I wish somebody would tell me what Cotex is. That was a bemused young American man at

the Diner Party in the 1920s. Nobody would, of course. Cotex was a code word,

an arcane reference to a secret man was not meant to know. Cotex was and remains one of the US's

most popular brands of menstrual pad. But to tell you the truth, I had never heard of it.

To share a Vosterole author of Under Raps, this is unsurprising. One of the defining

missions of menstrual products such as pads, tampons and cups says Vosterole is discretion.

The rest of the world simply isn't supposed to know whether a woman is menstruating or not.

Not for nothing was one early brand of tampons called Fibs. Not everyone approved the wink

implicit in that name. Fib is a polite word for lie. That was the complaint of one woman to

market researchers. Fibs suggests something nasty, secretive, unclean. If I wanted to buy tampons at

a store, I would not buy Fibs just because of the awful name. Nevertheless, women have had good

reason to keep quiet about menstruation. In 1868, the Vice President of the American Medical

Association noted that female physicians could not be trusted during their monthly infirmity.

Five years later, the American doctor and sex educator Edward Clark argued that girls

should be removed from the classroom during their periods. It was too demanding to expect them to

think and menstruate at the same time. The writer Eliza Duffy sharply responded that Dr. Clark

had no objection to women performing strenuous housework during their periods. Perhaps he just

wanted to deny education to girls. Perhaps indeed. It was hardly surprising that women preferred to

keep the details of their monthly cycle to themselves using home made approaches. But in the late

19th century, as home made products were replaced by manufactured commodities in other parts of

life, why not in this case? The challenge was how to advertise and sell a product that society

found unmentionable. The first recorded attempt to sell disposable pads date to the 1890s,

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