Johnson & Johnson marketed the first commercial disposable sanitary napkins, 'Lister's Towels,' leveraging Lister's antiseptic principles and catalog sales via Sears. Though initially met with limited acceptance due to taboos around advertising and purchasing such products, it signaled the shift toward industrialized menstrual management. This product targeted middle-class women seeking greater mobility and cleanliness.

The advent of commercial products coincided with the New Woman movement in literature, where authors like Kate Chopin and Charlotte Perkins Gilman depicted women's struggles for autonomy, including bodily freedom. These innovations indirectly empowered female voices in poetry and prose by reducing some physical barriers to public life, influencing 20th-century modernist poets who addressed gender and modernity more openly.