The Martha Trescott Prize will be given annually for the best published essay in one of two areas. In even-numbered years, the prize will be awarded to an outstanding published historical essay in the area of women in technology. In odd-numbered years, the prize will be awarded to an outstanding published essay in the area of social responsibility of engineers in history. Martha Trescott was one of the pioneering spirits behind Women in Technological History (WITH). She wished to honor Frances McConnell Moore, Carroll Pursell, and Edwin T. Layton, Jr., with this prize.
Camilla Mørk Røstvik, University of Agder
For: “Tampon Technology in Britain: Unilever’s Project Hyacinth and the ‘7-Day War’ Campaign, 1968–1980.” Technology and Culture 63, no. 1 (2022): 61–86
The 2024 Martha Trescott Prize recognizes an outstanding published historical essay in the area of women and technology in history. This year, we received a wide collection of thoughtful essays, treating the full range of approaches from representations of gender roles in language, to the experience of people perceived as female in the technological workplace, to explorations of technologies of reproduction. Our prize winner exposes intersections of engineering, business strategies, test marketing, and gathered opinions of users in the arena of menstrual management technologies. In her T&C article “Tampon Technology in Britain: Unilever’s Project Hyacinth and the ‘7-Day War’ Campaign, 1968–1980” (Technology and Culture 63, no. 1 (2022): 61–86) Camila Mørk Røstvik’s creative use of corporate archives and contemporary politics and visual culture offers insight not only into the business process behind a product never actually introduced, but also into attitudes toward gender and body technologies in 1970s era UK. The committee found Røstvik’s article both accessible and theoretically sophisticated as it explicates intersections of technological change, corporate marketing, gender ideologies, and the expertise of users of technologies of the body, situating marketing options in a wider political and social context.
Unilever’s “Project Hyacinth” was an overarching effort to include tampons in its product offerings, in competition with other major producers of “feminine hygeine” and “sanitary” technologies. Eventually focusing on newly developed absorbent gels, (with an eye to eventually expanding into the diapers/nappies market), planners carefully tracked existing and emerging products as well as market research. Probably fortunately for both Unilever at the time, and for the survival of untapped archival materials decades later, competing US corporation Proctor and Gamble was first to market with the new “superabsorbent” products (Rely tampons) — and thus bore the brunt of frightening publicity when toxic shock syndrome (TSS) became associated with their new tampons. Unilever shut down its UK project, which was well underway by that time.
Røstvik’s article focuses on the corporate interactions with user expertise, highlighting the paradox of recognized need for the expertise of people who menstruate with the ways researchers attempted to assign psychological patterns to technological choices, and the overlain process of sifting potential-user responses to proposed marketing strategies. Røstvik’s multi-faceted analysis of the decision to develop an advertising campaign based on the idea of menstrual management as a “7-day war” fought privately by women every month situates an often hidden technology (1970s UK censorship law prohibited explicit reference to tampon as object) in a wider range of political and cultural context. A series of well-chosen images help the reader envision references from product design to popular culture. Martha Moore Trescott’s legacy of uncovering reliance on women’s expertise and situating women in the history of technology is well honored as well as extended by Røstvik’s work.