Opinion – Leandro Narloch: How capitalism changed menstruation

Just over a century ago, menstrual poverty was the norm. One hundred percent of women of menstruating age needed to make ends meet by improvising strips of cloth, pieces of cotton or leaves from trees – a situation that still afflicts millions of Brazilians today.

Attempts to sell disposable absorbent pads date back to the 19th century. Johnson & Johnson tried it in 1895, but it was unsuccessful: the product was expensive and inefficient; the women didn’t think it was worth leaving the old towels.

Then, during World War I, Kimberly-Clark discovered a type of softwood pulp that had five times the absorbent capacity and was half the price of cotton. It was the perfect material to stop soldiers’ bleeding and help women in those days.

In 1921, magazines began displaying advertisements for Kimberly-Clark’s Kotex, the first industrialized absorbent well accepted by American women.

Seeing the competitor dominate a new market, Johnson & Johnson followed. Hired psychologist Lillan Gilbreth to research pad use habits.

The psychologist and her team interviewed 1,038 women. They found that most of them found the Kotex flashy and inconvenient to carry — the packages were the size of shoeboxes. Many consumers cut the product to adjust the shape and size.

Gilbreth also suggested strategies for dealing with the problem of announcing something that related to a taboo.

To avoid embarrassing women to buy it, the packaging should be discreet and small, and the name should be neutral, not very descriptive. In 1927, based on this market research, Johnson & Johnson launched its bet: Modess.

Marketing has changed the way men and women look at menstruation. As historian Sharra Vostral recounts in her book “Under Wraps”, the ads projected the image that a tampon consumer was a modern woman, rich and free to move or travel.

Instead of a taboo that should be avoided at all costs, menstruation came to be seen as part of the hygiene routine of emancipated women.

“The care of intimate hygiene must match our progress and provide the comfort required by the active life of the modern woman”, says an advertisement in Folha da Manhã of August 6, 1939.

“With Modess you can go wherever you want and for as long as you like”, promises an advertisement dated July 2, 1939, the oldest I could find in the Folha Acervo.

The ad emphasizes that one word was enough for the woman to be understood at the pharmacy: “Simply ask for Modess”. It worked: for a long time the brand was synonymous with sanitary pads in Brazil.

The movie “Padman”, available on Netflix, tells an even more emotional free-enterprise story.

Indian businessman Arunachalam Muruganantham, after discovering that the country’s women used to use dirty cloths to contain menstruation, and dissatisfied with the high price of imported products, created a simple and cheap machine to manufacture sanitary pads.

Muruganantham has shipped its machines to thousands of villages, making it possible for women to produce and sell door-to-door sanitary napkins much cheaper than those made by the big brands.

This is the type of entrepreneur that could further reduce menstrual poverty in Brazil — but I already predict that too strict regulations would leave him out of the running here.

The industrialized absorbent story is the typical story of problem solving through competition among entrepreneurs.

It happened in a decentralized way and through trial and error; Its protagonists were entrepreneurs who, in order to beat competitors and ensure profits, innovated, waged a constant technological race, carried out market research and understood the needs of their customers.

No central authority or social planner has forced companies to do this.

Perhaps some of the protagonists of this story, almost all of them men, were feminists, but what moved most of them was not kindness or activism. It was the desire to fill your pocket with money by solving other people’s problems.