Hasn’t your daughter a right to be told (Aug, 1930)
Hasn’t your daughter a right to be told
The easy way is to give her this booklet
You can’t keep your daughter ignorant of physical facts. She feels the need to know. Surely she deserves to be told the real truth rather than be forced to seek any kind of information that friends of her own age can give.
In regard to feminine hygiene, she may receive an entirely wrong impression, even a dangerous one. Many people still believe that caustic and poisonous antiseptics are necessary for this healthful, cleanly practice. But the medical profession does not endorse the use of bichloride of mercury and compounds of carbolic acid.Danger lies in poisons
Women used to run terrible risks. They were not fully aware how great was the danger of mercurial poisoning, areas of scar tissue, interference with normal secretions. They wanted surgical cleanliness. Before the coming of Zonite, caustics and poisons were the only germicides powerful enough to be effective.
Send for Zonite booklet
Zonite is the modern antiseptic. Non-poisonous. Non-caustic. Far more powerful than any dilution of carbolic acid that may be allowed on the body. Send for the booklet that gives all the facts about feminine hygiene. Read it. Give it to your daughter. It is frankly written, and honest. You can buy Zonite everywhere. Full directions with bottle. Zonite Products Corporation, Chrysler Building, New York, N. Y.
“For God’s sake, don’t do something crazy like *talk to her*! Give her this sales pitch – er, “hygiene booklet” – instead!”
This is of course yet another cryptic yeast infection treatment ad, but in reality Zonite was more popular as a (relatively ineffectual) contraceptive than as a (just as ineffective) treatment for any supposed hygiene problem. The main ingredient: diluted household bleach.
gosh, i hope it was very diluted
I just looked this up. Zonite was double-strength Dakin’s solution. I was wrong about it being nothing but “diluted bleach”- Dakin’s contains boric acid too. Bleach and ant killer!
But according to my medical dictionary, Dakin’s has to be extremely fresh to be effective – after 24 hours it breaks down into “irritating” secondary compounds. Zonite, on the other hand, would have been sitting on druggists’ shelves for weeks or months before it was used.
So basically women were being sold a chemical compound that irritated the membranes but didn’t do much good otherwise. The irritation probably felt like tingling, sort of like those acne medicines teenagers buy that “make the skin tingle because it’s working”, but of course the tingling is actually the skin being irritated and becoming even more prone to acne.
This is more than I, and probably most of you, ever wanted to know.
You’d think the guys that wrote the copy would have extolled the ability of the stuff to keep out ants
“Ant Invasion- the untold side of feminine hygiene.”
@StanFlouride, you missed your vocation – you should be an advertising copywriter…
Boric acid is good for more than killing ants. It is gentle enough that people used to use it as an antiseptic eyewash.
Boric acid is also billed as a very effective cockroach killer. You don’t want them up your frammazamma either, now do you?