Kotex Becoming Aware Educational Kit

Kotex Becoming Aware Educational Kit, containing: 1 Maxi Pad; 1 Thin Maxi Pad; 1 Curved Maxi Pad; 2 Lightdays Unscented Pantiliners; 2 Lightdays Longs Unscented Pantiliners; 2 Security Tampons Regular Absorbency. Missing Menstrual Education Booklet, Parent's Guide and UltraThin Maxi Pad, Kimberly-Clark, 1990-1995

This kit was produced by Kotex, one of the first brands to popularise disposable menstrual pads in the 1920s. Originally included, but now missing from the pack are a Parent’s Guide and ‘Sarah’s Story’, a booklet aimed at first time menstruators. The kit also contains a range of the company’s products including pads, tampons and panty liners.

Manufacturers of menstrual products have long produced educational materials and ‘starter kits’ that also serve a promotional agenda and means of instilling brand loyalty. Kotex itself published a booklet in 1929 in which a mother advises her daughter that while “there are several other kinds of pads, some cheaper, some made differently … I do want you always to use this kind”.

Despite the thinly veiled sales pitch, guides like this played an important role in disseminating up to date information and encouraging parents to discuss puberty and menstruation with their children.

Although produced in the 1990s, neither of the guides originally included in this pack featured any people of colour. Harry Finley, founder of the Museum of Menstruation and Women’s Health (MUM) collection to which this object previously belonged, commented that from early on Kotex pitched its products to women with money, which usually meant white women.