The History of Sanitary Towel

It is a typical day in the period for Mary, who lives in California, United Nations. She is twenty-six, working as a nurse in a private hospital. She is occupied with taking care of patients while being very careful of the hygiene of everything in the hospital including herself to prevent cross infection. How do you like such a nurse? Elegant and patient?

However, in reality, she feels extremely distressed and agitated. She tries to 100% concentrate on her work, but it is inevitable for her to be a bit distracted from the physical and mental unpleasure. She suffered from not only the distention feeling from her lower abdomen, but also the uncomfortableness of bleeding on the pad between her legs. The pad covers her lower body from the front to the back while the two sides are attached to a girdle. Wearing the pad working for hours, she feels quite hot and stuffy. If the weather is burning out, bacteria reproduce themselves quickly on the pad and send out smelliness, which increases the risk of gynecopathy infection. In addition, she really concerns herself whether the blood leaks from the pad and thus contaminates her white underskirt of the nurse uniform. It is because the girdle slipped either front or back of the intended position. Moreover, cleaning the pad is cumbersome and time-consuming. She has to change the pad every twelve hours, soak the fully blood-absorbed pads in cool water for ten minutes, clean them with detergent and running water, disinfect them in boiling water, hang them up and wait for them drying. Sometimes too much blood penetrates the pad; no matter how much detergent and water she applies to the pad and how many times she washes it, the bloodstain remains. She has to go through the above procedures twice a day and at least six days per month. Thinking of this, she feels a little collapsed and wishes not to be a female if she can choose a gender.

Mary is not alone. It was in 1789, females around the world whose age falls into about nine to fifty-five years old, had to deal with these menstruation inconveniences. But nowadays females living in a middle-class family can get rid of the annoyance of washing pads with bloodstain after using them. They can change a new one every one to four hours not to worry too much about the sanitation and blood leakage.

The reason for this shift is because of the revolutionary change in the design of a menstrual pad. For a symbol of this change, look at sanitary towels in the nineteen century.

A piece of medical cotton in the center of a fragment of bandage, it was the prototype of a sanitary towel invented by Benjamin Franklin (Kotler, 2018). It initially was invented to stop wounded soldiers from bleeding (Kotler, 2018). It was not until Franklin passed away for almost one hundred years, that the sanitary towels were commercially available in 1888 by a brand named Southall’s Towels (Kotler, 2018). The first target market were nurses (Kotler, 2018). In World War I, American nurses served in France and found that the ingredient of sanitary towels—cellulose—was easy to access to and cheap enough to dispose after use. Inspired by cellulose which performed better in blood absorption than cloth bandage, Kotex developed the first disposable cellulose menstrual towel and released it to the market in 1921 (Kotler, 2018). In 1956, Mary Kenner, an American female inventor, obtained a patent for an adaptable belt with an inbuilt and waterproof napkin pocket. It was late till 1980 that an adhesive back strip was added to the bottom of sanitary towels for attachment to the crotch of panties. The latter was demonstrated preferable to customers. Only until then that the modern sanitary towels were finalized while the girdle-connected sanitary pad gradually withdrew from the market. On the basis of adhesive sanitary napkins, ‘wings’ on both sides were introduced, so sanitary towels could be fixed on the underwear more stably. Moreover, the superabsorbent material polypropylene replaced the cellulose, so the thickness of sanitary pads decreased as thin as 0.1 centimeter.

The most obvious indication of sanitary napkins is more positions open to women (Kotler, 2018). Since the sanitary towels freed women from the repetitive laundry of menstrual pads and the embarrassment of bloodstains on clothes, women were encouraged to contribute to factory production (Kotler, 2018). With advertisements and bathroom redesigned, women were motivated to use sanitary napkins to ‘toughen up’ and continue to work during menstruation (Kotler, 2018). Hence, the beginning of the mainstreaming of menstrual products meant that women earned more control on their autonomy, allowing them to participate in activities outdoors (Kotler, 2018). For instance, women could even go swimming wearing sanitary pads when monthly bleeding. Girls in period can keep commuting to school no worrying about inconsistent education. Since then, women became more independent to gain economic sources and broaden their horizons in life. As a result, women’s social status rose while living quality improved.

Moreover, the creation of the sanitary towel inspired the development of more diverse menstrual products like tampons and menstrual cups. Dr. Earle Hass, an American doctor, realized how thick and inconvenient the sanitary towels are for his wife to move (Dingxiangyuan, 2013). He invested much time on improving sanitary napkins and eventually invented tampons of a brand called TAMPAX (Dingxiangyuan, 2013). Tampon is like a cotton stick with straight strip or slant patterns facilitating blood diversion. Absorbing blood, the tampon enlarges its volume so it can fit the vagina well. The top of tampon is designed rounded to insert smoothly while the end connects to a fragment of cotton string to pull out. Females wear a disposable finger-cot to push the tampon into their vagina until the top of tampon reach the ostium uteri. A tampon of 1cm-1.9cm diameter can absorb 6g-18g menstrual blood, so users can maintain it in the vagina for at longest eight hours. If the tampon is at the right position, the user can hardly feel its existence. Hence, 42% American females prefer to buy tampons due to less frequency of changing and better user experience. But due to the cultural reasons of hymen protection and habits, Asian females comparatively less welcome to tampons.

As for the menstrual cup, it was designed by an American actress Leona Chalmers (Qingzhu, 2017). It is a rubber or latex bell-shape cup with a loop top. Users need to fold the cup into C/S/7-shape and put it in the deep vagina. Then they unfold the cup facing the ostium uteri to collect menstrual blood as long as twelve hours. After withdrawing the cup, users exhaust the blood in the cup. Subsequently, they clean the cup by water and disinfect it in boiling water for five to ten minutes. Then they dry and reserve it in air-circulated place. Normally a menstrual cup can be recycled for five to ten years, so it is eco-friendlier than tampons and sanitary towels. Similarly, menstrual cups are more common on the western market than Asian market.

Additionally, the invention of the sanitary towel raised the public’s consciousness of the female menstrual hygiene. More and more females, together with males, started to care about the health of female reproductive system. Since then, they knew that menstruation is not just a monthly bleeding process, but also accompanied by estrogen level increasing and emotional fluctuation. Some females tend to feel tired, sleepy, unconcentrated and dysmenorrhea which affects normal life and work. Thus, some companies like Nike and nations like Japan allow female employees to take a leave of period (China daily, 2017). Also, the medical research on menstruation health summarizes concrete dos and don’ts for females to deal with period. For instance, females should pay more attention to staying warm during the period, because they are inclined to catch a cold than usual.

Furthermore, the sanitary towels help females know their body better and motivate them to fight for greater gender equality through menstrual education. Rachel Kauder Nalebuff published My Little Red Book collecting female stories from girls of all ages around the world, including an article If Men Could Menstruate (My little red book, 2020). The book reflects females’ feelings and thoughts throughout their life (My little red book, 2020). It aims to offer support, entertainment and education for mothers and daughters (My little red book, 2020). Sales of the book will donate to charities promoting female education and health (My little red book, 2020). Not only girls are encouraged to learn menstrual knowledge, males can also experience menstruation via menstruation machine developed by Hiromi Ozaki from Royal Art College (Xiao, 2010). Installing the machine on the waist, the participant will be stimulated by the inner electrodes feeling painful and then red paint ‘blood’ will flow (Xiao, 2010). Participants are required to wear the machine for five days as a period cycle (Xiao, 2010). Participants gave feedback like ‘uncomfortable’ ‘more cares should be given to females’. One of the males who tried the machine donated to a charity for menstrual products in developing countries after the experience.

However, at the very first stage sanitary towels appeared on the market, they were too expensive for many female consumers. After several years sanitary towels finally became affordable and were adopted by the mass. Nowadays in the middle- and high-income countries, 75% of females adopt industrial sanitary products (Jiemian, 2018). Even in developed countries like the United Kingdom, 15% of females who are between fourteen to twenty-one years old have experienced unable to afford menstrual products (Jiemian, 2018). However, until today the high price of sanitary towels still prevents thousands of females in developing countries from using them. According to a survey of WASH program of the United Nations International Children Emergency Fund (UNICEF), over 70% of interviewees believe that the unaffordability is the major obstacle of using menstrual products in Ethiopia, Uganda, South Sudan, Tanzania and Zimbabwe (Jiemian, 2018). It is said that over 50% of females in low-income countries have to self-make menstrual napkins (Jiemian, 2018). They combine whatever absorbent like rags, batts and even sands and boiler ash with safety pins, not distinctive to the women ‘on the rags’ before the invention of sanitary towels (Jiemian, 2018). Without high-temperature disinfection, these homemade menstrual napkins are considered unhygienic. Other girls wrap a segment of twig with wool as a low-resolution tampon and insert it into the vagina. In Afghanistan, 80% of females can only access to water to clean their self-made menstrual pads without soap (Jiemian, 2018). In 2013, 69% of females in Uttar Pradesh in India heard about sanitary towels but never used them (Jiemian, 2018). In suburban areas of Ethiopia, 25% of girls claim that they cannot access to any menstrual hygienic interventions except simply body-washing and self-quarantining in forests, deserts or farm fields (Jiemian, 2018). In Indian Jaipur, 70% of females say their families are unable to cover the expenses of sanitary products (Jiemian, 2018). The result is high gynecopathy rate in developing countries. World Bank’s statistics showed that the rate is as high as 18% in 1993 (Wei, 2020).

The poor popularization of sanitary towels in India was one of the backgrounds of an Indian movie Padman (Wei, 2020). Padman is adapted from an Indian menstrual towel entrepreneur Arunachalam’s life story. In India few factories produce sanitary towels. Most of sanitary napkins are imported while charging 12% duties (Wei, 2020). Therefore, sanitary towels are sold expensively. Noticing this issue, Arunachalam self-invented a low-cost sanitary towel manufacturing machine to increase the local supply on the Indian market (Wei, 2020). Thus, more Indian families can afford sanitary towels for female members. The movie facilitated the cancelation of sanitary towel tax by the Indian government on July 21, 2018 (Jiemian, 2018). Since January 1, 2019, the Australian government also followed and cancelled the menstrual products’ duties which was 10% (Jiemian, 2018). So far, only eleven countries regulate that menstrual products are duty-free (Jiemian, 2018). They are Jamaica, Nicaragua, Nigeria, Tanzania, Lebanon, Kenya, Ireland and around ten states in the US (Jiemian, 2018). The UK may come up with relevant policies in 2022 (Jiemian, 2018).

Nevertheless, sanitary towels do not eliminate the ingrained ‘menstruation taboo’ worldwide. Many women are not willing to let others know that they are buying menstrual products, so Kotex set a self-service counter (Gao, 2017). Hence, female customers can select menstrual products and pay without any interaction with clerks (Gao, 2017). To better ‘protect’ consumers’ privacy of buying menstrual products, Kotex’s competitor Johnson & Johnson—Modess package had no hint of sanitary product (Gao, 2017). Modess even provided a piece of brown wrapper to cover (Gao, 2017). As for menstrual advertisements, most of them replace red blood with blue ink, owing to male-dominant ad regulation that blood must not appear in the 1980s (Gao, 2017). Television news is in the same dilemma. In 2020, Chinese nurses told the reporter that menstrual products were deficient in Wuhan while the sentence was cut from the television news (Wei, 2020). Instead of deploying more menstrual products to Wuhan, Wuhan officials said that masks were more crucial and refused to order them (Wei, 2020). For many Chinese girls, they cannot confidently talk about menstruation and usually use euphemisms like ‘elder auntie comes’ to refer to period. In 2003, a Chinese girl who experienced the period first time was teased by boys and was diagnosed with child schizophrenia (Tianfu morning post, 2004).

In conclusion, sanitary towels were invented to solve the problems of menstruation hygiene and dignity. It evolved from reusable cloth sanitary pad attached to a girdle. The prototype of disposable sanitary towel was made of cellulose and bandage. Later adhesive back strip, wings and thinner design were added. The invention of sanitary towels enabled women to take part in work and outdoor activities in the period that they never tried before. Sanitary towels also gave inspirations of other menstrual products like tampons and menstrual cups. The massification of sanitary towels increased people’s attention to menstrual knowledge and reproductive system health. People were also encouraged to popularize menstrual hygiene education and greater gender equality. However, due to low productivity and incomes and high duties, sanitary pads were unaffordable and thus rarely used in developing countries. To lift public notice, the Indian movie Padman was on show and influenced Indian and Australian governments to give up sanitary product taxes. Nevertheless, sanitary towel’s generation did not decrease menstrual taboo globally in terms of package, advertisements, television coverage and phrases referring to period. Overall, menstruation is a normal female physical phenomenon. Females have the right to pursue health and esteem in period and deserve respect from males. By using sanitary products, menstruating females do not have many differences to males in working ability. It is just males’ biases on menstruation that regarding it dirty and shameful. Menstruation is and should be a topic that can be freely discussed with anyone. Hope that low-cost, duty-free, smart and better designed sanitary products are available to every female around the world. No one hides from others when buying menstrual products. No menstrual taboo, no bullies to menstrual females.

References

China daily. (March 28, 2017). Welfare or trouble? Italy may enforce female worker paid leave of period. (Fa fuli haishi bangdaomang? Yidali huotui nvyuangong daixin “yueijing jia”). Huanqiu. Retrieved from https://world.huanqiu.com/article/9CaKrnK1Bo9

Gao, Y. (March 2, 2017). Why do global sanitary towel ads use blue liquid? (Weishenme quanshijie weishengjin guanggao douyong lanse yeti). Meihua. Retrieved from https://www.meihua.info/a/68833

Jiemian. (October 12, 2018). Many countries start the wave of duty-free sanitary towels, ‘period poverty’ is concerned. (Duoguo xian weishengjin mianshui langchao, “yuejing pinkun” wenti shoudao guanzhu). Baijiahao. Retrieved from https://baijiahao.baidu.com/s?id=1614087287591171588&wfr=spider&for=pc

Kotler, J. (November 21, 2018). A short history of modern menstrual products: How did we end up with the tampons and pads we all know? Clue. Retrieved from https://helloclue.com/articles/culture/a-short-history-of-modern-menstrual-products

My little red book. (May 24, 2020). About. My little red book. Retrieved from http://www.mylittleredbook.net/

Qingzhu. (June 22, 2017). Overseas menstrual product concise history: a hundred year evolution of menstruation. (Guowai nvxing jingqi weisheng yongpin jianzhi: dayima de bainian ziwo xiuyang). Sohu. Retrieved from https://www.sohu.com/a/151113803_450331

Tianfu morning post. (June 21, 2004). Female teenager experience menstruation first time was teased by classmates and diagnosed schizophrenia. (Shaonv yuejing chuchao zao tongxue chaoxiao huanshang jingshenfenliezheng). Sina news. Retrieved from http://news.sina.com.cn/s/2004-06-21/06263472485.shtml