How did people with a female body deal with menstruation in earlier centuries? what would someone from OaLC part3 say to the modern construct of period shaming as misogyny?
If you ever look up Medieval women and menstruating and find something that says, âwomen just bled into their clothesâ rest assured, you have found something written by a man who had no fucking idea how periods worked.
The fact that people are still perpetuating that bad guess, including women writing on the subject who really should know better, is completely ridiculous.
Basically, you asked this question and I lost like two hours to research to find sources that werenât horseshit.
But there is more! In no particular order: They say we donât have any archeological evidence for what they used. (Yes we do.) We donât have any written documents referencing it. (Yes we do.) Women wore red petticoats to bleed into them. (Those were to avoid showing stains, dumbass.) Women used wool to soak up blood. (OMFG STOP SAYING THAT, wool is itchy and it repels moisture!)
So. Much. Utter. Bullshit.
There is evidence for underwear-like garments made of sealskin with blood moss remnants. One is waterproof; the other is so super absorbent that it can be rinsed of blood, wrung out, and re-used. (We know this because while there isnât much of anything written down regarding the use of blood moss for periods, scribes wax poetic about it in regards to battle wounds and surgeries.)An archaeologist discussing the sealskin find thought it was likely an incontinence garment considering the age of the skeleton it was found attached to, but if these garments existed, it really isnât a stretch to postulate that variants were used for periods as well. The design would have been similar, too, but with cotton used in place of sealskin, and cotton âpocketsâ stuffed with blood moss to absorb the blood, be rinsed out, and used again.
A Greek historian wrote about a woman so enraged by a suitor who wouldnât leave her be that she removed her blood-soaked cloth pad and flung it into his face. (omg time travel machine and a video camera needed for this moment.)
Pliny, of course, wrote that women were poison on their periods and shouldnât be allowed anywhere when on their courses, but he was a raving mysoginist even by Roman standards. (Unfortunately, a lot of modern people would get on well with Pliny.)
Medieval churches preached that women were unclean/useless/suffering from Eveâs Sin, so of course they should be kept away from church and away from fields and livestock, lest their uncleanliness contaminate things. However, land owners with planted fields likely gave no fucks about the Churchâs claimsâthey needed the help, male or female, bleeding or not. Women needed the money they could earn doing various tasks, bleeding or not.
(Fun maybe-fact! Medieval women who were in convents were considered holy in comparison to their not-convented brethren because they tended to no longer have periods, i.e. no longer suffering Eveâs Sin due to their piousness. A strict conventâs diet and almost no body fat will do that for ya. The moment these women left the convent and started eating normal foods, if they werenât already menopausalâbam, periods again! Thus âprovingâ that they were now terrible sinners again. *sigh* This is despite the fact that medical practitioners of the time fucking well knew better. They would tell women who were struggling to have a regular menstrual cycle to each rich food and drink.)
âReturning tothe purely practical aspect of menstruation, women of all classes needed somemethod of absorbing blood flow. Well into the twentieth century, the age-old âragsâwere used, torn and stuffed between the legs, although they were dependent uponthe use of some form of girdle of underwear to hold them in place. Trotula refers to wads of cotton being used to clean the female genitals, inside and out. Certains types of moss were also used to absord the blood flow from wounds and may well have also been used by women to staunch their flow as well as filling for washable cloth pads. Other recent suggestions have included cloth tampons, anointed with honey and oil, with a tie around the thigh. Thetraditional red coloured petticoats, worn next to the skin under many layers ofskirts may have owed their existence in part to a desire to minimise and absorbstains. Those engaged in manual work or physical activity must have had someway of ensuring their rags or pads remained in place. The discovery of a verymodern looking pair of pants in an Austrian castle in 2008 suggests that suchsupport was available, although the nature of medieval and Tudor undergarmentsstill leaves many questions unanswered.â
Sources that are (Mostly) not bullshit and at least consider how the Real World bloody works: http://onthetudortrail.com/Blog/2015/02/10/the-lady-in-red-medieval-menstruation/
https://rosaliegilbert.com/femininehygiene.html
http://authorherstorianparent.blogspot.com/2012/12/to-bring-on-flowers-medieval-women.html
https://www.femmeinternational.org/the-history-of-the-sanitary-pad/
Modern Period Commentary stumbled over in the process:
A Brief History of Your Period, and Why You Donât Have to Have It
Around the World in 28 Periods
Some Cultures Treating Periods with Respect
Banished for Menstruating (focuses on India but the same sort of practice is also done in Nepal)
