Track your menstrual cycle
I love your Web page! I just wanted to tell you that and suggest a Web site to add to your links page. It is cyclespage.com, which is an application to help women track their menstrual pages. It is easy to use and the basic service is free. I hope that you will visit the site and decide to add it to your site.
Once again, I love your site and hope you keep up the good work! [Many thanks!]
from Minnesota, USA
What did women "do" for menstruation in the past?
A male writes,
Maybe I'll stumble across the source sometime again. [I've asked the writer to please send me any sources he re-finds for the following information.]
Somewhere along the way, not actually looking for such information, I read that poor women (everyone but the rich), which naturally includes slaves, spent their periods mostly either standing, in which case they wiped frequently and also just dropped the blood and clotted stuff onto the ground or floor, or they sat on absorbent like straw, moss, or similar stuff. Since wearing "drawers," even the "open bottom" kind that was available until the mid-1920's, only just began to come into style in the late 1700's, it was fairly easy for them to reach under and wipe themselves. The wide dresses with a half dozen petticoats were worn only by the well-to-do. Ordinary women wore simple shifts except on special occasions. To keep from bleeding onto the skirt the woman merely lifted the back of her skirt out and sat directly on the absorbent.
In the Bible, Genesis 31:34, 35, Rachel is shown: "Now Rachel had taken [her father's] household idols, put them in the camel's saddle, and sat on them. And Laban [her father] searched all about the tent but did not find them. And she said to her father,'Let it not displease my lord that I cannot rise before you, for the manner of women is with me.' And he searched but did not find the teraphim."
Of course it was not that she was too weak to stand up. It was that when a woman was menstruating she was not expected to disturb her seat on absorbent, or as in this case, on a seat that was not damaged by the flow.
Women in rural regions of America were still going bare-bottomed under their skirts until the World War II era [as apparently they often were in Germany and probably other parts of Europe; see links below], and in much of the world they still go without underpants. Wherever they aren't paranoid about their "privates" being glimpsed it is much more practical for them to go without, which I think is a good guess as to why women have gone through most of history without.
[In a general way this is what your MUM has "discovered" from European sources. See three sections on this site: a very short discussion of underwear and its relationship to menstruation; and What did women use for menstruation? Part 1 and Part 2.
[By the way, the writer also contributed the only comments on stopping menstruation to the Would you stop menstruating if you could? page that I remember a male making.
[The writer also added an interesting article:
You might be interested in this:
http://www.holysmoke.org/fem/fem0426.htm
Magazine: New Age Journal
Issue: May/June 1994
Title: Blood Sisters
Author: Susan Roberts
Blood Sisters: By honoring the fertility cycle, the menstrual-health
movement seeks to reclaim an ancient source of female power.]
Teacher likes this site
Dear Harry,
I have just visited your MUM Web site (linked from Discovery Health Channel site) and am thrilled. I teach human sexuality at the community college level in California and I can't wait to tell my students about your site next semester. I especially appreciate your comments about menstruation not being a medical issue, but a cultural one. I love your view of the future museum, as a social and educational space. I look forward to keeping in touch with your efforts!
Thanks, [You're welcome!]
Book about menstruation published in Spain
The Spanish journalist who contributed some words for menstruation to this site last year and wrote about this museum (MUM) in the Madrid newspaper "El País" just co-authored with her daughter a book about menstruation (cover at left).
She writes, in part,
Dear Harry Finley,
As I told you, my daughter (Clara de Cominges) and I have written a book (called "El tabú") about menstruation, which is the first one to be published in Spain about that subject. The book - it talks about the MUM - is coming out at the end of March and I just said to the publisher, Editorial Planeta, to contact you and send you some pages from it and the cover as well. I'm sure that it will be interesting to you to have some information about the book that I hope has enough sense of humour to be understood anywhere. Thank you for your interest and help.
If you need anything else, please let me know.
Best wishes,
Margarita Rivière
Belen Lopez, the editor of nonfiction at Planeta, adds that "Margarita, more than 50 years old, and Clara, 20, expose their own experiences about menstruation with a sensational sense of humour." (Later this month more information will appear on the publisher's site, in Spanish.)
My guess is that Spaniards will regard the cover as risqué, as many Americans would. And the book, too. But, let's celebrate!
Two weeks ago I mentioned that Procter & Gamble was trying to change attitudes in the Spanish-speaking Americas to get more women to use tampons, specifically Tampax - a hard sell.
Compare this cover with the box cover for the Canadian television video about menstruation, Under Wraps, and the second The Curse.
An American network is now developing a program about menstruation for a popular cable channel; some folks from the network visited me recently to borrow material.
And this museum lent historical tampons and ads for a television program in Spain last year.
Now, if I could only read Spanish! (I'm a former German teacher.)
Irregular menses identify women at high risk for polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS), which exists in 6-10% of women of reproductive age. PCOS is a major cause of infertility and is linked to diabetes.
