I was listening to CBC radio the other day and the health crises for Zimbabwe’s women was being discussed. Apparently there is a shortage of napkins and women are getting infections from using newspapers and other media.
How in the world did women manage prior to the sanitary napkin?
Usually rags. I THINK Kotex invented pads around WWI, the were originally used as bandages.
Museum of Menstruation- (I’m not kidding, it really does exist!)
Cloth.
Some people still use them - they work really well.
Cloth. Rags. Where do you think we got the expression ‘on the rag’?
I can remember my grandmother and a couple of her college room mates [Mt Holyoak, class of 1919 …] reminiscing … I wandered through the room, and had just hit menarch [more or less] and they reminisced about leaving a small bag of ahem used rags in a railway station on a trip down to NY … :eek: which had mortified them when it happened, but filtered through 60 odd years they thought it was funny …
And I can remember hearing from some old army nurse friends that they would use cotton cording and rolls of gauze as impromptu tampons in Korea, they got the idea from reading the diary of Florence Nightingale from the Crimean war discussing ‘womens troubles’ in the field hospitals.
[NOT WORKSAFE - menstrual museum](http:// www.mum. org/)
http://www .mum. org/
D’oh - I hate it when I try to make a broken link … but here it is in clear and broken. Remove the spaces after www and m.
How is that link not worksafe? 
Or you could, just, you know, try my link in the second post.
There are some who theorize–since this isn’t the sort of thing that most women wrote about in their journals–that before the use of rags, women just bled out into their underclothes. I don’t remember where I read this. It might have been MUM, but I’m having trouble finding it there. It might have been some history of women’s health book or even a costume history text, though. Bleh. There are extant chemises out there that show stains in the right spot for this to be true, though.
Anyway, there wre some stories about knitted menstrual pads floating around on a LJ community I read a while ago. I believe they were Scandinavian, and were just knit tubes with additional, disposable padding inserted into them. They were worn on a belt.
Ha! Found it! It was on MUM, and there’s a bit there.
I wish that site was better designed. It’s a real mess.