What did women use for menstruation in Europe and America from 1700 - 1900, and probably earlier?
Many - most? - women probably used nothing.
Read this translated German quote:
"How did women handle their menstruation in daily life? In 1899 a German woman physician wrote the following advice in a book for German middle-class women ("Health in the House"):
'It is completely disgusting to bleed into your chemise, and wearing that same chemise for four to eight days can cause infections.'
"This was the age-old custom for rural women and women from the lower classes. Virtually only women in the theater professions wore close-fitting pads [Binden - see a modern American 'theatrical tampon'] or sponges and few women wore underpants or even used pads, which they made from cloth. Washing and changing underclothing was regarded as unhealthy, because women feared it would block the bleeding or cause more intense bleeding."
(The above is my translation of a quote, below, from "Zur Geschichte der Unterwäsche 1700-1960." 1988. Historisches Museum Frankfurt, p. 336, written by two women, Almut Junker and Eva Stille.
(Probably because of the increasing acceptance of germ theory, the authors report that German doctors in the 1880s and 1890s started proposing menstrual devices for women to wear to improve their health, for example here and here. American patents for menstrual devices start in 1854 for a belt with steel springs to hold a pad, but really don't pick up steam until the 1870s. In her PhD dissertation, Menstrual Technology in the United States [1994], Laura Klosterman Kidd writes that she found no proof that anyone used these patented devices, although it seems likely someone must have.)