Gender, Health, and Popular Culture: Historical Perspectives

Advice to Adolescents: Menstrual Health and Menstrual Education Films, 1946–1982

Advice to Adolescents: Menstrual Health and Menstrual Education Films, 1946–1982 Sharra L.Vostral M any women born after 1940 in the United States hold vivid memories of menstrual education during their teenage years. Some had mothers or sisters to explain menstruation; others learned from their physical education instructors. Most, though, were part of a nation-wide audience subjected to menstrual education films shown at school. These films came in two basic varieties: those produced by organizations that promoted public health and wellness, and those sponsored by corporations that manufactured menstrual hygiene technologies and crafted a role in public health education.1 These two sponsor types had different goals that were apparent in the films’ narration , production, and acting. Health and wellness films stressed caring for the body, eating right, and bathing. Corporate films stressed these same points, as well as the importance of managing menstruation with multiple changes of a sanitary napkin, which, not coincidentally, happened to be manufactured by the companies sponsoring the films. To better understand the relationship of menstrual movies to menstrual technologies, I utilize the framework of scripting, which has multiple meanings in this context. In a very obvious sense, actors perform scenes for the films based upon a scripted text. The narrative of the film provides a literal and visual script instructing girls about menstrual health and how to use menstrual hygiene technologies. In historical terms, this type of source material is often referred to as prescriptive literature, in part because it emanates from an authoritative body to provide very specific instructions about how to act or think.2 It prescribes behaviour, but whether or not 47 The Transmission of Health Information 48 recipients follow the advice is altogether another question. Both Lisa Forman Cody and Lisa Featherstone discuss medical advice literature about pregnancy and childbirth in this volume. Featherstone makes the important point that this literature did not necessarily predict actions: patients maintained a degree of autonomy concerning decision making about their own medical care. In addition, this prescriptive literature is useful to assess idealized outcomes and to consider which stakeholders would benefit from certain belief systems or behaviours, and how women in turn shaped larger discussions with their own actions. Thus, examining the film script is one component for understanding the menstrual education genre. I also employ the framework of scripting in terms of analyzing technologies , and ultimately the portrayal of menstrual hygiene technologies, in these films. Though scripting is most often associated with text, it can be usefully applied to objects. Madeline Akrich, who works within the field of sociology of technology, argues that designers inscribe a kind of scenario, or technical conceptual map, into a technology or object concerning the ways it should be used and how it will evolve once out in the world.3 She calls this a “script” or “scenario” for the technology. Designers hold a “projected user” in mind, but a “real user” must eventually encounter the object. Akrich defines this relationship between object, meaning, designer, and real and imagined user as “de-scription.”4 Thus, built into the menstrual hygiene technologies are assumptions of how they should be used and subsequently how they must be “read” or even decoded by users. Because the knowledge of using menstrual hygiene technology is not innate, how to extract information from the technology—figuring out what the technology scripts to a user— must be learned. Menstrual hygiene print advertising and educational films spent a great deal of energy scripting information to young, potential users. Therefore, this chapter assumes a dual scripting of both language and object concerning menstrual hygiene technologies. This scripting was necessary for the domestication of menstrual hygiene technologies into American households, and in particular into teenagers’ hands, during the twentieth century.5 The concept of domestication helps to explain how a seemingly outrageous technology becomes normalized, and even rendered invisible, with daily use. Because of the potential for tampons to be understood in a negative light due to their phallic-like shape and their potential to break a virginal hymen, manufacturers worked to neutralize, tame, and domesticate them for adolescents’ use. Thus, advertising scripts, film scripts, and technological scripts denatured the potentially dangerous implications of young, sexualized women using menstrual hygiene by Advice to Adolescents Sharra L.Vostral 49 rendering the technologies inert. Analyzing the menstrual education film withinthecontextof popularcultureoffersameanstounfurltherelationships of adolescence, gender, menstrual health, and popular culture in the United States during the...