How the women in nazi concentration camps coped with their periods.

Thanks for the interesting article. So true that in our society men’s bodily functions are something to be proud of but women must feel shame at theirs. The sad thing is that so many women and girls still have no access to sanpro and are using rags or whatever they can to deal with their periods

Thank you. A truly moving article.

And thanks to Thesepreciousthings as well - I read The White Hotel at a particularly vulnerable point in late teens. It wasn’t good.

Interesting article, thank you.

One of my relations had her first period just as she became a prisoner of the Japanese in 1942. I don't think she had another until after the war. Although she married, she never had children, and I have always wondered if that was connected to the starvation and abuse she suffered in her teens.

Cocolapew wtf?!

Thanks for that.
When I was at school (the 80's) I asked this question in my history class and got detention

Thank you for posting that, OP, and also Thesepreciousthings .

(Appalling grammar there but I am dreadfully underslept. Apologies.)

This could be incredibly outing but I did my dissertation on sexual violence against Jewish women during the Holocaust. I looked at how this particular experience was erased during the time period. The extra fear and vulnerability of these women added another layer to their trauma that was largely ignored as the primary oppression women were thought to face was their Jewishness.

Sadly the biggest threat to these women was often not the camp guards etc but some of the American liberation soldiers.

It’s also interesting to look at how these experiences, although few and far between have been represented in literature. In many cases it has been fetishised quite predictably by men. Case in point the fascinating but disturbing ‘The White Hotel’.

Off on a tangent but thought that extra insight in women’s experiences of the Holocaust may be of interest.

What a heartbreaking read. I have never thought about it before. Thank you so much for posting OP.

I was talking about serfs. Real bottom of the heap. Women too poor to have rags, which you're quite right, any woman who could afford a linen shift would use.

Incidentally, women in some places used a tall vase or pot full of water in the corner of their bedrooms in which they'd drop the bloody cloths until they washed the lot. This, it has been suggested, is where the famous murderer, Lizzie Borden, stashed the murder weapon as the men investigating the crimes wouldn't have dreamt of looking there.

Thanks for sharing, that was a very interesting read. I often wondered how women in concentration camps or women in any other brutal situations like enslaved women or women on overcrowded coffin ships managed when they had their periods. Of course many would have stopped menstruating due to stress and starvation but that article makes it clear that this wasn't the case for every woman. I'm glad we're at a point in history where we can research and discuss these issues now and history can be told from a woman's perspective.

History is taught so much from the male perspective that we often don’t even think about the way women coped.

This isn't necessarily true. My son is currently doing GCSE History. They are taught how women's lives changed between world war 1 and world war 2, that German women had more freedoms than women in many other countries under Weimar Constitution after World War 1 and how this changes under Nazi rule.

In the Middle Ages ordinary women just bled - another use for reeds, in this case the ones used to cover the floor.

( nerdy QI fact coming up) Common myth I'm afraid. We don't know conclusively but they probably used old rags and a belt. "Knickers" per se don't come in for another few hundred years, but their undergarments (shifts) were white linen/hemp/nettle fibre, and cloth was expensive; they would have done practical things to keep it (and the clothes above it) from getting stained with blood.

Never seen that movie, LarryGreysonDoor. I will have to check it out.

When I was 14, already a fierce feminist, I did a school project on periods through the ages. It wasn't very insightful or detailed as pre internet so not a lot of accessible sources. As I recall the Ancient Egyptians used the cellulose inside reeds as tampons, which sounded like a plan. In the Middle Ages ordinary women just bled - another use for reeds, in this case the ones used to cover the floor.

However my memory is a bit sketchy. 14 is a long time ago now.

Thank you for posting that.

Wow, really interesting, thank you for posting - i’m another one who assumed that malnutrition would have meant periods stopping - but that was only the tip of the iceberg!

Thanks for posting that

There are plenty of bathroom scenes in movies and TV-Shows. They can be action-packed, people talking about things in private, people hiding things in bathrooms. People getting eaten by dinosaurs.

Very few times will it involve periods though, even when it's women in the bathroom.

Extraordinary how I learned at a relatively young age, before I began to menstruate, about Mengele's work and the human experimentation and vivisection, truly revolting things, yet never learned that menstruation saved women from it. Menstruation being too 'shameful' to discuss, too 'revolting' to have been a good thing.

To be fair, you hardly ever see anyone in films going to the loo either. But yes, menstruation is particularly invisible in most of history as well as fiction.

Thank you for sharing this. I sometimes wondered how women cope with hardships and menstruation at the same time, but I hardly ever seen it in writing.

I sometimes even wonder while I watch a movie, when people are far removed from creature comforts, how these women deal with the facts of life. You never see it.

Wow. That is powerful thank you for sharing

I read that the other day. Fascinating but so sad.