How Did ladies Deal With Their Periods?
The history of menstruation is a subject exclusively about women's experience, and we are sanitary products producer.We found that for too long women's history has been relegated to minor sub-interest, and that's a poor state of affairs.
Women have always had periods: how did they handle without Sanitary Pad?
According to the evidence suggests that even in the ancient, women were using what may seem similar to modern hygiene products. It's suggested that Egyptian women used a Tampon of papyrus fibres, while Roman women perhaps preferred a similar device woven from softer cotton. Frustratingly, these are theories founded in modern supposition rather than good evidence, but there's better proof for the widespread use of absorbent cotton pads that lined a Roman woman's linen knickers (subligaculum). For more on that, check out this other post by Dr Helen King.
Such "menstruous rags", as they are called in the Bible (in 1600s England they were called "clouts") continued in use for millennia, despite the fact that most Western women wandered about knickerless between the medieval era and the early 1800s, with the only exceptions having been the fashionable ladies of 16th Century Italy. If women really did spend a thousand years going commando, then an alternative method was to suspend such pads between their legs using a belted girdle around the waist. We know, for example, that Queen Elizabeth I of England owned three black silk girdles to keep her linen sanitary Towels, or "vallopes of Holland cloth", held in the right place. 1800s to 1900: Turn of the century – From rags to riches?
In European and North American societies through most of the 1800s, homemade menstrual cloths made out of flannel or woven fabric were the norm–think “on the rag.”
By the turn of the century, concerns about bacterial growth from inadequate cleaning of reusable products between wears created a new menstrual “hygiene” market. Between 1854 and 1915, twenty patents were taken out for menstrual products, including the first menstrual cups (generally made of aluminum or hard rubber), rubber pants (literally bloomers or underwear lined with rubber), and Lister’s towels (a precursor to maxi pads). Period pants made of rubber.
While products were marketed door-to-door by the 1870s, the first commercial products available for a mainstream audience came in the 1890s with the products appearing in catalogues. Menstrual tools including a “Ladies Elastic Doily Belt” (a silk and elastic belt to which you’d attach a pad) and “Antiseptic and Absorbent Pad” were introduced at around the same time.
In the 1890s, new tools like the Ladies Elastic Doily Belt started to appear in catalogues. You'd attach the pad to the silk and elastic belt.
