Once women won the right to vote in 1920, the menstruation-equals-inadequacy debate ebbed for a while. In fact, two decades later, new proof arrived that women were perfectly fit and capable — even when bleeding — and therefore should step right up and join the war effort. When Rosie the Riveter was needed in American factories and recruits in the Women’s Army Corps, the War Department produced films telling women of the abundance of scientific evidence proving periods are no big deal.

A 1942 American propaganda film, “Strictly Personal,” for example, coached novice Wacs on nutrition, rest and exercise. In one scene, a soldier lies listlessly on her cot — “I can’t drill today, I feel unwell,” she whines — but a fellow Wac tells her to buck up. And a voiceover “doctor” explains: “That’s Victorian stuff. And so is that trash about nerves and sensibility during this period.” Menstruation, he says, “is no excuse for absenteeism and self-coddling.”

But then the war ended, and Rosie and the Wacs were retired — and shown a fresh batch of studies proving that children need their moms at home, that the workplace is potentially hazardous to women’s unborn children and that women’s cycles make them less efficient workers than men. By 1953, the affliction premenstrual syndrome turned up in the medical literature.

Someone cynical might suggest that research highlighting menstruation’s distressing consequences bubbles to the surface every time the public feels anxious over women’s expanding roles. (Say, the possibility that there might be a menopausal woman in the White House — and yes, you can’t win for losing here, given that our periods allegedly drive us to distraction and their cessation does the same.) So take today’s hoopla over menstrual suppression with a grain of ibuprofen.

While it may be good news for the 8 percent of women who have debilitating periods (a constellation of symptoms known as premenstrual dysphoric disorder), the rest of us may be puzzled by the fuss. Sure, getting our periods can be a bother sometimes, but after the traumatic moment of menarche — “How can this be happening to me when the sixth-grade pool party is tomorrow and I have no idea where that tampon goes?” — most of us get used to it.

It just is.

This is not a particularly profitable attitude for Wyeth, angling for its share of the $1.7 billion annual American market for birth control pills. It’s also not terribly useful for Barr, which makes Seasonale, an oral contraceptive that reduces women’s periods to once every three months. Nor for Watson, which sells a generic equivalent.

So what’s a poor company to do? Re-conceptualize menstruation as a disease in need of treatment.

And what’s a poor menstruating woman to do? Get cranky with the prophets who offer to cure us of menstruation; who minimize the complex interplay of hormones and their many roles in our bodies; who gloss over the still unknown long-term effects of menstrual suppression; who promise that cycle-free women are better lovers, mothers, workers.

Or just don’t buy it.