Via Feministing, a vintage print ad letting you know what will happen to your marriage if you don’t take care of yourself down there.
Via Feministing, a vintage print ad letting you know what will happen to your marriage if you don’t take care of yourself down there.
blech. Douches. What’s even worse is putting Lysol up there. (!)
I wonder if the Lysol chemicals were as harsh as they are today.
9 out of 10 doctors also recommended smoking a Lucky Strike after douching with Lysol back then. I just wasn’t meant for these times.
When I was younger we had an exchange student from Germany stay with us for a couple months. When she left, she forgot a bottle of something in the bathroom she had been using. It was called Dusch-das. My German wasn’t very good, so I figured Dusch was German for Douche. Apparently it’s just shower gel. Stupid high school german didn’t teach me shit about real life.
That “Dusch” meant “Shower” was a source of great amusement in my high school German class IIRC.
Gosh, I missed this until I saw it in the comments thread. I am so excited someone put up this ad as it is one I often have to deal with. Plus, it’s just so fascinating!
I often assign students in my women’s history and sexuality studies classes a small paper where they find and analyze old magazine ads that were aimed at women. Someone always finds the Lysol ads (they were used between the 20s and 40s, at least), and the students invariable chalk them up to the horrors of sexism and the burdens of women to keep themselves–every part of themselves–”clean” and “pure” and “beautiful” (etc.) for the men who treat them only as possessions. It’s not an incorrect analysis, but there was more to these ads than that. And I get the fun job of explaining why.
If you read between the lines and extrapolate just a bit, you can glean from the ads that they were actually promoting Lysol as a form of birth control, perhaps even as an abortifacient, back when discussions of such things were legally sanctioned by such things as Comstock laws, the same laws that forced b.c. advocate Margaret Sanger to flee the US for England to avoid felony charges of “pornography” for her attempts to educate women about how to control their own bodies and avoid unwanted pregnancies.
Sadly, many women were harmed by the use of the product for such purposes. And yes, Kate, Lysol was indeed as strong a disinfectant back then as you fear. But it does say something about how desperate some women were to control their fertility before it was legally possible for them to do so with safer methods.
Wow, KS, that’s fascinating. I am now starting to understand the basis of the feminist movement. I come from a place, where birth control has been available and encouraged for the longest time. Culturally, we have always had the emphasis on a woman’s ability to keep a household, have children, make a living, have a degree and still look beautiful, yet it was considered crude and pugnacious to speak on feminine issues in public and juxtapose the women’s status with anything lesser that the men’s. Chauvinism has always been deemed bad manners. Therefore, I struggled with the understanding of the matter in terms of casting some of the essential things (like cooking and changing diapers) off by the American society. Thanks, Lisa and KS! It all makes sense to me now.
I really don quite understand that ad. Lysol treats VD or something?
Shout out to y’all from Iceland!
Douches don’t treat anything. The women who use them think that they need to rinse out the vagina, just like one would wash one’s hands.
This particular ad is saying, “rinse your va-jay-jay to make it smell better to make you more appealing to your husband.” The harm in doing so (as discussed in the comments under the ad posting) is that the vagina doesn’t really need rinsing; in fact, rinsing it really just hurts it.
How about considering that the onus the ad seems to place on women to spice up the marriage (or sex life in the marriage) suggests that women were falling back on late-19th century practices of abstinence to avoid unwanted pregnancies? And no one enjoyed that! Lysol provided women with a means (albeit a dangerous, sometimes deadly, one) to engage in sex w/o the risk of pregnancy. It may not have been so much about women’s bodies needing to be cleaned and sanitized for hygienic reasons as for making their bodies inhospitable to sperm, fertilization, implantation, etc. Kinda like today’s bcp… But, to market the product FOR THIS PURPOSE, they had to covertly fly under the radar of the (male) censors.
Imagine how these ads must have validated the word-of-mouth home “remedies” women discussed among themselves? Doesn’t it seem like dangerous alchemy couched in psycho-sexual and health rhetoric?
ks looks to have it right — according to MedicineNet,
Dave, right back at you!!! Iceland, it must be beautiful!!!
Modesto: Thanks for the googlidation.
Dave: Is there still ice in Iceland? (Please say yes.) And are you there just because NYC isn’t cold enough for you, or for some greater purpose? I’ve not known anyone to visit Iceland so I know nothing about it, except it produced Bjork, which suggests it must at least be an obscure place.