“The bad week”, “Les Coquelicots”, “the red light”, “the curse” … The many periphrases designating menstruation underline the long history of their stigmatization. Since antiquity, women have been accused of “indisposed” women of spinning the milk in contact, of making the soils infertile under their feet, of corrupting food, of enraging animals … reason for which the rules have remained, during millennia, buried in the field of intimate and servants. But how can we keep silent on a phenomenon that concerns half of humanity?
This secret that we secrete
Consequence of this multimillenary taboo, menstrual protections do not exist so to speak at the beginning of the XXe century. Women must be satisfied with advice transmitted from mother to daughter and system D, generally using pieces of fabric “Similar to the layers of babies”that they make by hand, from old rags, then that they wash and reuse. The superstitions around the rules are tenacious. In the French countryside, we still run women “indisposed” in the fields because one imagines that the menstrual blood kills the caterpillars and pushes the pests!
What is more, at the dawn of the First World War, periodic protections are the last concern of the industry. We are much more concerned about the effusion of blood which will arise from male breasts, soon pierced with bayonets, balls or shraps of shrapnels (shells filled with bullets). The belligerents are therefore busy to produce sterile bandages, cotton compresses, antiseptic and surgical scissors, among other objects for first aid kits. Just for the tricolor armies, no less than 35 million dressings were shipped between 1914 and 1918.
However, in a context of global shortage, cotton is quickly missing, exhausted by the requirements of military clothing. As a result, the American company Kimberly-Clark turns to a new material in its design, made from wood pulp. To everyone’s surprise, the cellotton (cellulose wadding) is five times more absorbing than traditional cotton bandages and half cheaper to produce. The United States Ministry of War and the Red Cross hastened to order several tonnes, in order to cope with the frightening number of victims.
The rules have changed
This innovative material, used as a filter in gas masks, also serves as a compress on the fringes of the battlefield. According to the estimates of the company, “Kimberly-Clark produces wadding for surgical dressings with a rhythm of 110 to 150 meters (of material) per minute”. Mobilized to the aid of the wounded hairy, the nurses of the Red Cross spend most of their time deploying these dressings on open injuries and mutilated members. When their menstruation is declared, they do not hesitate to channel the flow using these same compresses, whose efficiency they have been able to measure.
This story could have ended in this way, on yet another improvisation in the service of female hygiene. Except that after the armistice, Kimberley-Clark is found with tons of surplus of cellotton on the arms. The satisfaction of the war nurses was not gone unnoticed, the company flows them in two brands called to a big future: the Kotex hygienic towels, launched in 1921 on the American market, then the Kleenex handkerchiefs three years later. The mass marketing of disposable towels marks a first step towards public recognition of the rules, in a context where feminist struggles begin to succeed (the Americans obtained the right to vote in 1920).
But the arrival of menstrual protections on the market does not dispel the taboo of the “bad week”. On the contrary, newspapers and magazines now distribute “silent purchasing coupons” to give male employees to department stores in exchange for a menstrual product, so that the latter “May be obtained without embarrassment or discussion in a crowded store”. It is clear that silence is still in order: an OpinionWay survey conducted for the NGO Plan International France, published in May 2022, revealed that 35% of French girls and young women (aged 13 to 25) were still ashamed of their rules …
