Cash Flow

The menstrual product industry has played a large role in shaping the last hundred years of menstrual culture, from technological innovation to creative advertising, education in classrooms and as employers of thousands in factories around the world. How much do we know about this sector and how has it changed in later decades? What constitutes ‘the industry’, who works in it, and how is it adapting to the current menstrual equity movement?

Cash Flow provides a new academic study of the menstrual corporate landscape that links its twentieth-century origins to the current ‘menstrual moment’. Drawing on a range of previously unexplored archival materials and interviews with industry insiders, each chapter examines one key company and brand: Saba in Norway, Essity in Sweden, Tambrands in the Soviet Union, Procter & Gamble in Britain and Europe, Kimberly-Clark in North America, and start-ups Clue and Thinx. By engaging with these corporate collections, the book highlights how the industry has survived as its consumers continually change.

Praise for Cash Flow

''This book is an important addition to the work done on menstrual capitalism and shows how the evolving culture around menstruation is actually “good for business.”''

LSE Review of Books

''This text deeply analyzes the corporate, social, and political dynamics of menstrual technologies through an intersectional feminist lens. Questions about the social construction of menstruation and its capitalization through mass-produced menstrual technologies are incisively raised''

Choice

''the establishing field of critical menstrual studies meets business history in this important book.''

Scandinavian Economic History Review

‘This wonderful book is a compelling and important addition to the fields of critical menstruation studies, labour history and feminist studies. Cash Flow interrogates the intersections of technology, capitalism and colonialism at the heart of the late-twentieth-century menstrual economy in the Global North. Focusing on seven powerful corporate brands and start-ups, Cash Flow explores the menstrual product industry’s capacities for re-invention and appropriation of shifts in menstrual culture to turn a profit, whatever the cost.’

Cathy McClive, Florida State University

''Cash Flow provides a succinct, yet in-depth cultural history of the men-strual economy, utilizing sources from the corporations’ own archives that have not previously been analyzed, making it a valuable contribution to critical men-struation studies and the wider field of cultural studies. Røstvik’s incisive analysis and use of archival material from the companies discussed in Cash Flow provides unique insight into the menstrual economy, and its wider relationship with the public’s perception of menstruation. Further, linking the history of the menstrual economy to FemTech startups proves that Cash Flow is a timely contribution that demonstrates how the history of menstrual products informs FemTech of the future.''

Cultural Studies