This article on Freebleeding is really interesting

[Mignonette]

Freebleeding - why is this taboo when images of violence, sex and repression are not?

Or should we see menstruation as nothing more than a process of excretion and attach no special significance to it?

[DuskAndShiver]

I don't know whether this is just my hidebound post-industrial squeamishness, but I am really struggling now to believe the quotation about the woman who got into trouble for providing san pro to a young woman because her parents said she could not be "got off" (married) without the sight and the smell of blood.

If this was common, why is there only one identical quotation that keeps popping up in diffferent places? I think it is either unusual, or made up, but so weirdly sensational that people can't help reproducing it

If anyone has any other sources then I will happily eat my words

[Grennie]

Dusk, there is other quotations about the fact that women in the working class used to bleed freely. But that is the only one I have read about pads being rejected. Whether that was a common attitude or not is very difficult to know, as I suspect a poor woman being offered free pads was probably quite rare.

I also read a quote from a disgusted well off woman, about a local factory owner who used to give poor young women money to do handstands in front of them. Most poor women then in the UK did not wear underwear, so he was basically paying them to expose themselves.

[Grennie]

Freebleeding would be practically difficult now. But when poor people lived in homes with dirt floors, it would have been less of an issue. Also because of frequent pregnancies and breastfeeding, periods were actually much less common in the past. So it may not have been such a big issue as it would now.

I went to China on holiday and you could still see some families with older babies, who wore trousers with an open hole for them to pee and poo through.

[GarlicReturns]

But, yes, if cool young boarders and eccentric artists can draw attention to the fact that women bleed, then good! You never see it in films & TV. I recall a sanitary towel appearing in one solitary CSI episode, in which a trans woman had lied to her victim that she was a born woman. A detective found the pad gently smeared with blood - and I was asking the telly whether none of them had actually seen evidence of a real period!

I wonder if this has anything to do with the media idea of women always ready to be impregnated? It's the only time of the month when we're almost certainly infertile (and a messy shag.)

[PleaseJustLeaveYourBrotherAlon]

But if there were no taboo wouldn't you find it mentioned in loads of novels? Especially ones about working class?

[Grennie]

Yes you would. You read after all about toilets in more gritty working class novels.

[PleaseJustLeaveYourBrotherAlon]

Sorry, I think you're being sarcastic, but I'm actually too tired to be sure right now. What I mean is if a story were set in a work house with girls weaving (or whatever they did in work houses) wouldn't the description of the setting mention the blood, the smell or even the hay?

[AngelaDaviesHair]

I don't know, I think that while low status women would have had to freebleed, it would carry a stigma for that reason alone-associated with poverty. So they would have been forced to be open/blase about it, without that attitude being repeated in 'polite' society, literature etc.

In the same way that working women through the ages were always less covered up, for reasons of money or practicality, but middle class women upwards were expected to be.

[GarlicReturns]

I don't think Grennie was being sarcastic. In workhouses, the women's menses would have synchronised as they often do in prisons & convents, for example.

[TeiTetua]

Dusk, there is another quote on the Museum of Menstruation site:

When studying the Suffragist movement and Selina Cooper [an Englishwoman who lived from 1864 - 1946], I came across a very interesting story about Mrs Cooper. When working in the cotton mills circa 1900, she was horrified to discover that the mill women used no sanitary towels [menstrual pads], the floor of the work room was spread with straw to absorb menstrual fluids. Mrs Cooper also mentions the smell. When Mrs Cooper made sanitary pads for some of the women there was an outcry from some of the girls' mothers as they were worried that their daughters would not find husbands as the smell and flow attracted them, both being considered signs of fertility. The passage is in Jill Liddington, A Respectable Rebel: Selina Cooper, Virago (1984). One could interpret from this that the use of sanitary pads depended on the cultural background of women.

This Harry Finley person has some strange interests, no question about that.

[GarlicReturns]

How the hell did those Edwardian women manage with their white muslin dresses??

While searching for answers to the above questions (no useful result), I discovered that the medical profession - in the early 20th century - considered menstruation an illness, which was made worse by a rich diet and eating meat. There's a kind of mad logic to this, as they would have observed dysmenorrhoea in anorexics. But it raises the possibility that young women may have been deliberately starved to reduce their bleeds. (Any excuse, eh?!)

[Grennie]

I wasn't being sarcastic at all! I was agreeing with you.

I have read plenty of descriptions of shared toilets or outdoor toilets in cold backyards. I have never read about women having their periods in novels like this.

[DuskAndShiver]

That's the same incident again, Tei. It's always that one, being repeated and referred to.

[GarlicReturns]

TT, when you start looking it's amazing how many books there are about menses through the ages, isn't it? Loads of old cobblers about the duality of power & fear surrounding it.

[GarlicReturns]

What's the betting this Mrs Cooper made it up?

[PleaseJustLeaveYourBrotherAlon]

I have read plenty of descriptions of shared toilets or outdoor toilets in cold backyards. I have never read about women having their periods in novels like this.

Oh thanks for clarifying grennie.. I thought maybe I had been a bit of a dick and said something stupid :)

Any of you read Fanny Hill? I read it about a decade ago so I can'#t remember.. if men were definitely turned on by a bleeding woman..it would have been in there!

[TeiTetua]

Sorry, I thought it was a different quote that was endlessly mentioned. What makes the story about Selina Cooper compelling is the amount of detail it goes into--the young women, their mothers, the workplace, and a middle-class woman seeing it all. It's true that this is such a universal feature of women's lives, yet has been so rarely written about.

I can recall my eyebrows going up when I saw menstruation mentioned in The Golden Notebook, and it's a fair few years since I read that.

[GarlicReturns]

OOOH!!! Look what I found!

I've spent an illuminating few hours reading the diaries of American women on the Western Trail, and following the links from the above page among others. I think my Gran said she used to wear an extra pair of thick drawers () for her periods. They would have been a kind of washable sanpro, though unpleasant to wear. The other grandma described how she made her own pads, washable of course, and a belt to which they were fastened. She couldn't do sports or anything during her period because this contraption was unwieldy - first gran was in service, so had to be able to move normally. Both were born in 1900.

[EBearhug]

The only thing I remember about bleeding in Fanny Hill is as its proof of virginity, and making sure you had a sponge with blood available to fake it if necessary.

I don't remember anything about free bleeding in anything else, either, though I do have some clear memories of sitting in the library crossing my legs while reading about Victorian contraception. There's a fair bit about the average age of menarche, but I don't remember reading about how they dealt with it. Of course, when I was about 20, I probably didn't think so much of it - periods turned up once a month for a few days and were pretty hassle-free. It's only as I've got older that I realise they aren't always that easy, and I do wonder how those who bled heavily coped. It was probably easy enough if you had staff, just to take a couple of days out, but otherwise, it must have been quite literally, a bloody nightmare.

[Mignonette]

Well the suffering of Marie Antoinette during her incarceration has been well documented - Antonia Fraser touches upon it in her biography and Gareth Russell has this to say -

"The Queen’s monthly period had started a few days earlier, but it had quickly degenerated into a frightening case of vaginal hemorrhaging. She had to constantly change her menstrual linens and trying to find the time to do so discreetly, when she was apt to be interrupted by the revolutionary guards at any given moment, was difficult. For a woman who was always so protective over her privacy and mortified by nudity, it was particularly humiliating set of circumstances"

I found this below - sorry for C+P but am tired and paraphrasing is a bit beyond me at the moment -

"Most historians agree that the 17th and 18th centuries were among the worst periods in terms of physical hygiene. Although hot baths and public baths of the Middle Ages still existed, the French regime sounded the death knell for this tradition. The French regime was a period of extreme modesty and, as a result, nudity was frowned upon. It was for this reason that people when washing did not disrobe. Into the 18th century, filth was considered beneficial thus causing people to wash even less. Medical theory of the time was that germs (then called miasmas) floated about in the air and entered the body though the skin, contaminating it. Water (particularly hot water) was harmful since it opened the pores of the skin, making the individual more vulnerable to disease.

It is said that Louis XVI took one bath in his life; on his wedding day. Because of the limited use of water for bathing, soap did not make a major inroad in French culture until the late 1700s. In 1791, Nicholas Leblanc, a French chemist, patented a process for making sodium carbonate from common salt. Sodium carbonate is the alkali that combines with fat to form soap. In the 1700s, cleanliness and hygiene were sought in white linen. Because of this, until the end of the 18th century, most people bathed ‘dry’ or, in other words, using as little water as possible as a cleaning agent. Linen absorbed perspiration, sebum [skin oil], and purified the body, and hence became a sign of the wearer’s sophistication and cleanliness. (This is why Antoinette was so concerned about the lack of linen in the NARRATIVE OF ROSALIE LAMORLIERE).

Therapeutic values were attributed to dirtiness. For example, urine soaked diapers were just dried before using them again; they were not washed. Urine was used as a beauty product to treat acne, among other things. People avoided washing their hair since scalp oil was considered excellent for shiny, healthy hair. As a result, most people had head lice. If you could manage to endure the stench of a person, his house would finish you off. Chances are you would smell several chamber pots. Separate toilet rooms draining to a cesspool weren’t common until the 19th century. Courtiers have written that Versailles had a particular stench; since it was a long distance between chamber pots, one relieved oneself in a corner, any corner.

For the nobility, cleanliness was attempted through the use of cosmetics: perfume and cologne to chase away bad odors, powder to dry greasy hair, etc. Artificial means, predominately wigs, were used to provide the appearance of cleanliness. Fragrances were used in great quantity and containers for them were an important part of early toilet sets. Most scents were heavy and sweet and were kept in glass or crystal bottles with glass stoppers ornamented with silver, gold and other metals.

An increased awareness of the benefits of hygiene in the later 18th century brought a change of attitude toward an unpleasant aspect of life that had been accepted for generations---the prevalence of lice, bedbugs and fleas. Bedbugs were a particularly common nuisance even in royal palaces. Marie Antoinette introduced an innovative remedy when, in the late 1770s, she ordered beds of polished iron from the royal locksmith Courbin. Since the bugs could not nest in the iron bed frames as they could in wooden ones, the royal children were protected from bites. Iron beds then became the standard in hospitals, homes and dormitories.

The peasants, on the other hand, settled for changing the shirt they used as their underclothing a few times a month and washing the parts of their body not covered by clothing (face, neck, hands, arms) quickly with cold water.

Everyone had poor dental hygiene. Since there were no toothbrushes, people settled for rubbing their gums and teeth with a cloth. They would then scrape the remains of food from their teeth with toothpicks.

[Alibabaandthe40nappies]

OP thanks for starting this thread, it has been such interesting reading.

Garlic I have just spent over an hour looking at that website and the various links. Amazing!

I remember my Mum having some huge pads with loops on the ends that she gave me to use at night when my periods first started and were very very heavy. No belt though :)

[TheWanderingUterus]

Someone asked what happened to upper class women, quite often they took to their beds or their rooms.

But they were in the unenviable position of having someone else washing their sanitary pads/rags/sheets. Quite often the staff of a stately home would know that their mistress was pregnant before she did. The Victorian attitude to menstruation was very much that it was an period (ha) where a woman was even more delicate and unbalanced than usual. It wasn't until after the First World War that these attitudes began to change seriously, although authors like Leta. Hollingsworth tried to change this earlier. she wrote an awesome scientific study looking at women's abilities during menstruation and showing that they were not affected in any serious way by menstruating ( contrary to the prevailing medical opinion). This was around 1914 I think. Of course this only applied to middle and upper class women, who had the luxury and money to consider themselves delicate.

There has been some very interesting oral history done on sex, birth etc, I have been struck by stories of the presence of a menstrual bucket in homes, where the female members of the household put their stained rags (or cotton wool sanitary pad stuffing) to be washed or burned later on the fire. For a male to approach and open (especially inadvertently) the bucket was a massive source of shame, fear and worry for working class women.

[TheWanderingUterus]

Sorry the menstrual bucket is 1900 onwards

[NiceTabard]

Just read about 3/4 and wanted to say before I get to the end and forget.

A lot of people mentioning more risk from blood so that being natural reason for people being more cautious than eg wee or snot.

That's not quite right though you would need to get involved with the blood to catch anything as you would with other fluids so no worse there.

Also saliva is risk for TB which is why spitting became a thing not done a few decades back. Now it is "fashionable" for men to gob left right and centre and damn the health risks and it's all over the sodding pavements.

Apart from the staining factor, I'm not seeing a huge difference. And yet men (well people but let's face it it's men) can flob freely all over the place (gross bodily fluid, potentially disease ridden) in PUBLIC in teh middle of the high street, yet girls are taught from the get-go that even purchasing stuff to deal with periods is embarrassing and humiliating.

Not keen on the "infectious" argument, as people might have guessed Infections, including incredibly nasty ones, are not bloodborne.

[NiceTabard]

Hmm I meant

Infections, including incredibly nasty ones, are not all bloodborne.