The appearance and usage of menstrual protection (pads or tampons) are one kind of the symbols of modern woman’s wear. As Harry Finley, the founder of Museum of Menstruation, suggests that the women, especially rural and lower class women, in America and Europe before the twentieth century probably wore nothing but chemise during their periods. Selina Cooper, an English Suffragist (1864-1946), described the condition of her working place around 1900, where the women workers wore no sanitary protection at all and left their flow on the ground everywhere in the working room.<9> A German female physician also preached in the book Health in the House for the middle-class women around 1899, “it is completely disgusting to bleed into your chemise, and wearing that same chemise for four to eight days can cause infections.”<10> Thus, Finley concluded that possibly the lack of information about sanitary articles in American and European history is due to “nothing to write”—they wore nothing particular at those “special times”<11>.

Before nineteenth century, there was no better situation than Europe in America. Sullen Hoy in her Chasing Dirt noted, America was described as “filthy, bordering on the beastly” in early nineteenth century.<12> However, American commenced their pursuit for “cleanliness” from pre-civil war period. Also, the germ theory was established by Robert Koch in late nineteenth century. Progressively, all American developed an obsession of a germ-free environment. People began to notice the hygiene in a different way and required it more than before. Prior to the presence of commercial menstrual products in the end of the nineteenth century, American women, if they wore something for their menses, usually used the cloth of bird’s eye or flannel to make diaper-like rages and to fix them by belts. (Figure 1) In 1896, Johnson & Johnson manufactured the first disposable sanitary napkin on the market, called “Lister’s Towel”. But it soon failed and seceded from the market owing to the public rejection of any advertising or publicity about women’s “unmentionables” at that time. After World War I, Kimberly-Clark, inspired by the cellulose cotton for bandaging wounds at war, started to market the first successful commercial sanitary napkins, Kotex, in 1921.

Kotex embarked on helping woman with improving personal hygiene to meet up the new-century standard. Unlike today’s advertising, the advertisements of early sanitary products carried long texts on them and acted as a bulletin taught the woman how to solve this “oldest hygienic problem” in a very ambiguous but you-know-what-is-it language. The first advertisement showed a scene which most likely took place in the court yard of a hospital. The box of the product looks like a first-ad kit box with a medical cross on it. The cross and the hospital scene both corroborated the slogan down the advertisement: inexpensive, comfortable, hygienic and safe. (Figure2) It presented a professional and convincing illustration—reliable and hygienic.