Not a Pretty History

(by permission from www.onewoman.com)

Menstruation is not a good thing according to Western history. Most old medical and religious writings on menstruation discuss it as shameful, unclean or unhealthy. These beliefs come from very ancient menstrual taboos. Ancient Greek and Roman writers described menstrual fluid as powerful and unclean. For example, the Roman historian Pliny the Elder described menstrual fluid as having these powers:

"Contact with it turns new wine sour, crops touched by it become barren, grafts die, seed in gardens are dried up, the fruit of trees fall off, the edge of steel and the gleam of ivory are dulled, hives of bees die, even bronze and iron are at once seized by rust, and a horrible smell fills the air; to taste it drives dogs mad and infects their bites with an incurable poison..."

And to think I'd always thought the packs of bees and dogs following me around were attracted by my animal magnetism.

Most of the writing we have from the past is written by men, and of course, men don't have periods. So it should not be surprising that they thought menstruation was awfully strange, since they did not bleed that way. It had to be normal not to have periods (after all, they didn't), and they searched for the reasons women bled. They believed there had to be something inferior about the way women are put together. Or they thought women bled because they were cursed by God. Some thought that women just had too much blood, so some of it had to come out monthly. Others thought women menstruated because they didn't exercise or get out of the house as much as men did. They thought the blood came out of the womb (uterus) because the womb was considered the weakest organ in the body, so it was the place the blood was most attracted to, like a hole in a bucket. At one point they thought the womb could move around inside the body, even go up a woman's throat, and cause all sorts of strange medical problems. This was known as the "wandering womb."

These strange stories go on up to the present day. As late as the 1960's, medical guide books suggested that women should not take baths or exercise during their periods. If menstruation has always been feared or misunderstood, how do we learn to feel good about our bodies when we bleed?