Throughout history, there have been a variety of items used by people who menstruate that resemble the tampons and pads of today. In ancient Japan, mulberry paper was one of many types of cloth used, while in ancient Egypt, papyrus was used similarly to tampons, according to Blood & Milk. Before commercial disposable menstruation products were invented, cloth was often used and it was then washed and reused. The Smithsonian writes that even though a “disposable sanitary napkin” was made by Johnson & Johnson in 1896, “it was met with limited acceptance.” It took until the First World War, when designs for menstrual pads were influenced by the recent innovations in surgical dressings, that commercial menstruation products started being used.

Some Indigenous societies in North America used Sphagnum moss and animal skin, and the Sfag-Na-Kins product, created in the 1910s, copied this technique. Kotex was also created around the same time, using a wood pulp product covered in a gauze sheath, and “the success of Kotex jumpstarted the feminine hygiene product market.” However, the Kotex pads were disposable, but not self-adhesive, which meant that people needed to hold them in place with safety pins.

Although tampons were also used in medicine, they weren’t patented for menstruation until the late 1920s. The first successful design was patented in 1931 by E.C. Hass. “This design, with its paper-tube applicator, became the Tampax tampon.” However, their use was discouraged since it was “thought to be sexually improper.”

Kenner first started working when she was just 14 years old at a woman’s hospital in Washington, D.C. After dropping out of Howard University, she worked various jobs to get by. By the time the Second World War came around, according to Houston Style Magazine, Kenner got a job working for the Census Bureau. She remained in government work for almost 20 years, later working for the General Accounting Office as well. But after 18 years of working for the United States government, in an interview Kenner stated that “when the government promoted people with less seniority than me and with less experience just because they were white, I knew it was time for me to move on.”

Kenner was also sometimes a chaperone for young women who went to dances at military bases. There, Kenner met a soldier whom she’d marry in 1945, but their marriage only lasted until 1950. The following year, Kenner married James “Jabbo” Kenner, an ex-heavyweight boxer. After being a housewife for a year, Kenner ended up opening a flower shop and for almost two decades, she ran up to “four flower shops scattered throughout Washington, D.C.” But even while running the flower shops, Kenner kept inventing in her free time.

Kenner and her husband fostered and raised five boys, although “Jabbo died before we could finish raising the children.” And according to Black Past, they also ended up adopting one of the foster children, Woodrow Kenner.

Kenner wasn’t the only inventive sister. Her sister Mildred also ended up being an inventor, creating a board game. When Mildred became diagnosed with multiple sclerosis and was “largely confined to her home,” according to the North Carolina Museum of History, she ended up coming up with a game to “teach family relationships.”

According to Board Game Geek, the game was called “Family Treedition” and featured cards representing various people in one’s family tree. “The object of the genealogy game is to earn points by placing on a board three cards from your hand that represent a correct relationship between blood relatives. For example, ‘my father’s first cousin is my second cousin.'” Mildred patented the game in 1980 and even copyrighted the written instructions of the game. And even though the game was intended for young people, “to help them understand their place in the extended family,” adults fell in love with the game as well. After printing just 100 games in October 1981, she’d already sold out by Christmas and had made plans to produce 500 more.

Despite strong early sales, Mildred didn’t invest a great deal in marketing and distribution, so sales eventually petered out. However, she was able to make back some of the money that she put into marketing the game.

When disposable menstruation pads started coming with an adhesive strip on the bottom, the belted menstruation pads soon fell out of favor. According to “Mothers and Daughters of Invention” by Autumn Stanley, adhesive pads were developed in the late 1960s, when companies like Kimberly-Clark came out with “beltless pads.” As noted in Bustle, when compared with adhesive pads, the belt presented significantly more problems. Since the pad was attached to the belt rather than underwear, it would move around while one walked, going from chafing one moment to giving “a wedgie the next.”

And due to the movement of the pad with the belt, leaks were significantly more common and were happily given up when adhesive pads came into the picture. The shift was so major, and sanitary belts were so quickly left behind and forgotten, that some books like “Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret” ended up rewriting out the use of sanitary belts because they so quickly “became obsolete.”

Tampons also became more popular as the obsession with virginity started to slowly wane and by the 1980s, a majority of people who menstruated were using tampons. However, some of these innovations caused problems, such as the deodorant tampon released by Playtex or the “super-absorbent tampon” made by Rely, both of which were linked to Toxic Shock Syndrome, according to Blood & Milk.