th and 19th centuries, were treated exclusively as a contraceptive device, a way of distributing medicines, or even a method of treatment or stopping labor, and - which is hard to believe from today's perspective - for a very long time no one associated them with menstruation.

So who invented tampons?

The modern tampon is a bit younger than its sister, the pad. In 1931, Earle Haas, a family doctor from Colorado, developed a tampon made of compressed layers of cotton. Importantly, he immediately equipped it with a cardboard applicator that made it easier to insert the material rolls into the vagina, and thus began a new chapter in the history of menstruation. When Gertrude Tendrich, an American of German descent, bought Haas' patent five years later and founded the Tampax company, tampons became more widely available, and their use began to grow. The discreet sale of these tampons was also a hit (remember, at that time it was still a taboo subject) - sold in plain, unmarked packaging and delivered by mail, it allowed menstruation to be kept a secret.

There is another reason why tampons with applicators have become such a hit. The story is sad and shows the stigma that our periods have been marked with for years. Namely, in the last century, many people (as we can guess - mainly men) felt uncomfortable at the mere thought of women touching themselves in any way in the vaginal area. It was considered highly inappropriate, even vulgar. The fact that they did it in order to insert a tampon into the vagina during menstruation did not change anything. Therefore, the invention of the telescopic applicator helped to bypass this "scary" element of self-touch.

Another breakthrough

Unfortunately, tampons back then were still far from today's standards. First of all, they were much larger and less handy than today, and their application often caused discomfort and took a lot of time. Therefore, the real revolution came in 1936, when Judith Esser Mittag, a German gynecologist, invented a compressed tampon that expanded only after being placed in the vagina. Such a device did not require an applicator, because due to its small size it could be conveniently and quickly inserted into the vagina.

But beware - this is not the end of the bumpy road for tampons. In 1975, the sensational Rely tampons, made of synthetic materials, hit the market. One of them was carboxymethylcellulose, or CMC, which gave tampons legendary absorbency - supposedly some women wore one tampon throughout their entire period. Shortly after the temporary boom, it turned out that the "innovative" materials multiplied bacteria much faster than cotton, resulting in TSS - toxic shock syndrome . At the end of 1979, the first information about women dying from this disease began to appear, and tampons disappeared from store shelves in an atmosphere of scandal.

Public perception

Tampons also had a rough life in the advertising world. The blushing, shame-stained female menstruation was carefully hidden from the world, which is why initially information about new means of protection against troublesome bleeding reached interested parties by word of mouth. It is worth adding that for a long time tampons were advertised only to married women, because there was a common fear of accidental loss of virginity and rupture of the hymen - which, by the way, is still alive in some circles today.

However, despite the fact that the antipathy towards tampons was much greater than towards the “good old” tried and tested pads, their sales grew at an impressive rate, and a study conducted in 1940-1944 showed that about ¼ of women used them regularly. And it’s no wonder – tampons completely revolutionized the period, giving people who menstruate a chance to live without restrictions – go swimming, play sports, and, more importantly, start professional and physical activity for women, without the inconvenience of menstruation. For this reason, many years later, in 1986, Consumer Reports magazine declared the tampon (along with air conditioning and running shoes) one of the “50 small miracles and great events that changed consumers’ lives”. A distinguished group!

Finally, a small digression. Currently, every mascara or shower gel must have a list of ingredients on the packaging, but a box of tampons or pads does not. That is why there is a lack of awareness of what our bodies come into contact with. Meanwhile, to this day, most well-known corporations use controversial substances to produce feminine hygiene products, such as dioxins found in artificially bleached silk, pesticides or chlorine. We have already learned to check the ingredients of food products or cosmetics that we use, so let's take care of our vaginas too!