In 1896, Johnson & Johnson launched a product called Lister’s Towels—disposable sanitary pads made of cotton and gauze, designed to address a need that half the world’s women had managed for thousands of years. It failed spectacularly, not because the product was poor, but because women were too embarrassed to walk into a store and buy something that announced to everyone present that they were menstruating. The product was quietly discontinued, and for decades afterward, most American women continued using the same system their grandmothers had used: rags, folded cloth, homemade solutions that no one spoke about openly. The oldest evidence of menstrual management dates to the Stone Age, roughly 30,000 years ago.

Women then made primitive pads from whatever nature provided. In parts of what is now Europe and North Africa, that meant wrapping sphagnum moss in strips of animal hide and fastening it to the body. Sphagnum moss, which grows abundantly in peat bogs, was the preferred choice for practical reasons. It can absorb up to twenty times its own weight in liquid, making it more absorbent than the cotton products on pharmacy shelves today.

It also has natural antiseptic properties that fight bacteria on contact and reduce the risk of infection. This was the same moss battlefield medics later used to dress wounds during the Napoleonic Wars and World War I, and it is the same moss archaeologists have found in medieval latrines in Scandinavia, stuffed inside pads clearly designed for menstruation. As human societies grew more complex, menstrual practices split along cultural and geographic lines. What a woman used, and how she was treated while using it, depended almost entirely on where she lived and what her civilization believed about menstrual blood.

In some ancient cultures, menstruation was actually a cause for celebration. The Aztec and Maya peoples treated a menstruating woman as the most important person in the household during her cycle. She was treated with respect, sometimes excused from heavy chores, and her blood was seen as a symbol of the life-giving power women carried. In parts of ancient Babylon, Hindu society, and China, menstruation was regarded as a sign of fertility and a good omen for the home.

The blood itself was considered sacred, linked to the cycles of the moon and the forces governing agriculture and birth. Elsewhere, the opposite was true. Some cultures associated menstrual blood with sorcery, with the power to ward off storms, or with the ability to contaminate food, animals, and entire crops. The Polynesian word tapua, meaning the flow of menstrual blood, is actually the origin of the English word taboo.

The very language reveals how deeply the idea of menstruation as something forbidden became rooted. In ancient Egypt, women along the Nile used soft papyrus, a reed-like plant growing thickly on the riverbanks. They wrapped strips tightly and used them internally, an early prototype of the tampon. This is one of the oldest recorded instances of internal menstrual management, dating back more than three thousand years.

Egyptian women also used washable cotton cloth pads. Cultural attitudes in Egypt were relatively positive by ancient standards. Many Egyptians viewed menstruation as a sign of fertility and spiritual strength, and some records suggest a belief that menstrual blood had medicinal properties. Women were not ostracized during their cycles and were not treated as cursed.

In ancient Greece, the picture changed. The Greeks believed menstruation was the body’s way of purging excess blood, an idea rooted in humoral theory, the dominant medical framework of the time. The theory held that health depended on a balance of four bodily fluids: blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile. Women, the theory claimed, were naturally colder and moister than men, accumulating excess blood that had to be expelled monthly.

The physician Hippocrates, living around 400 BC and often called the father of modern medicine, was said to have described women wrapping linen around small wooden sticks and inserting them to absorb menstrual blood. For years, this detail was repeated in articles and museum exhibits as evidence that Greek women used handmade tampons. Modern research has challenged that claim. Historian Helen King argues there is no solid evidence from the ancient world supporting routine use of internal devices by Greek women.

She suggests the claim appears to have originated from twentieth-century tampon marketing websites rather than ancient medical texts. King traced the misattribution through decades of secondary sources, each citing the previous one, until the trail ended at a marketing campaign. What Greek women actually used daily remains largely unknown because the men who wrote history did not consider it worth recording. Ancient Rome took the story in a stranger direction.

Roman women used wool pads, and sometimes small wool tampons, to manage menstrual flow. But what truly set Rome apart was what Roman men believed menstrual blood could do. Pliny the Elder, one of the most influential scholars of the ancient world, published his thirty-seven-volume encyclopedia Natural History between 77 and 79 AD. In it, he devoted an entire chapter to the alleged powers of menstruation.

He wrote that a menstruating woman could make seeds infertile, cause fruit to fall from trees, dull the shine of mirrors, and blunt the edge of steel blades. He claimed that if a menstruating woman looked at a swarm of bees, they would die instantly. He wrote that menstrual blood could drive dogs mad and make bronze and iron rust on contact. He even claimed that if a pregnant woman stepped over menstrual blood, she would miscarry.

None of it was true. But Pliny was not an eccentric writing from the margins of Roman intellectual life. His encyclopedia covered everything from astronomy to zoology and was one of the most widely read texts in the Roman Empire. It remained a standard reference for scholars, physicians, and clergy for more than a thousand years after his death.

So when Pliny wrote that menstrual blood could kill bees and rust metal, people believed him. In some Roman households, menstruating women were expected to stay away from the kitchen, the garden, and certain sacred rituals. Greek temple inscriptions specifically warned menstruating women not to enter holy places to avoid spiritual contamination. Pliny’s ideas were copied into medieval medical texts, translated into Arabic scholarship, and incorporated into church doctrine.

The superstitions he recorded in the first century AD were still shaping how physicians and clergy spoke about menstruation in the fifteenth century. The Middle Ages brought a major myth about menstrual history. The claim that medieval women wore no underwear and simply bled freely onto their clothes has been repeated so often it seems obviously true. Modern archaeological research strongly contradicts it.

Researcher Ingvild Halvorsen of the Norwegian Institute for Cultural Heritage Research examined textile remains recovered from a medieval latrine in Tønsberg, Norway. Among them, she identified carefully folded and shaped pieces of cloth, and for the first time in Norway, traces of what may have been menstrual blood on medieval textiles. These fabrics were not random rags. They were organized in ways suggesting they were designed specifically as sanitary pads.

The myth of free bleeding collapses further when considering how highly medieval people valued cloth. Fabric was extremely expensive. A simple wool dress could represent up to a thousand hours of work, including spinning, weaving, dyeing, and sewing, most of it done by women themselves. The idea that these same women would deliberately stain their clothing with blood every month, in a society that considered menstrual blood spiritually contaminating, makes little sense.

Medieval women used what their ancestors had used for centuries: rags. Specifically, strips of old linen torn from worn-out clothing or household fabrics. The English expression on the rag comes from this practice, a phrase dating back at least to the early twentieth century, but describing something women had done since ancient times. Linen was preferred because it is naturally soft, absorbent, and withstands repeated washing well.

Women folded the rags into thick pads and held them in place with a cloth belt or girdle tied around the waist. On heavy flow days, some women stuffed their rags with peat moss for extra absorbency, using the same material their Stone Age ancestors had relied on thousands of years earlier. After use, the rags were washed in hot water with lye soap, wrung out, and hung to dry. Sun bleaching helped remove stains soap alone could not.

Meanwhile, the church treated menstruation as a sign of original sin, the curse of Eve. Some religious authorities forbade menstruating women from entering churches, receiving communion, or touching sacred objects. Medieval medical texts repeated Pliny the Elder’s claims word for word, adding Christian theology that depicted menstrual blood as evidence of spiritual corruption. Women quietly solved a practical problem with rags, moss, and belts, while the institutions around them treated the same bodily function as something polluted, shameful, and wrong.

The real turning point came during World War I, from an unexpected source. An American paper company called Kimberly-Clark developed a material called Cellucotton. Made from processed wood pulp, it was designed as a cheaper, more absorbent substitute for cotton in medical dressings when cotton grew scarce due to wartime demands. French nurses in field hospitals on the Western Front began using the Cellucotton dressings not only to bandage soldiers’ wounds but also to absorb their own menstrual flow.

The material worked far better than anything else available. It was highly absorbent, cheap, widely available, and most importantly, disposable. No washing, no drying, no reuse. After the war, Kimberly-Clark found itself with a massive surplus of Cellucotton and no military demand.

The bandage market had collapsed entirely. Then someone at the company remembered what the nurses had been doing. In 1920, Kimberly-Clark launched Kotex, the first widely marketed disposable sanitary pad. The name came from combining cotton and texture.

The product consisted of layers of Cellucotton wrapped in gauze, held in place by a cloth belt with metal clips front and back. The first Kotex advertisement appeared in 1921 in women’s magazines, marking the first time sanitary pads were advertised nationally. But the stigma around menstruation remained enormous. The advertisements never used the word menstruation or even period.

They showed elegant women in fashionable clothing and used coded language that avoided mentioning the product’s real purpose. Stores developed ways to let women buy without speaking to a clerk. Kotex boxes were placed on counters with a sign and a coin slot. You put in your money, took the box, and left without saying a word.

According to historian Randa Mansky, who published a study of the Kotex campaign in 2010, these advertisements represented a radical shift in how menstruation was discussed in American culture. By turning it into a product you bought rather than a problem you handled at home, Kotex set the template that menstrual product advertising still follows more than a hundred years later. Then came the tampon. In 1931, Dr.

Earle Haas, an osteopathic physician in Denver, Colorado, patented the first modern tampon with a paper applicator. He drew inspiration from his wife’s frustration with bulky pads during a camping trip in the late 1920s. Haas made the prototype himself, compressing surgical cotton into a tight bullet-shaped plug and placing it inside a telescoping applicator modeled on a bullet casing. He patented what he called a catamenial device, using a Greek word meaning monthly.

But Haas could not convince anyone to manufacture it. He offered the invention to Johnson & Johnson and others, and they all refused. In 1933, he sold the patent for thirty-two thousand dollars to Gertrude Tenderich, a German immigrant and businesswoman from Denver who recognized the product’s potential immediately. Tenderich began producing the first Tampax tampons from her home, hand-sewing each one on her own sewing machine using the compression device Haas had invented.

She founded the Tampax company and became its first president. By 1936, Tampax tampons were available on store shelves across America. But the product faced an obstacle unrelated to design. Religious leaders, physicians, and parents questioned whether inserting a tampon could cause a young woman to lose her virginity.

Some doctors warned that internal products might be physically pleasurable and therefore morally unsuitable for unmarried women. Early Tampax packaging included anatomical diagrams showing the difference between the urethra and the vaginal opening, along with reassurance that the product would not affect the user’s virginity. Around the same time, another invention emerged that took decades to succeed. In 1937, American actress and inventor Leona Chalmers patented the first commercial menstrual cup, a bell-shaped rubber device designed to be inserted to collect menstrual blood rather than absorb it.

It was reusable, could last for years, and theoretically produced far less waste than pads or tampons. But it launched just before World War II, and rubber became a rationed wartime material. Factories shut down. The product disappeared from the market and did not meaningfully return until 2002, when a British woman named Sue Hardy redesigned the cup using medical-grade silicone and launched the Mooncup.

That gap between 1937 and 2002 represents sixty-five years of an effective product remaining off shelves because timing, materials, and cultural acceptance never aligned. In the 1920s, at the same time Kotex was launching its first national advertising campaign, a young Black woman in Charlotte, North Carolina, had already designed a better solution. Her name was Mary Kenner, and she had been inventing things since age six, when she attempted to build a self-oiling door hinge because the back door of her mother’s house woke her in the morning. Invention ran in her family.

Her grandfather had invented a railroad signal light and a wheeled stretcher for ambulances. Her father held a patent for a portable clothes press. Her sister later invented and sold a family board game. Kenner’s design was an adjustable sanitary belt with a built-in moisture-proof pocket that held the pad firmly against the body.

It solved the biggest complaint women had voiced for decades. Pads shifted, bunched up, and leaked. Her design kept everything in place. It was practical, effective, and ahead of anything on the market.

But she could not afford the patent filing fees, which ran into hundreds of dollars, money she simply did not have. The idea sat dormant. She worked odd jobs, including childcare and a position in the federal government, and saved for years. In 1956, she finally received her first patent for the sanitary belt.

Almost immediately, a company called Sonnett Products contacted her, wanting to discuss manufacturing and distribution. They scheduled a meeting. When the company’s representatives met Kenner in person and discovered she was Black, they withdrew from the deal. She contacted other companies.

The same pattern repeated. She faced open, persistent racial discrimination at every turn. Without a manufacturing partner or financial backing, Kenner’s patent eventually expired. Other companies became legally free to produce and sell her design, and she received nothing from any of them.

She obtained five patents in total during her lifetime, the most of any African American woman at that time. She patented a toilet paper holder, a back-washing device mounted inside the shower, and a walker tray for people with limited mobility. She never earned a profit from any of them. She spent her working life as a florist and continued inventing in her spare time until her death in 2006 at age ninety-three.

By 1969, Stayfree introduced the first adhesive pad, the kind that sticks directly to underwear without clips or belts. The sanitary belt, the product Mary Kenner had worked to improve for decades, became obsolete overnight. During the 1970s, feminism pushed menstrual products toward more open advertising. Pads became thinner.

They gained wings. Companies began manufacturing different sizes for different flow levels. In 1985, the word period was spoken for the first time on American television, in a Tampax commercial featuring young actress Courteney Cox. Thirty thousand years of women managing their periods, a hundred years of commercial products on the market, and American television did not accept the word period being spoken publicly until 1985.

Before that moment, the industry relied entirely on euphemisms, cartoons of blue liquid being poured on pads, and everything except acknowledging what the product actually was. Products changed almost beyond recognition over the following decades. Pharmacy shelves today hold adhesive pads, ultra-absorbent tampons, menstrual cups made of medical-grade silicone, period underwear with built-in absorbent layers, menstrual discs, and dozens of other options. The engineering improved dramatically, materials became safer, and products diversified to become genuinely useful.

But the journey was not smooth even in the modern era. In the late 1970s, Procter & Gamble launched an ultra-absorbent tampon called Rely, designed to last an entire period without changing. Within a few years, cases of toxic shock syndrome, a rare and sometimes fatal bacterial infection, rose among young women using high-absorbency tampons. The Centers for Disease Control directly linked the outbreak to these products.

Rely was pulled from shelves in 1980. The incident frightened an entire generation of women, driving them away from tampons and back to pads. It took years for tampon manufacturers to regain consumer trust with safer materials and clearer usage guidelines. While the developed world slowly built an industry around menstrual management, most of the world’s population had no access to these products at all.

Even today, hundreds of millions of women and girls in low-income countries manage their periods with old cloth scraps, leaves, newspapers, or nothing. Girls in parts of sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia miss school during their periods because products or facilities are unavailable. The World Bank estimated that poor menstrual hygiene management costs some countries billions of dollars annually in lost productivity and education. The problem Stone Age women solved with moss and hide was not actually solved for everyone.

It was solved only for those who could afford the solution. Breaking the silence around menstruation took far longer than developing any product. Historians studying this subject, including Camilla Røstvik at the University of Agder in Norway, have noted that shame was so deeply rooted in Western cultures that as late as the twentieth century, many girls had no idea what was happening to them at their first period. They thought they were dying.

They thought they were being punished. No one had told them otherwise, because no one talked about it. The women who worked hardest to solve this problem throughout history, from the Stone Age gatherers who placed moss against their bodies, to the nurses in France who repurposed battlefield dressings, to Mary Kenner who filed patents from her living room, almost none received credit, compensation, or even recognition during their lifetimes. They found solutions anyway.

They always had.