On a bitter cold day in January 2018, a woman died in Nepal after she was forced to live in a menstruating hut. She had been banished to the unheated hut for the duration of her period, a still-common practice in Nepal, despite the fact that the weather often falls below zero degrees celsius in the winter. The woman died from smoke inhalation after she lit a fire to try to get warm.
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| A menstruating hut in Nepal |
This sad story was announced soon after the publication of an article on the politics
of periods that I wrote for a new online literary magazine called Boundless. Dedicated to long-form writing and
edited by the incomparable Arifa Akbar, former Independent literary editor,
it's a fantastic resource, and one that I urge readers to check out.
My article considered why periods are
so shameful when they are such a natural part of human
existence. Most major belief systems, including Christianity, Islam,
Hinduism and Buddhism, place restrictions on menstruating women.
Leviticus 15:19 and 24 states: ‘if a woman has an emission, and her
emission in her flesh is blood, she shall be seven days in her [menstrual]
separation, and anyone who touches her shall be tamei…[ritually
unclean] until evening.’ Followers of the Qur'an regard menstruation as
‘an impurity’, often banning menstruating women from religious and social
practices. In the Christian tradition, menstruation and pain in childbirth was
God’s punishment when Eve tempted Adam. This is the origin of the
'curse', a term still used for menstruation.
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| The creation of Eve (Wellcome Images) |
Menstruation has not been considered
'proper history' in the past. That is, before the 1970s and women's history,
family history and medical history found new ways of redressing the gender and
class imbalance of traditional history and exploring new sources. There remains
a limit to what we know about menstruation in the ancient world, however, since
records of the time were taken by men. They therefore didn't record women's
cycles, or consider what 'normal' might have been. Ancient Egyptian women are said to have used cloths on sticks to stem the flow, or wedges of papyrus, a plant-based material also used to make paper. Classical books talked about 'wombfuls' of blood, but were not specific about how much blood a woman might have lost.
In keeping with religious concerns
about menstruation,we do know that classical writers worried about
women's association with witchcraft, the natural world and spiritualism. Pliny
the Elder, a Roman author and philosopher, believed that menstruating
women could prevent hailstorms and protect crops. Period blood was not
always depicted as revolting; ancient Egyptians may have included menstrual
blood in medical recipes.
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| Pliny the Elder, killed by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, AD 79 |
What did women do without Tampax? The same as they do in most of
the world today. Ragged cloths that were washed seems the likely option,
especially in medieval times, and this explains the modern term 'on the rag' to
describe a menstruating woman. It is likely that poor women with little
access to hot water had little option but to use and reuse the same rag, or to
bleed on their clothes. By the nineteenth century there was more concern about
hygiene, and more 'scientific' language by which the female body and
menstruation was understood.
Sanitary belts were created by the end
of the nineteenth century, and washable pads could be attached to the
belt. By the 1980s, adhesive strips on sanitary towels and tampons were more
popular. But this did not mean that the shame around women's bodies and
menstruation was reduced. In the modern West, menstruation remains
shrouded in disgust and shame, even where scientific explanations show it to be
a natural biomedical process rather than related to magic or divinity.
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| Early 20th-century newspaper advert for a sanitary belt |
Consider European popular culture,
which has many slang words for periods, few of them positive. English
examples are Aunt Flo, Bloody Mary, Code Red, The Blob and Shark Week; while
the French included La semaine Ketchup (ketchup week), VHS (vaginalement hors
service), Les chutes du Niagra (Niagra Falls). And in German: Die
rote pest (the red pest) and Besuchvon Tante Rosa (a visit from Aunt
Rose).
It's not just periods, but women who
are on their periods that are the subject of disempowering language. Menstruating
women are ‘PMS-ing’, ‘On the Blob’ or ‘Out of Service’. Jokes about
menstruation depict periods as a disruptive force that lessens women’s
intellectual capacities, and reduces them to their biological function.
In schools, children are taught a basic
biomedical model: each month the uterine lining thickens and becomes
vascularized in case an egg is fertilised. If it is not, the unused blood is
released as a period. Boys and girls (and boys are usually excluded from the
classroom) are not taught the psychological, social or cultural contexts of
menstruation, of the constituents of period blood, of the different cycles
girls might experience, or how cycles can differ between girls. Menstruation
simply marks girls and women apart as different and, in some contexts inferior,
like the poor girl who died in Nepal, or the thousands of women
from developing countries who cannot attend school because they do not
have sanitary supplies. 'Period poverty' is also a problem
in the UK.
It's striking how little we have
progressed from nineteenth-century ideas about menstruation, which is where
much of our language of the body comes from. Victorian medics were
convinced that menstruation weakened women, providing evidence of their
biological and spiritual inferiority. Women were already regarded as hysterical
because of their ‘wandering wombs’ that caused havoc with women’s mental and
physical health. Walter Heape, the anti-suffragist and Cambridge
zoologist, drew attention to the terrifying spectacle of menstruation, that
left behind ‘a ragged wreck of tissue, torn glands, ruptured vessels, jagged
edges of stroma, and masses of blood corpuscles.’ Menstruating women couldn’t
possibly tackle work, education or intellectual concerns, argued prominent
Victorian writers, which women like Mary Wollstonecraft did much to tackle.
Discussions of periods used economic
languages of production in the industrial age, with women’s bodies as
baby-making factories: profitable or unprofitable, depending on their ability
to produce. If conception was the proper result of the menstrual cycle,
menstruation was failed production. The tissue lost during menstruation was
‘debris’ and waste. Early pregnancy failure was a ‘blighted ovum’, a womb that
opened up too soon, an 'incompetent cervix'.
Scientific medicine still talks about
menstruation in these terms. The social meaning of menstruation also takes on
different emphases throughout a woman’s life, highlighting the demand for youth
in the modern West – at least for women. For an individual, menopause, or the
literal stopping of the menses, might bring all kinds of exciting
new opportunities into a woman's life. Yet in narrowly biomedical terms,
it signals her lack of reproductive competence, and her social and sexual
irrelevance. Menopausal women have a tendency to become invisible.
In all kinds of areas, 21st
century women campaign for more social visibility, and equity with regard to
their bodies, including around menstruation. In the digital age, new
opportunities arise for us to talk about periods and how they are framed in
society. For example, isn’t it extraordinary, given the fact that the
average woman menstruates for 3,000 days, that there is no symbol for
menstruation? There are, after all, emojis for everything from crystal balls to
sushi, from faeces to tears. This is why the charity Plan International
UK has been campaigning for a period emoji to allow people to communicate
more openly. Nearly 55,000 people voted. The winner? A pair of white pants,
decorated with two drops of blood.
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| The world's first period emoji, courtesy of Plan International |
Finding spaces to talk about
menstruation in its own right and not as linked to fertility is important –
and not only to avoid biological reductionism. The presumption that
menstruation equals fertility and womanhood excludes women born without wombs
as well transgender woman. It excludes women who choose not to have children,
or are unable to have children.
Reframing how we talk about the body,
and rejecting historical ideas that are outmoded or reductive, is not
new. Since the 1970s, the shaming and silencing of menstruation has been
subverted. Feminist artists initially made periods visible. Judy Chicago’s ‘Menstruation Bathroom’ (1972),
showcased a bin filled with used sanitary towels. In the 1990s, Tracy Emin
casually disposed of used tampons in ‘My Bed’ (1998), described as ‘a violent mess of sex and death’. In 2015 Kiran Ghandi ran the London marathon
while menstruating, and without using tampons or pads, to highlight menstrual
stigma. And in 2017 the #BloodNormal campaign won the right to use red
rather than blue fluid in menstrual product advertising. This important step demystifies
the idea and image of period blood, and marks a shift towards normalizing
menstruation.
Periods are political, as their history
shows. Which is why we need more education about what is 'normal' or abnormal,
more discussion about the differences between women, and better metaphors for
women's bodies that aren't based on outdated ideas of the factory. When it
comes to the history and experience of menstruation we need less shaming, and more talking. Period.
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| Joel Filipe, on Unsplash.com |
My website: www.fayboundalberti.com
Twitter: @fboundalberti
