In 1946, Walt Disney Productions created The Story of Menstruation, an educational film designed to teach young women about their cycles. This short animation, commissioned by the International Cello-Cotton Company (now Kimberly-Clark, the makers of Kotex), was shown to over 100 million students in U.S. health classes.
It was one of the first films to use the word vagina—yet, like many things from that era, it came with its fair share of outdated messaging.
Kotex itself had already been shaping period care since 1920, when Kimberly-Clark repurposed cellucotton, a material originally developed as a wartime bandage in World War I, into one of the first disposable menstrual pads. With the rise of commercial menstrual products came a push to educate (and market to) young women.
While the film was progressive for its time, normalizing menstruation in schools, it also reinforced the societal pressures placed on women’s bodies. It advised girls to stay fresh, avoid emotional upset, and most infamously, to just smile through their cycles.
The underlying message? Menstruation should be discreet, controlled, and, above all, pleasant.
Looking back, this film is both a fascinating relic of mid-20th-century menstrual education and a reminder of how far we've come. Today, discussions around menstruation are shifting—moving beyond shame and silence toward empowerment and body literacy. But the echoes of past messaging still linger in modern period advertising, where cleanliness and concealment are often emphasized over natural body wisdom.
So, what do you think?
Love, Danielle xx
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