On 'Ritual Rest' in Religion...
I have been thinking lately about a practice I've begun to label 'ritual rest.'
Years ago, while I was a wee Lullabyes studying at a Catholic school (a long but fun story for later), the Mother Superior told me that women used to be 'churched' after childbirth - and in many cultures still are. When I asked why, she got this conspiratorial twinkle in her eyes and whispered that it was partly so their husbands would not pressure them for sex immediately after giving birth.
At the time, wee Lullabyes filed this away under 'quaint Catholic things,' and went on with her wee life. But age, time and circumstances have made me think about it again and again over the years.
Last year, having spent an extended time in rural Turkey (another long and very fun story), I noticed similar rhythms around women’s bodies. Menstruating women do not pray or fast. Postpartum women are treated as being in a protected forty-day state. There are rules, exemptions, customs, taboos, aunties with soups, warnings, and general fussing.
Some of it is religious. Some of it is folk belief.
Most of it is women enforcing on other women the wisdom of what my Gran Madda used to call 'siddown before ya fall down.'
While wee, I also spent time around Orthodox Judaism (equally long story) and grew up familiar with the other version. Under the laws of niddah, husbands and wives abstain from sexual relations during menstruation and for a period afterward, and childbirth carries its own postpartum restrictions until ritual purification.
Three religions that, news cycles would have you believe, disagree on almost everything - yet nevertheless they've converged on remarkably similar rhythms around women's bodies.
As an atheist, I do not believe the metaphysics of it. I do not think blood makes someone spiritually dangerous. Nor do I think divine bureaucracies require menstrual leave from prayer.
However I am increasingly interested in what these rituals do socially.
On paper, a lot of these customs read as exclusion. The woman is set apart. She cannot do certain things. She is marked as being in a different state from everyone else.
And yes, that can absolutely become humiliating depending on the family, the community, and the temperament of whoever is enforcing it.
Religion has never struggled to find ways to make women feel watched, and more importantly, diminished.
Still, there is another layer here that I find harder to dismiss.
In many societies, historically but also in the present day, women are not always afforded the legal, social, or financial protections that can spare them from the consequences of refusal.
They cannot always say, "No, I am bleeding," or "No, I just gave birth," or "No, I am exhausted and my body hurts."
In these instances, the ritual can say it for them.
A husband might ignore a wife's discomfort. He might dismiss her pain. He might expect dinner, sex, ceremony, guests, childcare, obedience, compliance, enthusiasm-
But a husband is less able to argue with an entire institution comprised of: God, local customs, his mom, her mom, her extended kin, his friends' wives, the neighbors + the entire ancestral machine of "Nope."
That is the part I keep circling back to.
Not in the sense of romanticization; a cage with cushions is still a cage. But sometimes, in a world that already cages women in every aspect, a ritual pause may have been one of the few bars they could lean against.
There is also something grimly practical about it. Speaking from experience, after childbirth, the body needs time. Blood loss needs replenishment. Birth needs recuperation. The torn, leaking, fever-prone, milk-swollen body needs a sense of respite. Modernity likes to pretend people should be productive immediately. Older cultures, for all their purported superstition, often seemed to understand that a body crossing certain thresholds had to be handled carefully.
And yes, they wrapped that understanding in purity language. Many cultures, faiths and rituals called it pollution / danger / filth / unfitness/ uncleanness. All of those meanings got tangled together with vulnerability / restoration / healing / protection until nobody could separate theology from common sense.
Yet the double nature is precisely what fascinates me.
A menstrual exemption can be misogyny. It can also be mercy.
A postpartum taboo can be control. It can also be convalescence.
A woman being set apart can mean she is being shamed. It can also mean she is being guarded.
The same custom can be oppressive in one house and lifesaving in another. It depends who holds the rule, who benefits from it, and whether the woman herself is allowed to experience it as rest rather than punishment.
I do not believe in ritual purity.
But I am starting to understand why women across cultures may have preserved some of these practices even when the official explanation sounds, to modern ears, insulting, diminishing or absurd.
Sometimes the stated reason is not the whole reason. More tellingly, sometimes women inherit a crippling religious rule and deftly turn it into labor law.
In those cases, "God says no" may become the only socially acceptable way to say, "My body is not yours today."
Boyarin, Daniel. Carnal Israel: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture. University of California Press, 1993.
Buckley, Thomas, and Alma Gottlieb, editors. Blood Magic: The Anthropology of Menstruation. University of California Press, 1988.
Cohen, Ilana. "Menstruation and Religion: Developing a Critical Menstrual Studies Approach." The Palgrave Handbook of Critical Menstruation Studies, edited by Chris Bobel et al., Palgrave Macmillan, 2020. NCBI Bookshelf, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK565592/.
Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966.
Dunnavant, Nicki C., and Tomi-Ann Roberts. "Restriction and Renewal, Pollution and Power, Constraint and Community: The Paradoxes of Religious Women's Experiences of Menstruation." Sex Roles, vol. 68, no. 1–2, 2013, pp. 121–31, doi:10.1007/s11199-012-0132-8.
Gottlieb, Alma. "Menstrual Taboos: Moving Beyond the Curse." The Palgrave Handbook of Critical Menstruation Studies, edited by Chris Bobel et al., Palgrave Macmillan, 2020. NCBI Bookshelf, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK565616/.
Koren, Sharon Faye. Forsaken: The Menstruant in Medieval Jewish Mysticism. Brandeis University Press, 2011.
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