When Were Sanitary Pads Invented? A Brief History

The first commercially sold disposable sanitary pads appeared in the 1880s, but the product as we know it today took about a century of incremental changes to reach its current form. Before that, people who menstruated relied on whatever absorbent materials they could find or fashion by hand. The story of the sanitary pad is less a single invention moment and more a long arc stretching from rags and plant fibers to adhesive-backed, superabsorbent products sold in every pharmacy on earth.

What People Used Before Commercial Pads

For most of human history, menstrual management was a private, improvised affair. Women used rags, strips of old clothing, moss, grass, animal skins, and even papyrus depending on what was locally available. In many parts of the world, these homemade solutions persisted well into the twentieth century and, in some developing countries, continue today, often resulting in discomfort and increased risk of infection.¹ The English expression “on the rag” is a relic of this era, referring literally to the cloth strips women pinned to their undergarments or held in place with makeshift belts.

These methods were far from ideal. Rags needed constant washing and drying, which was difficult to do discreetly in societies where menstruation was deeply stigmatized. In cold or humid climates, drying cloth thoroughly was a challenge in itself, and damp fabric against the skin invited bacterial growth. There was no standard product to buy, so each person’s experience depended on what they could access and afford. Wealthier women in Europe might have purpose-made linen cloths; poorer women used whatever scraps they had. The lack of a reliable, hygienic option shaped everything from how freely women could move in public to how often they missed school or work.

The First Commercial Products in the Late 1800s

The idea of a manufactured, disposable menstrual product emerged alongside the broader hygiene movement of the Victorian era. In 1888, the British company Southall’s began selling what is generally considered one of the first commercially available sanitary pads, marketed as “Southall’s Sanitary Towels.” In the United States, Johnson & Johnson introduced Lister’s Towels in 1896, a gauze-and-cotton pad designed to be disposable. Around this same period, various inventors filed patents for menstrual support devices, catamenial sacks, and absorbent pads, reflecting a flurry of experimentation with different designs.

These early products largely flopped commercially. The problem was not technology but culture. Menstruation was considered so unspeakable that women were embarrassed to ask a shopkeeper for the product, and retailers were reluctant to display it. Johnson & Johnson quietly discontinued Lister’s Towels after poor sales. For the next two decades, most women continued making their own pads at home from cotton, gauze, or old fabric, not because manufactured options did not exist, but because buying them felt impossible.

World War I and the Kotex Breakthrough

The turning point came from an unexpected place: battlefield medicine. During World War I, the American company Kimberly-Clark developed a material called Cellucotton, a highly absorbent wood-pulp-based substitute for surgical cotton, which was in short supply. Red Cross nurses at field hospitals quickly discovered that Cellucotton worked far better than anything they had previously used for menstrual absorption. After the war ended in 1918, Kimberly-Clark found itself with warehouses full of surplus Cellucotton and no military contracts to fill.

In 1920, the company repurposed the material into a consumer product and launched Kotex, a name derived from “cotton-like texture.” This time, the marketing challenge was tackled head-on. Kimberly-Clark convinced stores to set up self-service counters where women could pick up a box of Kotex and leave money in a dish without having to speak to anyone. Advertisements appeared in women’s magazines, carefully using euphemisms and focusing on “comfort” and “protection” rather than mentioning menstruation directly. The strategy worked. By the mid-1920s, Kotex had become a household name, and for the first time, large numbers of women were switching from homemade rags to a manufactured disposable pad.

Other companies followed. In 1927, Johnson & Johnson re-entered the market with Modess, which competed directly with Kotex for decades. The commercial menstrual product industry had been born, though the products themselves still required a separate elastic belt or pins to hold them in place, since adhesive technology had not yet been applied to pads.

The Belt Era and the Shift to Adhesive Strips

From the 1920s through the early 1970s, disposable pads were worn with a sanitary belt, an elastic strap that looped around the waist with clips or tabs at the front and back to hold the pad in position. The system was functional but clunky. The belt could shift, the tabs could come undone, and the whole contraption was uncomfortable under clothing. Generations of women dealt with this design simply because nothing better existed.

The real game-changer arrived in 1969, when the first self-adhesive sanitary pad was introduced. Instead of clips and belts, the pad had a strip of adhesive on its underside that stuck directly to underwear. Stayfree, made by Personal Products Company (later acquired by Johnson & Johnson), was among the first major brands to market this design. By the mid-1970s, the belt was essentially dead. The adhesive pad was simpler, more discreet, and more comfortable, and it transformed what had been a multi-piece system into a single product you could apply in seconds.

Wings came next. In the 1980s, manufacturers added side flaps that folded over the edges of underwear, preventing leaks and keeping the pad more securely in place. This seemingly minor addition made a noticeable practical difference, particularly during physical activity, and “with wings” became a standard product feature.

Superabsorbent Polymers and Modern Materials

The other major material shift happened in the 1980s and 1990s with the introduction of superabsorbent polymers, or SAPs. These are synthetic granules that can absorb many times their own weight in liquid and lock it into a gel, keeping the surface of the pad feeling dry. SAPs are incorporated into the core of modern disposable pads to dramatically increase absorption capacity without adding bulk.² Before SAPs, pads relied solely on layers of cotton, wood pulp, and rayon for absorption, which meant thicker, bulkier products that still felt wet against the skin.

The modern disposable pad is a surprisingly engineered product. A typical design has four functional layers: a soft topsheet that sits against the body (usually made of polypropylene or a similar nonwoven material), an absorbent core containing wood pulp blended with SAP granules, a distribution layer that spreads fluid evenly across the core, and a waterproof backsheet to prevent leaks. Each layer serves a distinct purpose, and the combination explains why today’s ultra-thin pads can absorb significantly more than the bulky pads of the 1960s.

Research continues to push the materials forward. Recent work on bio-based superabsorbent polymers made from natural fibers has shown that these alternatives can match or exceed the absorption and retention performance of conventional petroleum-based SAPs, which could open the door to pads that work just as well but break down in the environment.³

How Advertising Shaped the Product’s Image

The history of sanitary pads is inseparable from the history of how they were marketed, because the marketing itself determined whether anyone would buy them. From the earliest Kotex advertisements in the 1920s through television commercials well into the 2000s, the overwhelming strategy was concealment. Ads emphasized discretion, thinness, and the promise that no one would know you were menstruating. Blue liquid stood in for blood in demonstrations. Euphemisms like “that time of the month” or “feminine protection” avoided naming the biological process the product was designed for.

This approach reflected and reinforced a broader cultural stigma. Throughout the twentieth century, menstrual product advertising in Britain and the United States framed menstruation primarily as something to hide, treating visible evidence of a period as a social failure rather than a normal bodily function. The stigma was self-reinforcing: the more advertisers treated menstruation as unspeakable, the more consumers internalized the idea that it was something to be ashamed of, which in turn made them responsive to products marketed on the promise of invisibility.

The tone has shifted in recent years. Several brands have begun using red liquid instead of blue in their ads, showing blood on underwear, and speaking about periods in direct language. Whether these campaigns represent a genuine cultural shift or simply a new marketing strategy aimed at younger consumers who value authenticity is debatable, but the contrast with a century of euphemism is striking.

The Environmental Cost of Disposability

A person who menstruates from roughly age 12 to 50 will use somewhere in the range of 5,000 to 15,000 disposable pads or tampons over their lifetime, depending on flow, product preference, and cycle regularity. Virtually all of those end up in landfills. Conventional disposable pads contain plastic in the backsheet, the topsheet, and often the packaging. These components are not biodegradable and contribute to plastic waste that persists in the environment for centuries. Concerns have also been raised about chemicals found in some pads, including phthalates and other compounds considered potentially harmful to the reproductive system.¹

This is a relatively new conversation. For most of the twentieth century, disposability was the selling point, the entire reason commercial pads existed was so that women would not have to wash and reuse cloth. The environmental cost simply was not part of the equation. It was only as awareness of plastic pollution grew in the 2000s and 2010s that the menstrual product industry began facing serious questions about sustainability.

The push toward biodegradable and bio-based materials described earlier in this article is one response. Others include pads made from organic cotton without synthetic top layers, compostable packaging, and products designed specifically for industrial composting facilities. None of these have yet reached the scale of conventional disposable pads, but the direction of the industry is clear.

The Return of Reusable Products

In a historical irony, the most ancient approach to menstrual care, using washable cloth, has circled back into the mainstream. Modern reusable pads are nothing like the rags of earlier centuries. They are purpose-made products with absorbent cores, waterproof backing, and snap closures that attach to underwear. Newer designs use silicone or polyester-based materials that contain menstrual blood within the fabric’s structure and can be washed, dried with a towel, and reused almost immediately.⁴

The market has expanded beyond cloth pads to include menstrual cups, discs, and period underwear with built-in absorbent layers. A survey of young people in Australia found that about 37% had used a reusable menstrual product during their most recent period, with period underwear being the most popular choice, followed by menstrual cups and reusable pads.⁵ That study reflected a specific population in a high-income country, and globally, disposable pads still dominate by a wide margin. But in markets where environmental awareness and product variety are high, reusables have carved out a real share.

The appeal is partly environmental and partly economic. A menstrual cup can last several years, and a set of reusable pads can last through hundreds of wash cycles. Over time, the upfront cost is offset by not buying disposables every month. In lower-income settings, reusable pads have also been promoted as a way to ensure consistent access to menstrual products where disposables may be too expensive or inconsistently available.

Period Poverty and the Tax Question

For all the innovation in materials and design, the most basic problem has never been technological. It has been economic. Menstrual products cost money, and for people living in poverty, that cost can be a genuine barrier to managing their periods with dignity. The term “period poverty” describes the situation where someone cannot afford adequate menstrual products, and it is not limited to developing countries. It exists in wealthy nations too, affecting people experiencing homelessness, students, and low-income families.

One piece of the affordability puzzle is taxation. In many countries, menstrual products are taxed as general consumer goods or even as luxury items, adding to their cost. Since 2012, ten countries and territories in the Americas alone have eliminated taxation on menstrual products, including Canada, Colombia, Mexico, and Jamaica. Despite that progress, as of 2022, menstrual product taxes were still applied in about 63% of locations in the Americas, with tax rates ranging from 1% in Costa Rica to 22% in Uruguay. On average, a woman of reproductive age in the Americas faced a menstrual product tax rate of about 6% in 2022.⁶

The push to eliminate these taxes, sometimes called the “tampon tax” campaign, has gained momentum in countries around the world. The United Kingdom eliminated its VAT on menstrual products in 2021 after years of advocacy. Australia did the same in 2019. Scotland went further in 2022, becoming the first country to make period products free in all public buildings, including schools and universities. These moves acknowledge something that the century-long history of sanitary pads makes clear: access to menstrual products is not a luxury but a basic need, and the history of the pad is ultimately a story about who gets to participate fully in public life.

What Changed and What Has Not

If you compare a modern ultra-thin pad to the bulky Cellucotton product that Kotex sold in the 1920s, the material difference is enormous. The modern pad is thinner, lighter, vastly more absorbent, and stays in place with adhesive instead of a belt. Superabsorbent polymers keep the surface dry. Wings prevent side leaks. Individual packaging allows discreet carrying. Every physical aspect of the product has improved.

What has changed more slowly is the cultural infrastructure around menstruation. Many schools still lack adequate facilities for changing menstrual products. Workplace policies rarely account for menstrual health. In some parts of the world, menstruating people are still isolated in huts or excluded from kitchens and temples. The technology has leapt forward; the social norms have shuffled along behind it. The gap between what the product can do and what society allows people to do comfortably while using it is the unfinished chapter of this particular history.