Who invented pads for the girls menstruation?

Answer 1

Menstrual pads have been mentioned as early as in the (10th century) Suda, where Hypatia was said to have thrown her "feminine rags" at an admirer in an attempt to turn him off.

Through the ages women have used different forms of menstrual protection. The Museum of menstruation has articles and photos of some early forms of menstrual protection. Including among other things, knitted pads, and menstrual aprons. Women often used strips of folded old cloth (rags) to catch their menstrual blood, which is why the term "rags" was used to refer to menstruation.

Disposable menstrual pads appear to have been first commercially available from around 1895 through Curads and Hartmann's. Disposable pads had their start with nurses using their wood pulp bandages to catch their menstrual flow, creating a pad that was made from easily obtainable materials and inexpensive enough to throw away after use. Products like the Johnson & Johnson Lister's Towel failed because of a lack of publicity. Unlike today, the subject of menstruation was not as widely discussed or advertised. One advertising company addressed this, by allowing women to place money into a box (so that the woman would not have to speak to the clerk) and take a box of Kotex pads from the counter themselves. Kotex would appear to be the first of these early disposable menstrual pads to really take off. Several of the first disposable pad manufacturers were also manufacturers of bandages, which could give an indication of what these products were like.

Until disposable sanitary pads were created, all women used some form of cloth or reusable pad to collect menstrual blood. Even after they were commercially available, for several years they were too expensive for many women to afford. It took many years for disposable menstrual pads to become commonplace, but since then in most areas of the industrialised world, their use became almost exclusive.

Cloth menstrual pads made a comeback around the 1970s, with their popularity increasing in the late eighties and early nineties.

Source(s):