History and Resources

In the West, it can be easy to forget history and how quickly mores and materials have changed. How women perceive menstruation, how they talk about it, and what they use has changed dramatically over the last three generations.

Western views of menstruation

Hippocrates, the father of Western medicine, proposed that menstruation was necessary to rid the body of excess blood, which was necessary more often for women than for men because women were colder and moister and required more regular purging. Pliny the Elder added that menstrual flow rid the body of impurities and was poisonous in all sorts of (now humorous) ways, including:

[menstrual blood can] make seeds infertile, kill insects, kill flowers, kill grass, cause fruit to fall off trees, dull razors and drive dogs mad. The glance of a menstruating woman could kill bees, her touch could make a horse miscarry, and contact with her blood would cause another woman to lose her child, as well. (see reference)

A century later Soranus in Rome came up with a “radical” alternative: menstrual blood was merely excessive and would decompose if not released regularly, a view which became rooted in seventeenth century medical thought. Scientific thought underwent may permutations of thought concerning menstruation, including that it was like estrus in dogs, made women deranged which could lead to myriad diseases and fatalities, or, our favorite, was a periodic disability. Says physical Freferick Hollick in 1847:

there is scarcely a single disease that [the menstrual cycle's] derangement will not either cause, or at least seriously aggrivate. It is therefore vitally important to attend to this matter, particularly in young persons approaching puberty! A little care at that time, properly bestowed, may prevent years of disease and suffering, if not untimely death! (as quoted p. 26 of The Modern Period, by one of our Senior Advisors Lara Friedenfelds, italics original)

Religious viewpoints were also dominant. Many cultures considered menstruating women to be unclean, and would have them removed for the duration of their period. It was only after a ritual bath that they would become ceremonially clean again and could return to society.

In many ways, in the West, it was only as religious institutions’ influence and authority slowly declined, in combination with scientific advancements which meant that we could understand ovulation and the shedding of the uterine lining. These, coupled with advances such as more affordable printing and videos made dissemination of information easier.

Managing menstruation over time

Perceptions and understandings of menstruation were one thing, managing it another. Women in the West tended to use cloth pads, often made at home and from old sheets, in a way similar to that of baby diapers, and fastened to a menstrual belt. In fact, they were called “diapers”. Wealthier women threw these pads away, poor women reused them. Both could choose to throw them down a pit latrine.

In the late 1800s and early 1900s, hygiene came to be a major class differentiator: the wealthier brushed their teeth, washed their clothes, bathed regularly and with soap, to name a few. Menstruation management came to be a class differential: Lara Friedenfelds notes that hanging your rags out to dry on your clothes line meant that you “were too poor to follow the more ‘hygienic’ and ‘modern’ practice of throwing away menstrual pads. Washing them thoroughly also involved stinky boiling on the stove.

Kotex was the first disposable sanitary pad made by Kimberly Clarke in 1921 and weighed in at the “comfortable” 22 inches long, with 33 layers of filler measuring 9 inches long by 3 inches wide (see first ad). This came at a time when societal norms were changing, when indoor plumbing was more the norm, when women were wearing tighter dresses, and entering the workforce, which made cloth rags more burdensome. Yet still for the poor, disposable sanitary pads were too expensive, and in the 1940s this became a major class divide between the working- and middle-classes.

Changing perceptions of women

Sanitary pads marketing rose and fell according to the perception of women. For instance, in the 1920s “flapper” culture, society was emphasizing women who went to college and entered the workforce, who were equals with their husbands, who took charge of their sexuality.

This flipped in the post-WWII culture where advertising was linked to returning to domesticity and being a stay-at-home, suburban mom. The 1960s sexual revolution meant more freedom for women, which was reflected in advertising.

Integral to this story is how menstruation was communicated to girls. Until advertising, really it wasn’t communicated. Girls just had to figure it out on their own. Companies, health workers, and others collaborated to try different ways of discussing menstruation in ways that didn’t link to sex, that weren’t “pornographic” in their opinion, and which gave only the “right amount of information. By 1964 it was estimated that  at least 47 million girls had seen The Story of Menstruation by Kimberly-Clark and the pamphlets Very Personally Yours and You’re a Young Lady Now had reached 31 million girls. By 1984, 100 million girls had watched The Story of Menstruation.

The cultural shift that these pamphlets and the disposable sanitary pads brought really cannot be understated. We now take for granted even tampons, which is another conversation altogether, which were introduced in 1936 for menstruation (versus medical management of non-menstrual vaginal bleeding), but took over 40 years to really pick up use in the mainstream.

Kenya and menstruation

This same story is playing out in Kenya, and across the global south, just a few decades later. As girls are required to go to school, to wear more fitted uniforms at school, to stand up when called upon in class, to play sports, and indeed to participate in every aspect of life like boys, different methods of managing menstruation are required, as are different cultural shifts in perceptions. Poor girls cannot afford sanitary pads, rags are too bulky and there is nowhere to safely wash and dry them. So instead, girls choose to miss school. Common amongst boarding school teachers is the lamentation that every month every girl seems to get sick for a few days, and it impedes her learning.

This need of affordable pads is real, is personal, directly shapes girls’ self-perception and self-confidence, and contributes significantly to a landslide of future choices and options. For instance, in cultures where girls are not valued as highly as their brothers – which is many, many cultures sadly – this absence in school which directly results in lowered grades becomes a liability to the family, and parents will often choose to remove the girl from school and, because she is a “woman” now, marry her off, get the bride price from the new husband, and move on. She now has more children, her lack of education prevents her from making a decent income, and the next generation remains in poverty.

Alternatively, she may take matters into her own hands, and find the equivalent in a day’s manual labor by sleeping with a man to obtain money for sanitary pads. This can result in STDs or HIV, and reduces her self-esteem, making her more likely to make poor decisions with men in the future.

Just like Kimberly-Clark in the 1920s, ZanaA and others are pioneering a new way to conceive of menstruation and promoting more cost-effective (and environmentally responsible) ways of managing menstruation. The story isn’t over, and for many girls now it is just beginning.

Resources to learn more about the history of menstruation

Books:

• The Modern Period: Menstruation in Twentieth-Century America, by Lara Friedenfelds
• Flow: The Cultural Story of Menstruation, by Susan Kim
• You can search for “the curse menstruation” on Amazon and find a plethora of books on the subject, but we haven’t read any of those. We recommend The Modern Period for its well-referenced facts and detailed compilation of interviews across cultures and generations in America
• Stay tuned for ZanaA! We’re working on a book about the history and cultural perceptions in Kenya

Websites (caveat that most all are from a Western point of view):

• Museum of Menstruation – kind of zany, rather disorganized, but full of information
• History of Menstrual Pads - good overview of history and the options available for managing menstruation
• Time Periods – a fun interactive timeline of events in menstrual history
• – a compilation of some articles and sites on the topic

Stay tuned for a discussion on alternative indigenous views of menstruation