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

[LarryGreysonsDoor]

A very interesting read.

www.historytoday.com/archive/feature/menstruation-and-holocaust

I always understood that their periods stopped through lack of food and medical attention. Poor women

Hit post too soon!

Really interesting article, thanks for posting.

Damn, it never occurred to me to pause and think about women in those camps and their periods.

Interesting article.

I think the fact that I had never been thought about it is what made me really stop.
History is taught so much from the male perspective that we often don’t even think about the way women coped.

Thanks for posting this.

Thanks Larry for posting. Really interesting article.

Thanks for posting :)

Thanks for posting this, a really interesting read and not something i had ever thought about before.

The increasing sharing / writing / publishing of female accounts of events atrocities both past and present are really important and really do show up how most things esp around war are focussed on the mens experience.

That was interesting. When I was younger, I used to wonder how women managed in adverse circumstances. It is something that is ignored in all tales of adventures and extreme conditions. I found it bad enough getting through school.

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

Wow. That is powerful thank you for sharing

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.

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.

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.

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.

Thanks 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!

Thank you for posting that.

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.

I got so excited when I was watching The End Of The Fucking World and the girl in that got her period and then had to try and deal with it.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.