As early as 1910, public schools in the United States began to incorporate educational films into their curricula. World War I caused this new method of instruction to gain momentum by adapting it for a new subject: health education. The educational film subgenre aimed to inform soldiers about certain diseases, such as malaria and venereal disease, and it continued to be regarded as a useful teaching tool after the war.

Educational films were also used in World War II when Walt Disney Productions became involved in their making. The company dedicated much of its resources to films for training programs of the Army, the Navy, and the Air Force. However, the war also brought financial difficulties to the company, and, as the conflict ended, Disney had to figure out a way to counter its limited cash flow. Because of its experience with governmental films, the studio decided to branch out to animated industrial and educational films by establishing an Educational and Industrial Film Division in 1944 and by taking on corporate clients like General Motors, among others. During that time, for example, Disney worked with the Westinghouse Electric Corporation to produce The Dawn of Better Living and with Johnson & Johnson to produce Bathing Time for Baby.

Although money might have been the biggest factor behind the division’s creation, Walt Disney himself regarded animated films as potentially revolutionary for public education. In the Summer 1945 issue of Public Opinion Quarterly, he wrote, “The generation that used the motion picture to help train its fighters and its workers into the mightiest nation in history, is not apt to ignore the motion picture as an essential tool in the labor of enlightenment, civilization and peace.”

A year after the division’s creation, Disney gained the International Cellucotton Products Company, a branch of the Kimberly-Clark Corporation, as a client. The company wanted new ways to market its Kotex products to young women because encouraging women’s potential brand loyalty could increase revenue. Kimberly-Clark’s advertising agency, Foote, Cone and Belding, devised an educational film about menstruation and approached Disney with the idea.

A certain mystery accompanies the production of the animated film, which was called The Story of Menstruation, because no one has ever been officially credited with the making of it. However, it is known that the advertising agency sent its newly hired educational program director, Leah Anderson, to work in close collaboration with Disney at the studio. In 1945, Disney produced the first script drafts of the animated film and hired gynecologist Elizabeth Mason Hohl as a consultant to ensure the film was scientifically accurate. Disney adopted the final draft for The Story of Menstruation in June 1945, conducted test screenings with high school audiences later that year, and released the film to high school teachers in 1946.

Teachers did not immediately trust The Story of Menstruation because the film was commercially sponsored and dealt with a subject that was not readily included in health curricula at the time. To get the animated film into classrooms, Kimberly-Clark put together an entire menstrual education program around it. The program included Very Personally Yours, a pamphlet that repeated information and advice from the film. It was to be distributed to girls as take-home reference material. The pamphlet featured a calendar on one of its last pages so that girls could track their periods. Kimberly-Clark also created a teaching guide and a menstrual chart for instructor use.

The corporation responded to teachers’ apprehension by attending education conventions and placing advertisements in education journals like Educational Screen. The advertisements, which also included mail-in coupons, emphasized that the film was free for short-term loans and that it came with the pamphlet, the teaching guide, and the menstrual chart.

The Story of Menstruation also began to receive more positive reviews in education journals. A review in the April 1947 edition of Educational Screen touched on how the film could make teaching the “hard-to-handle” subject of menstruation easier: “This film has been built around the reasoning that substituting accurate knowledge for fear and mystery will help to create a healthy attitude toward menstruation. It should help to banish girl-to-girl superstitions and misconceptions. It should serve to minimize the mental handicap which hampers many girls during their periods.”

As an educational tool, the film addressed many misconceptions about menstruation that were common in the United States. In the 1910s, for example, doctors instructed women to treat menstruation as an approaching illness. Many women during that time were also afraid to bathe, to exercise, and to live out their lives normally while experiencing their periods. In addition to those misconceptions, a taboo of silence had historically accompanied the topic of menstruation. Many mothers did not discuss the topic with their daughters, and, as a result, many girls did not know much about it before or after their periods began.

However, social attitudes toward discussing menstruation began to change following the rise of venereal diseases during World War I, which caused “physicians, social workers, and teachers [to embark] on a crusade to promote the moral health of American youth, a crusade in which many aspects of sexuality, including menarche and menstruation, were sanitized and openly discussed.” Kimberly-Clark recognized this and marketed the film as an educational tool.

The “open discussion” of menstruation in the 1940s focused mostly on personal hygiene. The Story of Menstruation was made as a film that addressed the “cleanliness issue” of menstruation and minimized its connection to reproduction. A note in the September 1948 edition of the Saturday Review of Literature described the animation as “not a film about sex; it is one about physiology. Entirely animated in color, and narrated with an air of good cheer which dispels any expected tension, here is an interesting and accurate film specifically designed for meeting curriculum needs.”

Many reviews addressed teachers’ apprehension. The Saturday Review of Literature even noted that the film had been “singled out for a special award at the Film Festival in Brussels, Belgium,” giving an air of prestige to the film. The Story of Menstruation’s good reputation was further solidified when the magazine Good Housekeeping gave the film its “Seal of Approval.”

Upon releasing The Story of Menstruation in 1946, Kimberly-Clark recommended in its teaching guide that the film be shown in seventh and eighth grade; however, by 1957, the corporation urged schools to show the film in fifth grade. An edition of Kimberly-Clark’s A Practical Guide for Teaching Menstrual Hygiene from 1961 included two sets of suggested lesson plans for teachers: one aimed at fourth to sixth graders and another aimed at junior and senior high school girls.

The lesson plans aimed at the younger students did not include the pamphlet Very Personally Yours; instead, they included what was considered a more age-appropriate pamphlet, You’re a Young Lady Now. The pamphlet appears to have been created in 1952, years after The Story of Menstruation was made. The variety of lesson plans in A Practical Guide for Teaching Menstrual Hygiene included the same tasks but put them in different orders to fit various styles of teaching. Those tasks fell under the categories of “show film,” “demonstration kit,” “booklet,” “menstrual physiology chart,” and “questions and discussions.”

It was up to individual teachers to present the menstrual education program in the way they saw fit for their students. In some schools, the boys were sent to play outside while the girls stayed in the classroom to watch The Story of Menstruation. On the day when the film was shown in class, mothers were invited to preview the film before their daughters saw it, or they could attend the screening with their daughters. After the screening, the teacher or a school nurse would often discuss the contents of the film with the students and then hand out sanitary napkins.

By the 1950s, many school health guides recommended the showing of the film as part of official menstrual education. The Story of Menstruation was shown in classrooms from 1946 to around 1984, when Kimberly-Clark retired the film and replaced it with a new menstruation-related educational film, Julie’s Story. After almost four decades, more than 100 million young women had viewed The Story of Menstruation.

Today, multiple versions of the film have been uploaded to YouTube and to the Internet Archive. Because Disney’s work under the Educational and Industrial Film Division was produced for corporations, many of the projects were in the control of the companies that commissioned them and ultimately ended up in the public domain. A common misconception is that The Story of Menstruation is one of those films. However, that is not the case. Disney first registered the film with the Library of Congress Copyright Office in November 1946 and then renewed the copyright in December 1973; therefore, the animation is not in the public domain.

What makes the question of which company has control over the film more confusing is that, in 2011, sixty-five years after the release of The Story of Menstruation, Kotex worked with Disney Family to update the film. In a Kotex press release, which includes a dead link to the film, the company wrote that this updated version “features [gynecologist] Dr. [Lissa] Rankin with other parenting experts in a discussion about preparing for the first period conversation and how committing to picking a day to talk to your daughter can ease apprehension around the discussion.” It is unclear whether the 2011 version is the same as the 1946 version, but with added content, or whether it contains only the conversation between the gynecologist and the other parenting experts. Besides the press release, not much information is found online about Kimberly-Clark’s motivation to update the film and about how the new version was received.

Either way, The Story of Menstruation is an important film because it was the first commercially sponsored educational film dealing with the topic of menstruation in the United States. In 2015, the Library of Congress selected the film to be named to its National Film Registry, which identifies “motion pictures that deserve to be preserved because of their cultural, historic or aesthetic importance.”

1. Larry Cuban, “Film and Radio: The Promise of Bringing the World into the Classroom,” in Teachers and Machines: The Classroom Use of Technology Since 1920 (New York: Teachers College Press, 1986), 12. ↵
2. Bob Cruz, Jr., “Paging Dr. Disney: Health Education Films, 1922-1973,” in Learning from Mickey, Donald and Walt: Essays on Disney’s Edutainment Films, ed. A. Bowdoin Van Riper (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2011), 127. ↵
3. Walt Disney, “Mickey as Professor,” Public Opinion Quarterly, no. 9 (Summer 1945): 120. ↵
4. Cruz, “Paging Dr. Disney,” 127-128. ↵
5. Steven Watts, The Magic Kingdom: Walt Disney and the American Way of Life (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2001), 261. ↵
6. Watts, The Magic Kingdom, 261. ↵
7. Disney, “Mickey as Professor,” 125. ↵
8. Cruz, “Paging Dr. Disney,” 134. ↵
9. Margot Elizabeth Kennard, “The Corporation in the Classroom: The Struggles Over Meanings of Menstrual Education in Sponsored Films, 1947-1983” (Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1989), 77. ↵
10. Fairfax M. Cone, With All Its Faults: A Candid Account of Forty Years in Advertising (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 1969), 183. ↵
11. Cruz, “Paging Dr. Disney,” 127-136. ↵
12. Kennard, “The Corporation in the Classroom,” 169. ↵
13. Thomas Heinrich and Bob Batchelor, Kotex, Kleenex, Huggies: Kimberly-Clark and the Consumer Revolution in American Business (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2004), 122. ↵
14. Heinrich and Batchelor, Kotex, Kleenex, Huggies, 123. ↵
15. Kennard, “The Corporation in the Classroom,” 117. ↵
16. Very Personally Yours (Chicago: International Cellucotton Products Company, 1948). ↵
17. A Practical Guide for Teaching Menstrual Hygiene (Neenah, WI: Kimberly-Clark Educational Department, 1961). ↵
18. Kennard, “The Corporation in the Classroom,” 117-118. ↵
19. Ibid., 118. ↵
20. “New Biology Film Helps Girls,” review of The Story of Menstruation, by Walt Disney Productions, Educational Screen, April 1947. ↵
21. Caroline Latimer, Girl and Woman: A Book for Mothers and Daughters (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1909), 113. ↵
22. Kennard, “The Corporation in the Classroom,” 105. ↵
23. Ibid.,126. ↵
24. Joan Jacobs Brumberg, The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls (New York: Random House, 1997), 45-46.↵
25. Kennard, “The Corporation in the Classroom,” 121. ↵
26. Brumberg, The Body Project, 31. ↵
27. “The Film Forum,” review of The Story of Menstruation, by Walt Disney Productions, Saturday Review of Literature, September 1948. ↵
28. “The Film Forum,” Saturday Review of Literature. ↵
29. Sharra L. Vostral, Under Wraps: A History of Menstrual Hygiene Technology (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2008), 122. ↵
30. Lara Freidenfelds, Menstruation in Twentieth-Century America (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), 54-55. ↵
31. Kimberly-Clark, A Practical Guide. ↵
32. Ibid. ↵
33. Ibid. ↵
34. Lynn Peril, Pink Think: Becoming a Woman in Many Uneasy Lessons (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2002), 83. ↵
35. Kennard, “The Corporation in the Classroom,” 121. ↵
36. Heinrich and Batchelor, Kotex, Kleenex, Huggies, 123. ↵
37. Sharra L. Vostral, “Advice to Adolescents: Menstrual Health and Menstrual Education Films, 1946-1982,” in Gender, Health, and Popular Culture: Historical Perspectives, ed. Cheryl Krasnick Warsh (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2011), 57. ↵
38. Kennard, “The Corporation in the Classroom,” 121. ↵
39. Margot Kennard, “Producing Sponsored Films on Menstruation: The Struggle over Meaning,” in The Ideology of Images in Educational Media: Hidden Curriculums in the Classroom, ed. Elizabeth Ellsworth and Mariamne H. Whatley (New York: Teachers College Press, 1990), 67. ↵
40. Cruz, “Paging Dr. Disney,” 127-128. ↵
41. Kotex, “The Kotex Brand Empowers Moms to Initiate the Important First Period Conversation,” PR Newswire, April 15, 2011, http://multivu.prnewswire.com/mnr/kotex/49650/. ↵
42. Ibid. ↵
43. Michelle H. Martin, “Periods, Parody, Polyphony: Fifty Years of Menstrual Education Through Fiction and Film,” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, no. 1 (Spring 1997): 22. ↵
44. “2015 National Film Registry: ‘Ghostbusters’ Gets the Call,” Library of Congress, updated December 16, 2015, https://www.loc.gov/item/prn-15-216/. ↵