Women have probably used tampons
for menstruation for thousands
of
years, but the first
commercial tampons seem to be
those from the late 1920s or
early 1930s in the United
States.
Most of the tampons you see
below have no
applicators (and fax
doesn't even have a string!); Tampax sold the
first tampon with an applicator
in 1936, developed from
the patent
of Dr. Earle C. Haas of Denver,
Colorado.
Who knows what the first
commercial tampon was? I suspect
someone from Chicago, probably a
man, made it, simply because this
museum has likely candidates from
that city, and because men
generally have controlled business
in America, especially in an
earlier era. (Lydia
Pinkham may have been the
first widely successful
businesswoman.) I wonder if the
first menstrual tampon makers got
their idea from the tampons
doctors used for introducing
medication into the vagina, which
women could have also used for
absorbing menstrual discharge.
(Read the important Tampons as
menstrual guards ("The
Dickinson Report"), from the
September 1945 issue of the
American magazine Consumer Reports;
it was a simplified version of an
article by Dr. Robert L. Dickinson
(who made the office rent comment)
in the Journal
of the American Medical
Association. This report
boosted the tampon industry and
encouraged women to switch from
pads to tampons. Or read the original
report.)
Here's a partial table
of early tampons for
which MUM has original material
(the relative sizes of the boxes
below are incorrect). This museum
has almost 1000 boxes of
tampons, starting in the early
1930s, mostly American, many
from three extraordinary gifts
described at the bottom of
this page.
Site
directories for tampons,
pads, ads for teens, and underwear.