The Shame of Menstruation

The media was horrified when Christina Aguilera appeared on stage in 2012, with what appeared to be menstrual blood running down her leg during a performance at Etta James’ memorial service. The barrage of tweets that followed described the incident as gross, embarrassing or speculated that it was really fake tan. But whether the comments were negative or supportive, the uniform assumption was that any woman would be embarrassed to have menstrual blood running down her leg in public. And yet, this would not always have been the public view.

Most of us have heard about a variety of materials being used in the past to create home-made sanitary towels or tampons, ranging from rags to sheepskin and moss. And some of us have heard about customs where menstruating women would stay in a hut set aside for this purpose and bleed directly onto the floor or straw. What is less well known is that from the 18th to the early 20th century, in parts of Europe and America, many lower class women did not use any sanitary protection at all. Instead they bled directly into their clothes or let their menstrual blood run down their legs.

For example, in 1899 a German woman physician wrote the following advice in a book Health in the House aimed at the German middle-class women.

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“It is completely disgusting to bleed into your chemise, and wearing that same chemise for four to eight days can cause infections”

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This certainly implies that women were indeed bleeding directly onto their clothes. The Museum of Menstruation (MUM) in Washington DC confirms this.

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“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….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.”

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And some women simply let the blood run down their legs onto the floor. Again from MUM:

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“..her mother (was) one of the only women in the village (in Mexico) to sew underwear for herself and her children, and said that she assumes that her neighbors and friends just menstruated directly onto the floor. As a matter of fact, she vividly recalls (as a very young child) watching a neighbor hurriedly wiping a small puddle of blood off the floor..”

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While in Britain:

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“In 1900 Britain, Suffragist Selina Cooper was horrified to discover that some lower class women still did not use any menstrual devices. She discovered that women working in a mill did not use sanitary napkins, they just bled straight onto the floor (which was covered in straw to absorb the blood). The mill women believed that the smell and flow attracted potential husbands because they were signs of fertility.”

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It is clear there was a strong class divide with this practice. For example, when Suffragettes were first imprisoned, they found that no provision was made for sanitary protection, as it was assumed that the class of women who were prisoners, would not need any such facilities. This implies that women prisoners simply bled onto the floor of their cells.

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When I first read about women bleeding directly onto floors, I had assumed this was due to poverty, particularly as all the descriptions of women doing this, are of lower class women. After all, even with rags, women still need access to facilities to wash them and some means, such as underwear, to keep them in place. But as the quote about the mill women begins to say, some women bled onto floors, because they believed that the smell of menstrual blood and the sight of it on their legs was a sign of fertility and made them more attractive to any future husband. If some women thought that, it is safe to assume that some men thought it made women more attractive too. And we can see from the tale below, that even when some women were offered sanitary protection, they refused to use it. In the Lancashire cotton mills in England in the 1890’s comes this tale.

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women in those days didn’t wear any sanitary protection, all their petticoats would be covered in blood every month. And my mother made some towelling (pads)…for a woman she worked with….Anyhow this (girl’s) mother came back and played pop at the mill with the manager, because my mother had given this girl (some towels). She said how was her daughter ever going to get off if they didn’t know about this smell? Like an animal! (My mother said there) used to be blood on the floor of the winding room….Of course, they wore drawers, and they were just legs up to here and all open at the – and of course it went straight down on to the floor, or on to the petticoats. It was an attraction. This woman played pop with the manager. My mother nearly got sacked for making her (daughter) some sanitary towels.”

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What also stands out is that the presumably male manager accepted that the women would bleed onto the mill floor. This indicates that there was an acceptance amongst both women and men, at least in working class circles, that bleeding openly like this was normal.

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Sadly these accounts leave us with many questions that I certainly am currently unable to answer. So for example, when did this attitude to menstrual bleeding change and why? Why has the fact that it was relatively recently acceptable to openly bleed amongst some women, been erased from our history and largely forgotten? And when exactly did this practice die out? Any information or memories are welcome and gratefully received.

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REFERENCES and FURTHER INFORMATION:

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