This page was created by Christopher R. Maden.  The last update was by SourceLab Editorial Board.

The Story of Menstruation (1946): Teaching Menstrual Hygiene in American Classrooms

About this Edition

In the spring of 2017, Saniya Lee Ghanoui, a graduate student in the Department of History at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, approached HIST 207: Publishing the Past to propose a digital edition of the 1946 Disney-animated educational film called The Story of Menstruation and its accompanying Kotex-produced pamphlet, Very Personally Yours.

During that semester, I worked with members of my group—Gianna Bendinelli, Emma Kelley, and Gerard Puczek—to select the source materials that would serve as the basis of our research. Ghanoui had a copy of the pamphlet, so we borrowed it from her and digitized it by using a flatbed KIC scanner. The images came out abnormally yellow, so we used a temperature white balance tool to get the images to look like the original pages. 

We ran into some roadblocks in deciding which version of the educational film was the most appropriate to use. Many versions were available on YouTube, and one version had also been uploaded to the Internet Archive. Our commentary focuses on the Internet Archive version (linked to here) because the Internet Archive has clearer guidelines on what can be uploaded.

 

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