"Ending Women's Greatest Hygienic Mistake": Modernity and the Mortification of Menstruation in Kotex Advertising, 1921–1926

Abstract

Contemporary American discourses about menstruation sustain a fine balance between the realms of freedom and prohibition, a combination that constitutes a potent ideological mixture defining women’s cultural membership within limitations defined by their bodily processes. 1 As Dorothy Dinnerstein describes this cultural terrain, the province of the female becomes that of the “mucky limitations of the flesh” (1976, 133). Medicine contributes the impression that menstruation renders women offensive and incomplete; advertising discourses, in turn, offer products to compensate for this inadequacy, women’s perpetual “problem.” Both function to suppress women’s ability to control the cultural definition and meaning of menses, insinuating that menstruation is shameful, a personal source of mortification that must be hidden, and a force that, because it conspires against women, must be controlled by the latest technologically sophisticated product. To understand the ideological patterns in contemporary cultural discourse about menstruation, particularly as developed in advertisements about “feminine hygiene products,” it is instructive to examine the historical circumstances in which the intersection of social, medical, and commercial interests first manifested itself, specifically in the major American magazine advertising campaign that introduced Kotex sanitary pads to American women in 1921. The early years of the Kotex campaign mark a historical nexus where consumerism merged with medical authority, and it is these initial ideological appeals that persist in contemporary discourse about menstruation. By enticing women to enact and reproduce Western culture’s proscriptions against their own bodies, Kotex set into circulation