Almost every object a woman used during her monthly bleeding before the twentieth century has vanished. Cloth was washed and reused until it fell apart. Nothing was catalogued, nothing was kept, and very little was written down.

What survives instead is indirect: laundry inventories, a stray line in a diary, a court transcript, a patent drawing. The result is a strange gap in the record — a daily experience shared by half the population for the whole of human history, with almost no artefacts to show for it. Historians reconstructing how societies have viewed menstruation through history are often working from silences rather than sources. 

That silence is itself the story. The material history of period products is short — barely 130 years of commercial goods sitting on top of thousands of years of improvisation — and each stage of it says something about what its era believed a woman could be told, sold, or trusted to handle.

The Long Era of the Makeshift

Cloth is the answer for most of the past. Folded linen, worn shifts cut down, flannel strips, wool — laundered and used again. Early modern English sources refer to the practice of wearing a "clout," a plain word for a plain rag, and historian Sara Read's study of menstruation in early modern England gathers this evidence from medical handbooks, personal letters and Old Bailey court records rather than from any surviving object.

Then there is the more contested claim: that in some periods, many women used nothing structured at all. Long chemises, layered petticoats and the absence of closed underwear until the nineteenth century meant that clothing could absorb a good deal on its own. Some historians read the documentary quiet as evidence that improvised protection was less universal than modern readers assume. Others argue the quiet simply reflects a subject nobody bothered to write down. The honest position is that the evidence is thin in both directions, and confident claims about "what women used before pads and tampons" tend to outrun what the sources can support.

One frequently repeated line deserves particular caution. The claim that ancient Egyptian women used softened papyrus as an internal absorbent appears constantly in popular histories, and it traces back to no reliable primary source. The same applies to the story that the Hippocratic writers described lint wound onto small pieces of wood. Both circulate because they are memorable, not because they are documented.

Several other factors made the whole question less pressing than it is now. Later onset of menstruation, more pregnancies, and longer stretches of breastfeeding meant far fewer bleeding episodes across a lifetime than a woman today would expect. Estimates vary widely and depend on assumptions researchers cannot fully verify, but the direction is not disputed: the modern experience of monthly bleeding for several decades is historically unusual.

1896: The Product Nobody Would Buy

The first commercially manufactured disposable pad in the United States arrived in the mid-1890s. Johnson & Johnson called it Lister's Towel, after the surgeon Joseph Lister, and packaged it like a first-aid supply. It failed. Not because the object was poor, but because buying it required a woman to identify herself, out loud, at a counter, in front of a shopkeeper and whoever else was in the shop.

A handful of other disposable pads circulated through mail-order catalogues in the same decades — a delivery method that solved the naming problem by removing the conversation entirely. The technology existed for a quarter of a century before anyone worked out how to sell it.

1920: Wartime Bandages and the First Real Market

The breakthrough came out of a field hospital. During the First World War, Kimberly-Clark manufactured Cellucotton, a wood-pulp material developed as a substitute for scarce cotton surgical dressings. Nurses serving in France began using it for their own bleeding, and the company noticed. Kotex reached shops in 1920, with a national advertising campaign following in 1921 — the first time sanitary napkins were promoted at scale in mainstream women's magazines. Records of the period, including the Smithsonian's collection of early feminine hygiene products, also preserve a stranger competitor: pads made from sphagnum moss, another wartime dressing material, which absorbed remarkably well and disappeared from the market within a few years.

The retail problem from 1896 had not gone away, and the solution was theatrical. Shops stacked plain-wrapped boxes on the counter beside a coin box, so a woman could take one and leave payment without speaking. Advertising copy of the era worked the same way, describing the product through hygiene, modernity and social confidence rather than through anything anatomical. It was a market built on the promise that nobody would have to say the word.

1931: A Patent, a Dancer, and a Great Deal of Resistance

Internal absorbents were not a new idea — versions had been used in medicine for centuries to stop bleeding and to deliver preparations. What Denver physician Earle Haas patented in 1931 was the delivery system: compressed cotton with a withdrawal cord, fitted inside a telescoping cardboard applicator. Accounts of his inspiration differ, some crediting his wife's complaints about bulky cloth pads, others a dancer of his acquaintance. The patent was granted in 1933 and sold that year to Gertrude Tenderich, who built the Tampax business around it — reportedly assembling the first units herself with a sewing machine. Even the sale price is disputed in the secondary literature, with figures ranging from a few thousand dollars to ten times that.

Resistance was immediate and moral rather than practical. Internal products collided directly with contemporary anxieties about virginity, and with a broader discomfort about a woman handling her own body at all. Adoption grew anyway, first among dancers, swimmers and athletes, then far more widely during the Second World War as women moved into factory and service work where a belted pad was simply impractical. In Germany, gynaecologist Judith Esser-Mittag developed a digital, applicator-free design at mid-century — a fork in the road that still divides European and North American shelves today.

1937: The Cup That Arrived Sixty Years Early

The menstrual cup is routinely described as a modern invention. It is not. Cup-shaped catamenial devices were patented as far back as the 1860s without ever reaching a market, and in 1937 the American actress and author Leona Chalmers patented and marketed the first genuinely usable version, moulded from vulcanised rubber. Its shape would be recognisable to anyone using a silicone cup today.

It sold poorly. Wartime rubber shortages interrupted production, and the deeper obstacle was cultural: the design required a woman to use her fingers, which contemporary standards of delicacy treated as unthinkable. A revival attempt in 1959 under the Tassette name lasted into the early 1970s before folding. The object had been solved. The audience had not.

Dates mark first commercial appearance or patent, not widespread adoption — several of these products waited decades for an audience. Mid-century and modern entries are approximate.

1980: The Year the Industry Changed Its Language

Through the 1960s and 1970s, manufacturers competed largely on absorbency, and synthetic materials pushed that capacity far beyond what natural fibres allowed. In 1980, one highly absorbent American tampon brand was withdrawn from the market following its association with a cluster of serious illnesses. Standardised absorbency labelling across the category followed in the years afterward, and the marketing language shifted noticeably — away from maximum capacity as a selling point, toward comfort, fit and reliability.

It is a useful marker in the timeline because it is the point at which regulators, rather than advertisers, began setting the terms of the conversation. Even the fabrics themselves carried assumptions about what was modern and what was old-fashioned — synthetics read as advanced for most of the twentieth century, a hierarchy that has since reversed in parts of the market.

The Circle Closes

Silicone brought the cup back in the early 2000s, roughly sixty-five years after Chalmers first moulded one in rubber. Absorbent underwear reached the mainstream market in the mid-2010s, marketed on sustainability, cost over time, and a general fatigue with disposables. Both are, at bottom, a return to reuse — the arrangement that governed the entire span of history before 1920, now sold at a premium and photographed beautifully.

What changed most across the whole timeline is not absorbency. It is speech. The 1890s product failed because a woman could not name it at a shop counter. The 1920s campaign succeeded by inventing a vocabulary that named it without naming it. The 1930s tampon was resisted on grounds of modesty rather than function. Each stage of the commercial record maps onto what its era was willing to have said out loud, and much of the resistance drew on far older material — the myths and superstitions attached to menstrual blood shaped the market long before any of these companies existed.

The objects in a museum case tell a shorter story than the silence surrounding them. Cloth, washed and folded and used again, covers nearly all of it. Everything since is a footnote written in the last five generations — and a fair amount of that footnote is now circling back to where it began.