July 31, 2021

History of Menstruation: From Papyrus to Plastic-Free Pads

The history of menstruation is mostly a history of making do. For thousands of years women managed their periods with wool, cloth, moss and whatever else was soft and absorbent, then washed it and used it again. Disposable pads only appeared in the late 1800s, adhesive strips only in the 1970s, and the plastic most pads are made of today is younger than many of the women reading this. Here is the story in six chapters, ending with the current turn back towards plant fibres.

Ancient answers: wool, papyrus and moss

Written records from the ancient world say very little about periods, mostly because the people writing were men. What survives is fragments and later retellings, so the details should be held loosely.

Egyptian women are often said to have used softened papyrus, and Greek sources mention lint wrapped around small pieces of wood as an internal absorbent. Roman women are usually credited with wool pads. Across Africa, Asia and the Americas, communities used what grew nearby: moss, grass, bark fibre, soft animal skins. In many places women simply bled into their clothing, and layers of skirts did the rest.

The word itself is a clue to how people thought. "Menstruation" comes from the Latin for "monthly", and many languages built their word for it from "month" or "moon". Menstrual blood was treated as powerful, sometimes sacred, often dangerous. Classical writers claimed it could sour wine or blunt a blade. Traces of these beliefs survive in the euphemisms we still use, collected in our post on slang words and names for periods.

Medieval and early modern Europe: rags and remedies

Through the Middle Ages the standard solution was cloth. Strips of linen or wool were folded, worn between the legs, washed and reused; "on the rag" is a direct descendant. Women who could afford it scented themselves with herbs to mask any smell.

Religious teaching in Europe treated menstruation as unclean, and women were sometimes barred from church during their periods. Medical writing blamed the womb for everything from mood to madness. The one useful development was practical: by the 1700s, better-off women were sewing washable pads and holding them in place with tapes tied around the waist, an early version of the belt that would dominate the next two centuries.

The 1800s: belts, aprons and the first disposables

The nineteenth century industrialised cloth, and period care with it. Women in Europe and North America wore "sanitary aprons" of rubberised fabric to protect their skirts, and washable pads clipped to a belt worn under the clothes. Catalogues sold them in language so vague a modern reader might not guess what the product was.

The first commercial disposable pads appeared in the 1880s and 1890s, made of cotton wool wrapped in gauze. They largely failed. Advertising them openly was unthinkable, and many women were too embarrassed to ask a male shop assistant for them. The technology existed a full generation before society allowed it to sell.

The 1920s: mass-market pads and the marketing of discretion

The First World War changed the material. Nurses found that a highly absorbent wood-pulp bandage, developed because cotton was scarce, worked well for periods. After the war the manufacturer turned it into a pad, and by the early 1920s the first widely marketed disposable sanitary napkins were on sale.

Selling them required a trick. Shops placed the boxes on the counter beside a jar so a woman could leave her money and take a box without speaking to anyone. Adverts never showed the product, never said "blood", and promised above all that nobody would know. This is the moment the modern taboo of discretion was manufactured. Period care became a product whose main selling point was invisibility, and that framing stuck for a hundred years.

Tampons with applicators were patented in the early 1930s, and menstrual cups were invented in the same decade, though cups would not find a market for another sixty years. The belt hung on. Improved designs, including one patented in the 1950s by an African American inventor whose work was ignored for years because of her race, made belts more comfortable, but women were still pinning pads to elastic well into the 1970s.

The 1970s to the 2000s: adhesive strips and the age of plastic

The biggest convenience leap came in the early 1970s: an adhesive strip on the back of the pad. Belts vanished within a decade. Wings followed in the 1980s, and in the 1990s superabsorbent polymer gels made ultrathin pads possible.

Each of these steps was made of plastic. The adhesive, the leak-proof back sheet, the soft "dry-weave" top sheet, the absorbent gel, the wrapper: a typical late-1990s pad had become a mostly synthetic product that does not break down in landfill. Plastic also traps heat and moisture against the skin, which anyone who has worn one through a Dubai summer will recognise. Nobody set out to make pads worse for skin or the planet; each layer solved a real problem, and the cumulative cost only became visible later.

Now: back to plant fibres, with better engineering

The current chapter is an unwinding of that plastic. Menstrual cups finally became mainstream in the 2010s. Period underwear arrived. And disposable pads began returning to the natural fibres women used for millennia, this time with modern engineering: bamboo viscose top sheets that breathe and wick, chlorine-free pulp cores, and back sheets made from corn starch instead of polyethylene, so the whole pad can biodegrade. LiZZOM was founded in Dubai in 2019 to make exactly this kind of pad for the UAE; our organic thick night pads are, in a sense, a wool pad's great-great-granddaughter with a far better design.

The marketing is changing too. A century after the money jar on the counter, brands are saying the word "period" out loud, and packaging is plain because there is nothing to hide rather than because there is something to hide. If you are weighing the modern options, our comparison of sustainable period products sets out cups, reusable pads and plant-based disposables side by side, and our guide to biodegradable pads in the UAE explains what happens to a plant-fibre pad after you bin it.

What history teaches a girl having her first period

Two things. First, every woman who ever lived dealt with this, mostly without running water, painkillers or a decent pad, and got on with her life. Second, the shame around periods is not ancient or natural; much of it was built in living memory by people trying to sell products quietly. Both are worth saying out loud to a daughter, and our first period guide for UAE parents can help with the rest of the conversation.

Frequently asked questions

What did women use for periods before pads?

Folded cloth, mainly. Linen or wool rags were worn, washed and reused for most of recorded history. Earlier and in other regions, women used softened papyrus, moss, grass, bark fibre or wool, and many simply bled into layered clothing. Washable cloth pads held by a waist belt were common from the 1700s until the 1970s.

When were disposable sanitary pads invented?

The first commercial disposables appeared in the 1880s and 1890s but sold poorly because they could not be advertised. The first mass-market pads, made from absorbent wood-pulp bandage material developed during the First World War, launched in the early 1920s. Adhesive-backed pads that did not need a belt arrived in the early 1970s.

Why were period products marketed as "discreet"?

Because in the 1920s the only way to sell them was to promise nobody would know. Shops let women pay silently at the counter, and adverts avoided the product, the blood and the word. Discretion became the industry's central message for decades, and that marketing did as much as any older belief to make periods feel shameful.

When did pads become plastic?

Gradually, between the 1970s and the 1990s. The adhesive strip, the leak-proof back sheet, the dry-feel top sheet, wings and superabsorbent gel each added a synthetic layer, so that a typical pad by the late 1990s was mostly plastic. The move back towards bamboo, cotton and corn-starch materials began in earnest in the 2010s.

Join the newest chapter: shop LiZZOM plant-fibre pads, delivered across the UAE.