Mar. 11th, 2010

[identity profile] franklanguage.livejournal.com


Lysol douche ad, 1928, U.S.A.

Lysol, which today scours toilets and bathroom floors, scoured vaginas (and helped kill sperm) in an earlier era, when, I guess, women were hardier. (Andrea Tone, in Devices & Desires [2001, Hill & Wang], reports on the vaginal scalding Lysol caused, and read a 1936 critique of Lysol and Zonite douching). Note the powerful, horrible word "disinfectant." This is a black-and-white ad from McCall's Magazine, July 1928, the same month that future Life magazine photographer Lee Miller unwittingly appeared in the first menstrual hygiene ad to feature a real person, a Kotex ad. She was just as surprised, and disappointed, as the rest of the country.
[identity profile] keristars.livejournal.com
The post earlier about Lysol made me want to find out about Kotex ad from 1928, which was the first to feature a photograph of a woman. So I googled! It wasn't very difficult to find, but for the lazy and comm-archival purposes, I'm sharing it here.

Thanks to mum.org, where I found the images (uploaded to imageshack so as to not hotlink)

1928 ad:


1929 ad:


Here is the MUM page: http://www.mum.org/lemiller.htm
And detail of the text from the 1929 ad: http://www.mum.org/lemmar29.htm


Also, a hint! If you have access to ARTstor, there are some awesome propaganda and advertisements from WW1 and WW2. I'm not sure about saving the images to upload here (since ARTstor is subscriber based and I'm not sure if these images are for subscribers only), but you should be able to access the database from a school or library account, if that organization has a subscription. I access it from my university library log-in when I'm at home.

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