Take a Bizarre Look Back at Period Products Used Throughout History

It's never been as easy to have your period as it is now. Whereas now you can grab a pad or tampon and go, women in the past had to make do without the help of these life-changing advancements. "I started writing this book because I was so fascinated by how we got to this negative mindset about menstruation," says Elissa Stein, author of Flow: The Cultural Story of Menstruation. While she researched, Stein discovered various fascinating facts about how our culture has handled menstruation over the years. Here's a timeline of how period-related products have changed throughout history.

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1850s

People develop patents for different ways to collect menstrual flow with methods like aprons. "They were pieces of rubber that you would wear over your butt between your bloomers and skirt, so when you sat down there was a rubber barrier," says Sharra Vostral, associate professor of History at Purdue University. "They were heavy and stinky. It could not have been comfortable." In the 1800s, women also pin cotton and flannel into their bloomers, says Vostral.

A product called Lister's Towels goes on sale. "They were a resounding failure," says Stein. "Menstruation's always been this taboo subject, but the Industrial Revolution brought about this ability to sell products. Menstrual products were too new and too shocking, and it's hard to sell a product that everybody is too embarrassed to talk about."

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1920

Kotex sells the first pad made of cellulose, a cotton-acrylic blend that was used for bandages during the first World War. "After the war was over, there were warehouses of this stuff," says Stein. "Nurses in France were using it to soak up menstrual flow." To capitalize on the connection, Kotex's ads feature nurses and showcase the pads as a revolutionary way to treat periods. "They were presented as, 'If it's good enough for our soldiers, it's good enough for us,'" says Stein. They were marketed towards wealthy white women who could patronize the department stores where they were sold. The women would leave a nickel in a jar and take a pad from a box so they wouldn't have to call attention to themselves. A change in advertising technique helped popularize the products. "A lot of the ads had to teach people how to consume things," says Stein. "They would have a ton of written description about what the pads were and how they made you a better person." This year, women also get the right to vote.

The first menstrual cup, patented and produced by a woman named Leona Chalmers, shows up in an ad. "They weren't a big success because most people prefer not to touch anything bloody, even though apparently they're much more effective," says Stein.

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1931

All hail the tampon! A man named Earle Hass creates the modern tampon as we know it, made out of cardboard and cotton and complete with an applicator. "The applicator meant women could insert a tampon on their own without a physician but not having to touch themselves," says Vostral. Kotex didn't think it would work and passed on it.

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1933

A woman named Gertrude Tendrich buys the patent and founds Tampax. Tampons were advertised for married women only, as people thought they women could lose their virginity if they inserted one. They also had a medical use before they went commercial. "People were putting all sorts of tinctures on them to treat prolapsed uteruses, which is when ligaments are severed or don't work and it kind of collapses into the vaginal canal," says Vostral. "They were meant to keep the uterus up."

Stayfree puts out the first pads with an adhesive strip, which was a game-changer, and put an end to menstrual belts. "I know it seems so normal now, but it was a big deal that these could peel back," says Vostral. These developments in menstrual products went hand-in-hand with the scientific and technological progress of the times. "People weren't looking to come up with something that would make women's lives easier," says Stein. "Things like adhesive pads and pads made of cellulose were created by a trickle-down effect."

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1972

New Freedom, a Stayfree competitor, releases maxipads (Stayfree had introduced them in 1971). "These represent a larger cultural shift," says Vostral. "They were riding on the women's movement and playing on that idea of bodily freedom and political freedom."

Rely tampons go on the market. “This was a big technological change," says Vostral. "They were made of polyester on the outside, polyester foam cubes on the inside, and a substance called carboxymethyl cellulose. It's a thickening agent, so the tampons were super-absorbent. They turned out to be problematic because these synthetic components pretty much served as a petri dish." Women who harbored the bacteria staphylococcus aureus in their bodies were left vulnerable to toxic shock syndrome. "It's not causation, but there's correlation," says Vostral. "The bacteria causes TSS, not the tampons, but they did help create that environment for some women." Rely tampons were recalled in 1980 due to the TSS risk.

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1985

While repping Tampax, Courtney Cox is the first person to say "period" in a commercial. Monica Geller would be proud!

Women can start to skip their periods thanks to Lybrel, the first FDA-approved continuous birth control pill. "It was birth control, but its advertising took the tack of, 'Why bother having a period if you don't need to?'" says Stein.

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2000s

Reusable menstrual cups experience a surge in popularity. Women are turning to these cups made out of materials like latex and silicone instead of pads and tampons. "People are becoming more environmentally aware," says Stein. "The average woman menstruates for 40 years. That's 12 periods a year for about five days, going through five or six pads or tampons a day. How much garbage does one women create in her lifetime?" We did the math, and it's between 12,000 and 14,400 pieces of usually non-biodegradable trash per woman. Women are also questioning tampons' composition. "There's no federal labeling for tampons, which is a big problem," says Vostral. "We know more about what's in your T-shirt or sweater than we do what's in a tampon."

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2015

There's a wealth of choices when it comes to how you want to handle your period. You can go for pads, tampons, sea sponges (they've been used in different cultures for hundreds of thousands of years and can now be found in health-food stores, says Stein), and/or even hop over to Etsy and find reusable sanitary pads in cute designs. We're leaps and bounds from the menstrual belts and aprons, but there's still a ways to go. "Menstrual product development has come so far, but the advertising message to women is still just as negative and shameful as it's ever been," says Stein. "Even though people use the word 'period' more than ever, the vast majority of ads are still abut keeping it a secret and making sure no one knows. Half the people on the planet get them!" In that vein, let's be grateful for the progress we've made and hope for even more period openness in the future.

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