Estelle Ellis and Postwar Marketing

When Estelle Ellis pitched the Life Cycle Center to Kimberly-Clark in 1967, she, like many other postwar marketers, hung her capabilities as a marketing expert on her ability to explain certain kinds of consumers (in this case, young women) to major merchandisers. Her marketing expertise did not emerge from formal training in the industry. As Ellis described it, her working-class Jewish childhood in Brooklyn meant she had grown up with the expectation of a life defined by employment and motherhood. She leveraged this narrative in her marketing work, arguing that in an era of booming employment for women, her biography provided a keen insight into the kind of future young girls should expect for themselves.Footnote ¹³

Ellis began her marketing career in 1944 when she was hired at Philadelphia publishing magnate Walter Annenberg's Triangle Publications, working at the soon-to-be launched Seventeen magazine. At Seventeen, Ellis's youth allowed her to serve as a proxy for the magazine's imagined teenaged readership, and she was tasked with developing a marketing composite that could be used to teach merchandisers about the magazine's reader. In 1950, she moved to Charm magazine with former Seventeen editor Helen Valentine, revamping Charm from a magazine “for the business girl” to the magazine for “working women,” extending the marketing project that Ellis and Valentine had begun at Seventeen. Footnote ¹⁴ After eight years at Charm, Ellis departed the magazine in 1958 to found Business Image, Inc., where she would develop the Life Cycle Center for Kimberly-Clark.

In her marketing work at Seventeen, Ellis's job was to construct and define a legible market for potential advertisers, combining both the teenager's current buying power as well as her future commercial possibility. In early 1944, she commissioned a survey of the magazine's first-year readership. In the report, titled Life with Teena, a fictional, normative, and composite consumer named Teena the Teenage Girl narrated the study.Footnote ¹⁵ Figures like Teena projected a “race-evasive” normativity, which embedded reproductive heterosexuality and whiteness within what it meant to be typical or average in the United States.Footnote ¹⁶ This whiteness and heterosexuality were central, but not explicitly stated as such, to presenting Teena as a long-term marketing investment that was amiable to potential Seventeen merchandisers. Indeed, Seventeen would not feature a model of color on the cover—one of their “Teenas”—until 1971, when the African American model Joyce Walker appeared alongside a white model in a beach photo shoot.

The Life with Teena survey focused on aspiration and interest, interviewing young women who read the magazine as well as their mothers. Upon contacting a home, if the participants were aged between 12 and 18, the interviewer would proceed to ask whether they were enrolled in public, parochial, private, or business schools, or if they were in college. The survey then asked readers to think forward: if they were in high school, what did they hope to do once they graduated? If they were going to attend college, who would pay for further education? What would their majors be, and would they work after graduation? The topic of marriage came up much later in the study and was referenced only in relationship to employment, when the interviewer asked: “Do you think that you would like to work after you are married?”Footnote ¹⁷ The study mapped out young women's current buying habits and their employment situation—parsing out whether they were employed, received an allowance from their parents, or if they requested cash as needed. The interview then proceeded to place young women in relationship to broader patterns of domestic purchasing in the household, asking for examples of the products they had encouraged their family to buy. Finally, the interview concluded on how Seventeen ranked against magazines of a similar ilk, asking young women to expand on their relationship to reading the magazine, the circulation of articles and issues between them and their friends, and where such circulation occurred. In interviews with mothers, the survey focused on questions about purchasing patterns, asking how frequently they replaced goods such as girdles, skirts, sweaters, and party dresses, and, critically, the influence daughters had on family purchasing decisions. For mothers, the study ended on an open-ended question: “what plans do you have for … when she leaves high school?”—attempting to measure where mothers saw their daughter's lives taking them in the coming years.Footnote ¹⁸

Ellis went to great lengths to personify Teena, using demographic and financial data to endow the composite with the more subjective elements of personhood. “Our girl Teena is sixteen years old. She's five feet four and a quarter inches tall and tips the scales at 118 pounds. She goes to a public high school, expects to graduate next year at the age of 17 and go on to college with a B.A. or B.S. in mind.” The profile located Teena in a web of family relations in order to establish the readership's decidedly middle-class position and their influential role in family decision-making: “Her chances of going to college are good, since Teena's mother is in favor of higher education! And her father can afford to foot all her college bills. He's a professional man … a business man … a white-collar worker.” Teena suggested a magazine readership that was middle- or upper-middle-class, with 63 percent of readers’ fathers working as business executives, owners, and professionals, or in other white-collar occupations, and an additional 19 percent earning a living as skilled workers. The text framed its subject, Teena, as both a consumer and a worker, although the primary concern was not the work undertaken, but the income it generated:

With such specificity regarding working and spending, Life with Teena invited potential merchandisers to imagine exactly the kind of young woman Ellis wanted them to believe read Seventeen. And it worked. Two years after the publication of Life with Teena, Seventeen's circulation boomed—as did its portfolio of advertisers. In February 1947, the magazine hit one million copies per issue; by July 1949, circulation reached two and a half million.Footnote ²⁰ In one set of pamphlets that went out to the advertising and marketing trade press announcing Teena's success, the copy asked, “When is a girl worth $11,690,499?” The answer: “when the magazine devoted to her interests surveys her needs—sets up a research department, a consumer panel, [and] a library of fifteen market studies to determine her powerful present, her promising future.”Footnote ²¹

Ellis worked at Seventeen until 1950, when she and editor Helen Valentine moved to Charm. The two redeveloped Charm to follow the marketing narrative presented in Life with Teena: young women bound not for housewifery, but for college and a career. During her time at Charm, Ellis successfully rebranded the periodical from the magazine for the “business girl”—a middle-class figure of mid-century industry who often worked in secretarial labor until marriage—to Charm: The Magazine for Women Who Work. While at Charm, Ellis argued that, as a consumer category, “working women” represented an enormous emerging market defined not by household management, but by autonomous spending and a fulfilling white-collar career.Footnote ²² Just as with Seventeen, Ellis used Charm to build her own capacity as an arbiter of postwar white womanhood. The women who read these magazines could be packaged and sold through composite types defined by heterosexuality, youth, whiteness, and ambition. The vision Ellis offered at both magazines was a bankable one—or, as Ellis described the Teenas she packaged, promoted, and sold: “a career girl, a college student, a mother! The happy ending writes itself.”Footnote ²³

Marketing the Life Cycle

Ellis left Charm in 1958 to open her marketing consultancy, Business Image, Inc., which developed the Life Cycle Center for Kimberly-Clark. As she later recalled in an interview, with Business Image she set out to define “a market, give it visibility, establish its credibility, have people see it as a new country to be communicated with and conquered and benefitted.”Footnote ²⁴ It was not an advertising agency per se. Rather, Ellis described the firm as a “creative marketing” consultancy, working with corporate executives who felt increasingly out of step with the shifting youth culture of the 1950s and 1960s.

Ellis rejected the notion that her firm be named after herself, suggesting instead through the title “Business Image” that her firm would work internally with major merchandisers to develop their own marketing strategies for teen girls.Footnote ²⁵ The “image” in Ellis's Business Image, Inc. played on a popular trope of “image marketing” in the 1960s. Image marketing first came into vogue in 1955 thanks of Social Research, Inc. (SRI), a market research firm staffed by academics at the University of Chicago. SRI researchers argued that every encounter a consumer had with a product or advertisement contributed to the overall image of the brand in the consumer's mind, inviting them to incorporate the brand into their own self-conception.Footnote ²⁶ This image concept allowed marketers such as Ellis to claim that their proximity to certain kinds of consumers’ lived experiences gave them a more intimate sense of how these buyers might respond to a campaign. Business Image thus promised access to the interior lives and social expectations of young, white, heterosexual women. Indeed, when Ellis first proposed the Life Cycle Center to Kimberly-Clark in 1967, she insisted that the brand itself be pedagogical: Kimberly-Clark and Kotex would become a part of how readers would understand and segment their own lives. In the context of sex education, the power of establishing a brand image such as Kotex as a space for self-understanding throughout life was especially potent, mapping long-term questions about biological and emotional transformation onto the corporate brand. In essence, Ellis promised Kotex the same vision of future buying power that Seventeen had pitched to their advertisers: a dollar spent today would spell dividends tomorrow.

The Life Cycle Center's central marketing logic turned on the cyclical nature of the life cycle concept, which promised a variety of commercial possibilities to Kimberly-Clark as the Center's young readers grew up. Ellis's segmentation of the life cycle as a commercial strategy was not necessarily new in American corporate marketing. Since the 1920s, many service industries had placed an intense focus on life stages in advertising directed toward potential clients. The life insurance industry, for example, used the specter of death, the risks of old age, and the unknowns of tomorrow to play on a prospective client's anxieties and to argue that private insurance was a means by which they could protect themselves against an uncertain future.Footnote ²⁷

The Life Cycle Center went well beyond this kind of marketing strategy, however. Through booklets distributed in the classroom, the Center did not simply educate students on life cycle stages; it intentionally constructed them. From The Miracle of You to Your First Pregnancy, social or biological changes defined transitions between books, and Ellis framed these as opportunities for new Kimberly-Clark product lines and brands. At the end of Kimberly-Clark's Life Cycle Library, Getting Married and Your First Pregnancy primed readers for married life and motherhood, emphasizing the financial, emotional, and marital obligations of starting a family. Your First Pregnancy in particular spoke directly to a mother's connection with her newborn child, prompting the mother to use an additional guide published by the Center when her own child came of age. The Center drew readers into a teleology of reproductive heterosexual intimacy both embedded in and defined by Kimberly-Clark and its brands, all while framing postmenopausal women and women who could not reproduce as explicitly outside the normative bounds of the life cycle.

In constructing life-cycle segments as distinct market categories, Ellis promised Kimberly-Clark the gold standard of all marketing strategy: a homogenous market of uniform consumers whose emotional life transitions would deepen their relationship to Kotex and Kimberly-Clark. Ellis argued that moments like experiencing one's first period, having one's first sexual experience, going to college, getting married, and beginning a family were both significant life events and times when consumers either switched brands or intensified their relationship to their current brand of choice. For example, the fourth booklet in the library, The Years of the Independence, defined its readers as late teens finishing high school and entering college or the workforce. Ellis suggested that this period of change “correlates with the period in her life when the first truly independent buying patterns are set up.”Footnote ²⁸ The booklet offered advice on navigating work and educational commitments alongside the potential social obligations of sex, syncing bodily change with consumer loyalty in an attempt to affix navigating these new concerns to Kimberly-Clark and its respective brands.

The life cycle concept played to both consumer and merchandiser. For Ellis and Kimberly-Clark, the model standardized life stages and managed moments of transition, enabling them to monitor how consumer needs would change. The life cycle model projected value onto the specific future it mapped out, promising homogenous markets of readers who shared in the same specific kinds of potential needs. It provided the firm with a blueprint to the life cycle of their consumers’ lives, one which could be capitalized upon through line extensions and specific promotional outreach programs. For readers, the life cycle model broke their lives down into knowable moments. When handed out by teachers, school nurses, or parents, these booklets gained a tacit institutional or familial endorsement, attaching social and personal value to the attainment of the norms laid out in their pages. At the same time, the Center's pursuit of coherent life stage categories as markets functionally marked those readers who fell outside the bounds of the “normative” life cycle as failures. This included those who experienced queer desire, those who did not get married, those who experienced childbirth before marriage, and those who did not menstruate—all framed as aberrations.

Ellis proposed the Center as a significant departure from how sex education had been taught for much of the twentieth century. She argued there were benefits to rejecting the silence and shame that had historically defined both sex education and advertising around menstruation. These silences, in fact, had been purposely constructed by corporations like Kimberly-Clark. In 1921, Kotex had been promoted through a joint military–public health discourse, an emphasis on white respectability, and a focus on shame. Early Kotex advertisements featured white female nurses who suggested the napkins had been devised to use up leftover wood pulp–based absorbent materials, mass produced and supplied to the U.S. federal government by Kimberly-Clark during the First World War. Such advertisements framed Kotex as the solution to a problem that could not be publicly spoken. The company relied on the term “Kotex” (a portmanteau of “cotton” and “texture”) for public discussion of menstruation, mapping a commercial brand and the representation of medical authority over biological functions. Kimberly-Clark also undertook efforts to distance itself from Kotex, creating a wholly owned subsidiary, the International Cellucotton Products Company (ICPC). Kotex packaging contained no reference to Kimberly-Clark until the ICPC was dissolved in 1946. And finally, the product's in-store merchandising placement positioned it close to the register in unmarked blue boxes, allowing customers to purchase with discretion. As one January 1922 advertisement suggested, Kotex was “Easy to buy. All embarrassing counter conversation is avoided by saying, ‘A box of Kotex please.’”Footnote ²⁹

Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, Kotex advertising furthered this silence by emphasizing the dangers of frank discussion between mothers and daughters. In a series of advertisements in the late 1940s, Kimberly-Clark cautioned that broaching the topic of menstruation without the guiding hand of Kotex was a risk, warning keen mothers not to share “some of the bogey ideas you picked up when you were a teen-ager” and to send away for Kotex educational materials instead. “A girl's first experience with menstruation can and does condition her for life,” such ads warned, asking the mother: “Do You Scare Her to Death?”Footnote ³⁰ These claims were more than the production of social anxiety that classic advertisements for products like Listerine sought to generate when they conjured up the social ill of bad breath. This was capital entering the most non-market of relations, attempting to perform a form of in loco parentis that undermined parents who sought to explain biological function—menstruation, in this case—to their own children. These ads were attempts to alienate parents and, in turn, assert control over a young person's first real experiences of puberty, sexuality, and bodily change. Thanks in part to this legacy of shame and silence, even when Ellis first proposed the Center in the mid-1960s, most American men and women remained largely divorced from a knowledge of their own bodies, let alone the opposite sex.Footnote ³¹

The model of sex education adopted by Ellis and the Life Cycle Center was not without challenges, however. It was complicated by a broad, community-based resistance to sex education beginning in the early 1960s. Those resistant to sex education worried over the raw explanation of sexual intercourse devoid of romance and sanctity, the presentation of homosexuality and other 'maladjustments' as life choices (albeit as poor ones), and the adoption of less moralistic learning strategies that asked students to think about the dynamics of sexuality rather than static intimacy between different sex partners.Footnote ³² Many feared that such programs intruded upon the sanctified white, nuclear family—that is, parental authority to teach children about sex—and that any frank discussion of intimacy would lead to experimentation.

To mitigate the potential for blowback, Ellis argued that the Center could be strategically framed as a form of consumer education, capitalizing on the growing interest in consumer advocacy and programming that had, since the 1930s, worked both to soften Americans’ perceptions of industrial capitalism and to celebrate free enterprise. Ellis argued, “The point cannot be over-emphasized since educational material can provide the added ‘product benefit’ so essential in establishing a competitive edge for the Kotex feminine hygiene products division.… There is reason to believe in time [Kimberly-Clark] may discover that soundly researched consumer service literature is the most wanted product premium of all.”Footnote ³³ By framing the Center as consumer service programming, Ellis spared the Center from pitched debates over the merit of sex education, even as it carefully advocated and extended a vision of normal sexuality that framed companionate intimacy and heterosexual sex in frank terms.

In order to get materials into teachers’ hands, Ellis sent Life Cycle Center booklets to schools with a teaching guide that underscored how the booklets taught menstruation rather than sex education. To secure buy-in from teachers, the Center addressed educators through a public-facing nurse, lending the enterprise the bona fides of medicine:

In this description, Ellis proposed the Center as a resource for instruction on menstruation and reproductive health instead of sex, framing menstruation as a biological function concerning “physical maturation” and “healthy identification of self as a female.” The biologically based young person constructed in the Center's materials was likely intended to be a less controversial figure than the sexually aware youth so often vilified by opponents of sex education.

The letter to teachers suggested that Kimberly-Clark had followed the debate over sex education with a keen interest and was eager to revamp its education program “to the needs of the time,” offering the booklets for free in any quantity alongside the popular, albeit aging, film, The Story of Menstruation—a Disney production that Kimberly-Clark had sponsored in 1946. School teachers and nurses also received special teaching pamphlets that detailed a number of educational services available through the Life Cycle Center.Footnote ³⁵ Taken together, these materials worked to ease the Center into the classroom, framing its marketing materials as educational supports designed to benefit school nurses, parents, and teachers.

Reading the Life Cycle Library

The Life Cycle Library booklets ranged from early childhood to first pregnancy, with an additional booklet targeted at mothers of infant children. Each of the six published booklets were structured to frame menstruation and sexual maturation within the context of social, psychological, and emotional change. “This was done not only to widen consumer interest in Kotex educational materials,” Ellis explained, “but to insure [sic] their acceptance and distribution at critical professional levels … among educators, doctors and nurses.”Footnote ³⁶ Such groups served as essential gatekeepers who made decisions on whether or not to implement the program and who would receive the booklets. The choice to target professionals was as much a marketing decision as it was a pedagogical one. By framing the Life Cycle Center as an effective educational program, Ellis could use it as a model for other corporate forays into the public school classroom.Footnote ³⁷ While the Life Cycle Library was developed in consultation with a committee of sex education experts, it selected specific stages of the life cycle to “intensify and extend [Kotex's] sphere of consumer influence with women in each of the selected age groups.” The booklets were “pinpointed to the life cycle changes of paramount relevance to the marketing of Kotex Products,” developed as tools to bridge the reader's self-understanding with the brand itself.Footnote ³⁸

The first book in the series, The Miracle of You, opens by describing the biological changes underway in the pubescent body, anchoring them to a specific heteronormative reproductive future. Subtitled “What It Means to Be a Girl,” the booklet constructs menstruation as “the beginning of the remarkable journey that, slowly and wonderfully, can reach its highest point in parenthood.”Footnote ³⁹ Motherhood, it suggests, “is a natural desire for girls. Since menstruation makes motherhood possible you should think of it as a good and healthy bodily function.… In one form or another, all living creatures experience the cycle of infancy, childhood, adolescence and maturity.”Footnote ⁴⁰ The text then describes the maturation process underway in early puberty. Reflecting the scientific approach emphasized by Ellis in her marketing pitch, the booklet contextualizes reproductive biology using other mammals.Footnote ⁴¹ The final pages feature advertisements for a Kotex introductory kit designed for young women who might soon experience menstruation. The kit consists of Kotex “Miss Deb” sanitary napkins as well as the Miss Deb belt. The booklet, which arrived in a package including napkins and other service literature, promises the Center's careful guidance as young women grow up and through the life cycle.

The second booklet, Your Years of Self Discovery, which targeted the high school teenager, entangles notions of self-actualization, autonomy, and sexual identity by promising to assist young women in coming to terms with their own sexual desire along with the expectations of others. It places the responsibility of managing young men's desire on the female reader: “Male sexual desire is aroused, in general, much more quickly and easily than your own. A sweater that seems fashionable to you may appear sexually provocative to your date.” This management succeeds, suggests the text, only through “self-discipline—controlling your own feelings, sexual and otherwise—even at those very moments when physical urges move you most strongly.” Your Years of Self Discovery also introduces same-sex desire as naturally occurring in early adolescence in both boys and girls, but notes that this natural same-sex desire itself is a prologue to heterosexuality. “[I]t is a symptom of maladjustment,” the booklet warns; it “indicates that the normal response to persons of the opposite sex has somehow been damaged. Professional counseling, in some instances might reverse the emotional direction into heterosexual patterns.” The commercial section of this booklet featured profiles for Kotex sanitary napkins and tampons designed for this age group.Footnote ⁴²

The Years of Independence: Learning to Live on Your Own offered a wider gamut of advice, focusing on the transition from high school to college or employment and connecting these changes to new kinds of purchasing opportunities. The booklet engaged with a young woman's expanded social circle, dating, social activities, drinking, drugs, and sexual intimacy. “Among the decisions you'll be making for yourself,” the text suggests, “concerns your attitude toward alcohol, tobacco, and drugs.” The booklet argues that social drinking and drug use remain matter-of-fact for single life—but the latter activity, especially marijuana use, is “simply another crutch, another form of escape, another dependency that no young woman needs.” It warns its readers about “hard narcotics and LSD” as carrying “obvious dangers,” and that the universe of “sleeping pills, tranquillizers, psychic energizers (or ‘pep’ pills)” brings with them a host of their own risks. The booklet's discussion may have signaled these drugs as risks to stability, but it nonetheless framed their use as decisions which readers themselves would have to make.Footnote ⁴³

The Years of Independence also introduced what it called “the new morality” that came with sexual autonomy, a paycheck, and life away from home. “The new morality exists as a reaction to the old morality that imposed a rigid set of rules upon young women, while tacitly condoning another standard for men,” the booklet reads. Reproducing the norms of heteronormative sexuality, the booklet argues that while the new morality promises women fuller access to their sexuality, wanton sex outside of the bounds of heterosexual intimacy with an eye toward marriage “destroys what it is trying to achieve.”Footnote ⁴⁴ Alongside this advice, the booklet offered a discussion of same-sex desire in fuller detail than previous texts, framing queer intimacies as a risk to the heterosexual reproductive subject.

Published during the transition from the liberal politics of the U.S. homophile movement to the liberationist demands of the late 1960s and early 1970s, The Years of Independence constructed two types of maladjusted queer subjects for the reader to navigate: the gay man who she might develop feelings for and the gay woman who might develop feelings for her. It did not condemn queer subjects outright, however: “Homosexuals are not always easy to recognize. Although there are those who flaunt their homosexuality in dress and manner, many pass inconspicuously in the everyday world.… No one knows the precise cause of homosexuality. It is generally attributed to extreme identification in early childhood with the parent of the same sex.”Footnote ⁴⁵ When readers felt an emotional connection toward a gay man, the text suggests they be wary of pursuing it. While “male homosexuals can be interesting friends and good companions,” the booklet warns, “the young woman who believes she is in love with a male homosexual is in for a deep disappointment”:

The Years of Independence made no reference to the reader experiencing or navigating her own erotic or emotional queer desires. Just as homosexuality had been treated as a category of maladjustment in Your Years of Self-Discovery, the absence of the adult queer subject in The Years of Independence suggested a kind of gender failure in light of the normative reproductive life cycle forwarded by Kimberly-Clark, even if the booklets offered a fairly sympathetic treatment of queer difference.Footnote ⁴⁷

From The Years of Independence, the Life Cycle Library moved to marriage and the establishment of the family as a domestic unit. In Getting Married, the text opens with the proclamation “I Love Him and I Need Him!” documenting the promise of marriage, exploring the wedding night, and quickly moving into companionate intimacy and the challenges of maintaining normative sexuality. “One of your married friends may tell you that she and her husband have had a ‘fantastic’ sex life ever since their first night together. Instead of envying her, accept the fact that this is a most unusual experience,” the booklet insists.

Although the booklet describes the heterosexual sex act as aiming for mutual orgasm—a central tenet and promise of marriage advice manuals directed at women since the 1930s—Getting Married frankly broaches the challenges that come with intimacy, shifting the discourse of marriage toward a vision of companionate obligation, even in sex: “Occasionally, a couple succeeds in synchronizing their responses perfectly and thus achieve orgasm simultaneously. When this happens it can be a very beautiful experience. But since male and female timing and rhythms tend to be quite different, it is unrealistic and frustrating to make this a constant goal.”Footnote ⁴⁹

While the booklet suggests that the give and take of a relationship is the foundation of a well-adjusted and productive marriage, it nevertheless makes the challenge of achieving this intimacy the reader's responsibility. The text warns that “despite her husband's best efforts, a woman fails to reach orgasm because she is overtired, upset, or insufficiently aroused emotionally. Or it may be due to her inhibitions.” The work of companionate intimacy was placed squarely on the reader of the text:

The final marketing materials in Getting Married reflected those in The Years of Independence, although the text also made overtures to the future financial obligations of parenthood. The Library ended with Your First Pregnancy, which looped the reader back to You and Your Daughter, completing the cyclical nature of the platform itself.

The life cycle concept advanced by the Life Cycle Center ended at reproduction—conceiving neither postmenopausal subjects nor nonmenstruating women as viable consumer markets. Intriguingly, Ellis's original proposal for the Center included booklets for pre- and post-menopause: The Middle Years would have targeted 40- to 55-year-old women, and The Mature Woman: Post-menopause—The Heritage of Femininity was planned for readers aged 50–85.Footnote ⁵¹ The proposed booklets would have discussed sex during and after menopause, late-in-life marriage, the possibilities of hormone therapy, and remarriage after the death of a partner, with sections dedicated to “the expanded choices of Kotex Life-Cycle products with recommendations for use” in the “middle” and “mature years.”Footnote ⁵² Yet these booklets were never produced. Instead, the focus of the Life Cycle Center remained tethered to reproductive capacity. Reproduction was so central to how Kimberly-Clark viewed this program that Ellis went as far as to suggest that this consumer market might be extended through scientific advances in hormone therapy that would push a potential consumer's menstruating years into their “sixties, seventies, and eighties.”Footnote ⁵³ Just as the teenager supplanted the mother within American consumer capitalism, the cultural weight of American youth culture meant that the female consumer lost her commercial viability postmenopause.

Ellis proposed the booklets be matched with a newsletter program that capitalized upon the growing popularity of health and wellness literature offered in magazines. “Covers designed to build circulation for magazines dramatize in bold type feature articles on the most intimate aspects of feminine hygiene and health.… Editorial research shows that the subject of health has replaced fiction as the primary audience draw.”Footnote ⁵⁴ The newsletter would serve as a digest, gathering articles that concerned sexual reproduction and health. As Ellis suggested in an executive summary of the Center and its operation, “our basic purpose is to assure close harmony with the product managers’ marketing plans and programs” and the Center's health education aims. “An effective ‘educational’ program could easily become the catalyst for a new corporate format built around the concept that Kimberly-Clark is bringing the consumer a helpful service—that it is a company dedicated to make [sic] a woman's life a little easier.”Footnote ⁵⁵

After the Center launched in 1968, Business Image, Inc. began to tabulate reader responses in order to refine and reposition the booklets. After the first year of operation, Ellis selected and processed forty pages of response letters, both positive and negative, and broken down by region across North America. (The program was also marketed in Australia, but archived responses are exclusively from the U.S. and Canada.) These letters came from public health departments, Planned Parenthood, Catholic school teachers, children, health services directors, educational consultants, advocates for children with disabilities, nurses, mothers, principals, and state supervisors.Footnote ⁵⁶ Across both positive and negative comments, those who wrote in recognized the Center as both an educational service as well as an advertising and marketing strategy.

In tabulated positive comments, Ellis found that readers appreciated the factual data about sexual health and especially the emphasis on emotional changes. One teacher, from San Antonio, praised the “company for ... doing a real service for those who benefit from these excellent materials.” An associate director of public aid in Chicago suggested the booklets had “been welcomed by our girls and their foster mothers.” Similarly, a school nurse from St. Joseph, Michigan, and a mother from Whippany, New Jersey, both agreed that the materials would be essential to the sex education programs being developed in their local school districts. Some parents recognized that the Library itself was a form of advertising. A mother from Detroit, Michigan noted, “My hearty thanks.… This is the best form of advertising any firm can do.”Footnote ⁵⁷

Ellis also compiled critiques, which typically focused on frank discussions of sexual intimacy, with some parents responding with the threat of a consumer boycott. A parent from Phoenix, Arizona, named the product plainly: “advertising has reached the point of being repulsive,” they argued. “I for one intend to boycott your products until you can find your way back to decency.” A member of the Utah State Board of Education decried it

A mother from Petaluma, California, threatened the Life Cycle Center on obscenity grounds, arguing that the educational materials spelled the end of her support for Kotex: “I have bought Tampax and Kotex all the time but now I will not buy your products anymore.… I am very much opposed to the filth that is being called ‘Sex Education’ and is pushed in our local schools.… Us gals are passing the word around.” A parent from El Dorado, Texas, made a similar suggestion: “I am terribly disappointed in the Kimberly-Clark Corp. and in the future shall be very selective in the brand of feminine products I buy.” Many negative respondents committed to switch brands in response to the program.Footnote ⁵⁹

Indeed, later scholarly analysis of commercially sponsored sex education materials would condemn consumer education service programs outright. In one 1975 study, three clinical psychiatrists interviewed women aged nine to eighteen. They found that commercial materials emphasized products as solutions to menstruation and, in turn, puberty as a market and issue to be solved, arguing that “the major concern of these companies is with selling a product. Any educational endeavor they engage in must support their commercial interests. Their failure lies in their concern with avoiding controversial and unpleasant topics in communicating with potential consumers.”Footnote ⁶⁰ Ellis herself dismissed this kind of critique early on in planning the Center. She argued that as the booklets moved on and their narrative shifted toward marital concerns, navigating work, and the construction of ideal companionate heterosexuality, critiques about crass commercialism would fade from view. As young women who grew up with the platform began to have children of their own, their commitment to Kotex would lead them to dismiss concerns over the commercialization of sex education, let alone the very definition of the life cycle.

In their own usage studies of the Life Cycle Center materials, however, Ellis and her staff discovered the booklets had overlapping audiences. Younger readers frequently consulted all of the published material, even those booklets marketed to women above their age group. In later reviews of the Center's first years of operation, Ellis in fact celebrated this, claiming the “multiple readership of the books in the Life Cycle Library … [is] one of its greatest marketing strengths.”Footnote ⁶¹ As young women encountered the booklets in elementary and middle school classrooms, reading ahead not only did the work of structuring life cycle stages, but invited readers to intuit and understand their future sexual and reproductive health entirely on Kimberly-Clark's marketing terms.

Legitimizing the Life Cycle Center

After two years in operation, Ellis issued a report and review to Kimberly-Clark advising on how the Center should develop in the coming decade. “The Life Cycle Center is a reality,” Ellis proclaimed. “[I]t has substantial assets, most important of which is the point of view it reinforces with each periodical it publishes.” However, “[t]he full value of the Life Cycle Center cannot be realized without an aggressive program to communicate its existence, its philosophy, its health-education benefits to women and the community at large.” Ellis argued that the Center was “ready to move forward—to expand the dissemination of materials built up in the past three years via educational and market channels.” She declared that, from 1970 onward, Kimberly-Clark had to “enlarge the Life Cycle Center's sphere of consumer and professional influence,” targeting those institutional and professional networks that might lend it further legitimacy beyond marketing, giving Kimberly-Clark “access to organized groups via classrooms, clubs, and private and government agencies.”Footnote ⁶² To do so would be to render “Kotex as an authority in the area of menstrual-related health problems, relating service authority to product authority.” Ellis aimed to transform the Center into an institutional leader on sex education and public health.

Ellis undertook a number of strategies to deepen the Center's professional capacity. This included publicizing the Center with ads targeted at educational programs; donating bound volumes of Life Cycle Center materials to university libraries; and distributing materials to a variety of different organizations, such as Job Corps, Headstart, Upward Bound, state youth agencies, private resident camps, state and federal health and education agencies, and organizations on record as supporting sex education. “To place Life Cycle materials in the hands of the participants (people who are actually giving the courses in schools and on an extra-curricular level),” Ellis argued, “is to ensure an immediate hearing and to accelerate acceptance and requests for the books.”Footnote ⁶³ Such outreach accrued respectability for the program, insulating it from critiques of commercialism while allowing Kotex to manage a generation of young girls’ understandings of sexual health.

Ellis also hired a nurse to serve as a leadership figure for the Center, lending this marketing regime both medical and educational authority. She sought someone who understood that the Life Cycle Center served up “a unique business opportunity” and who could balance the “growth of an educational division of a major industrial corporation” with the directing of “a corporate consumer service program unique in the nation.” Ellis intended the director to be an academic with a background in the fields of sex education and public health. They would perform the work of legitimation for the Center through participation in scholarly, trade, and public health conventions, speaking engagements, and presentations at forums on family life planning. In pursuing a registered nurse who would perform public relations in academic, educational, and public health circles, Ellis sought to balance out anxieties that might creep up when consumers recognized the Center for what it was: commercial marketing.Footnote ⁶⁴

In 1970, Kimberly-Clark hired Mary Louise Lennon, a graduate of Emmanuel College, to serve as director of the Life Cycle Center. Lennon had previously served as a community health representative for the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company in New York, which itself had for much of the twentieth century drawn the discourse of medical professionalism into its own marketing and advertising strategy.Footnote ⁶⁵ In March 1970, Lennon assumed leadership over the Center while Ellis remained in an advisory capacity. Lennon soon began producing scholarly writing extolling the benefits of the Center as a form of consumer service. These pieces often narrated a history of Kimberly-Clark's consumer education programs, celebrating the firm's foray into education through the language of pedagogy and service. In an essay published in 1974, Lennon argued that “[b]eginning in the early 60s the mail indicated that women's questions were no longer in the narrow area of menstrual hygiene. Rather, women were [asking questions] on topics related to feminine development, such as developing sexuality, personal relationships, attitudes and behavior, as well as the role of women in society.” The Center, argued Lennon, was simply a response to these inquiries.Footnote ⁶⁶ Both Ellis and Business Image disappear in this narrative framing; the Center's mission emerges from the language of educational duty, the service ethos, and a commitment to consumer well-being.

Ellis also believed that as director, Lennon's training as a registered nurse could be used to influence readers’ relationship with the Center—a connection Kimberly-Clark could exploit to develop a potentially lucrative trove of marketing data. Lennon invited readers and teachers alike to write in directly to her with their questions and concerns about reproductive and sexual health. Ellis intended these inquiries to serve as the foundation for highly tailored direct marketing campaigns. “The lists Mary Louise Lennon will be building in the coming years from requests for Life Cycle materials and information,” noted Ellis, “will provide the nucleus for future direct marketing ventures. Computerized, as all consumer and professional names gathered by the Life Cycle Center should be from here on in, they will serve to build a customer bank of immediate value to Kotex and its regional sales offices.”Footnote ⁶⁷ Reader inquiries, many of which detailed pressing and intimate concerns about sexual and reproductive health, would generate a database of anxieties that Kimberly-Clark could use to develop new campaigns, product lines, and services.

Lennon succeeded in extending the Center's professional influence into public health and educational policy discussions. In 1972, she noted that the Center was organizing a “coalition of independent associations” concerned with public health and school education across a number of U.S. states and territories.Footnote ⁶⁸ Led by the Center, the coalition would work with Nixon's proposed National Health Education Foundation. At the municipal level, Lennon brought the Center into direct conversation with public school boards. In a 1972 report prepared in cooperation with the director of family life education at Chicago Public Schools, Lennon highlighted the role of Life Cycle Center materials used in Chicago schools. The study emphasized the close, professional working relationship between the Center and the school board and highlighted the variety of Kimberly-Clark–sponsored materials that teachers used in the classroom. The report's publication served the very purpose that Ellis had envisioned for Mary Louise Lennon: to frame the Center as a public health and sex education institution rather than a marketing regime.Footnote ⁶⁹

Although the Center doubled down on a language of sexual health and family planning under Lennon's direction, its framework remained fundamentally commercial. Indeed, tying the Center to both state and educational institutions did far more than capitalize on the benefits of institutional affiliation. Through its engagement with institutional actors, the Center sought to lead a movement toward increased state investment in both public and private family-planning programming. This process lent further credence to the Center's life cycle model as scientific fact. In doing so, Ellis succeeded in bringing her marketing ideas about the normative sexual and reproductive life cycle of American womanhood into educational policy. This vision framed those who failed to meet gendered and raced norms of normal sexuality as irresponsible at best and failed citizens at worst, tethering women's conception of their own sexual health and well-being to Kotex, Kimberly-Clark, and their product lines.