NTS have a whole piece on their website in which they talk about changes to menstrual hygiene products in the first half of the twentieth century (focused on the experiences of women who lived in a property they now own).
And they actually use the woman/women throughout.
It’s headed up with a disclaimer though:
We recognise that menstruation is an experience that can be highly variable, and can mean different things to different people. We acknowledge that not all people who menstruate are women and not all women menstruate. However, for the purpose of this story, the term ‘woman/women’ has been used.
It’s inevitable that we will look at the past with all the benefits of the present - but you can’t go round imposing current ideas on it. Did all of NTS miss that day in P7? And every single other time it was taught.
The absolute insult of “not all women menstruate” - imagine trying to get a disclaimer like that put on for post-menopausal women & women who cannot menstruate for medical reasons? It wouldn’t ever [have] happen[ed], not that any of those groups of women would have been so spectacularly self-absorbed as to try to make it.
I note that NTS didn’t point out it was perfectly appropriate to use the language of the time (in the sense of it not involving slurs) & they were in fact being respectful of how the women they were talking about understood their own identities. And indeed that it would be completely inappropriate & wrong to project current understandings of gender into the past. Because if we’re going to start putting out wee disclaimers about things, that’s the one to have. Acknowledge their tremendously important Gender Feelz if you must - but then explain that they have no relevance here. Women’s history is about women. And history as a complete discipline isn’t interested either unless specifically looking at trans people - but even there modern!GenderFeelz Do. Not. Matter. One. Jot. Scholars of religion are expected to keep it together if they are also people of faith; & they don’t get any disclaimers. Completely ordinary Catholics are expected to keep it together in Canterbury Cathedral even though Protestants are doing a rubbish job at martyr-minding. (And just in case any genderist feels so inclined: the literal centuries of documented discrimination experienced by Catholics in the UK are sadly not over. To give an example of just how normalised it is, bonfire societies down in Sussex might not ACTUALLY want to burn Catholics, but they wouldn’t swap “no Popery!” for “no Jews!” or any other minority faith. Of course they shouldn’t be ok with the latter, but if they’re not, why are they fine with the former? Catholics being burnt out of their homes is not a thing of the distant past.)
Talking about women & displaying women’s history as exactly that is not problematic or exclusionary. Certainly it’s not transphobic. The claim trans-people are erased from history is not supported by the evidence. Women, however, particularly working-class women, have been overwhelmingly excluded from the historical narrative. Efforts to hear what they have to say being drowned out by nonsense about how Jeanne d’Arc was totally trans & we shouldn’t be assuming George Elliot’s gender (anyone tried claiming domestic servants were non-binary due to the physicality of their work yet?) are enraging. Because it’s still privileged people talking over the disenfranchised.
Only female bodies are capable of menstruating; & the difference between the sexes cannot be subject to a disclaimer, nor can it be claimed to be insignificant. If an individual is unable to cope with the very simple realities of the past eg division of labour by sex, the marriage bar, women’s struggle to become doctors (& limitations on their careers post-qualification), &/or the staggering inequality of access to education experienced by girls & women; they need therapy. The expectation that instead the world bend to them & round them is not healthy - for them as an individual, nor for history as a discipline.