Months created by women?

[delilabell]

I saw a sandi toksvig quote yesterday and it got me thinking. It was about how 28bdays had been marked on a prehistoric bone. So possibly it was women marking tjebdays of their cycle.
Womens cycles are generally a month long. As are months. So does this mean women created months?
Or are months based on the moon so our cycles follow the moon. Which again I think is amazing.
I know this is random ramblings but it all just popped into my head the other day.

I thought they were to do with phases of the moon.
Women’s cycles are all different lengths so who’s would you take to be the standard? And it is a myth that women’s menstrual cycles synchronise if they live together!

Lunar calendars are easier for people to follow without the use of any technology (stone age or modern), but they don't work for anything that needs to be kept track of annually. 12 lunar months are about 10 or 11 days shorter that the time it takes for the Earth to orbit the sun once, ie one year. This is why the Muslim and Jewish religious festivals move around - those religious calendars are lunar.

When women live closely together, without any contraception or other intervention in their fertility, their cycles often begin to match each others. It can happen that they will all begin their periods within 24h of the first one beginning.

So I would think that a 28 day tally would be more likely to be women tracking when they were going to come on, than anyone tracking the moon.

Not in my experience.

No, months are roughly based on moon cycles (an old way of measuring time before set calendars was by the moon, hence phrases such as "many moons passed by").

Some women have 28 day cycles - mine when it was regular was 34 though. I suspect it's pure coincidence that human females ovulate roughly once a month - other mammals have different patterns.

www.bbc.com/news/magazine-37256161.amp

Having attended boarding school from 11 to 16 and had female flatmates throughout my 20s, our menstrual cycles did sync to a large extent. Contraceptive pills messed this up and the whole dorm wasnt synced, but my close friends and I were definitely all aligned during term times. It went wonky over summer hols (10 weeks long)

Months are quite literally linguistically derived from moon.
A lunar month is 28 days and there are 13 in a year.

Womens natural menstrual cycles are very rarely exactly & regularly 28days long.

So no, women would not have invented months to track their menstrual cycle. That’s preposterous.

I saw a sandi toksvig quote yesterday and it got me thinking. It was about how 28bdays had been marked on a prehistoric bone. So possibly it was women marking tjebdays of their cycle.

Idiotic. Preposterous. Most women today have 28 days cycles because it’s artificially imposed through hormonal contraception. In prehistory, that would certainly not be the case. Natural cycles are not usually 28days regularly, and then in prehistory you’d have issue of malnutrition and STIs delaying or suspending periods making them irregular. In addition, with no birth control, there’d be a lot of skipped periods due to pregnancy, and breastfeeding. I don’t know who Sandi Toksvig is, but they’re completely out of their depth.

Lunar calendars are easier for people to follow without the use of any technology (stone age or modern), but they don't work for anything that needs to be kept track of annually. 12 lunar months are about 10 or 11 days shorter that the time it takes for the Earth to orbit the sun once, ie one year.

No, they work fine for annual tracking. There are 365 days in a year which equates to 13.04 lunar months in a year. So that’s a 1 day slip per year and most cultures would have 1 day holiday between old and new year, making their calendars actually more accurate than our current Leap Year one.

I don’t know who Sandi Toksvig is, but they’re completely out of their depth.

A comedian, and QI host. Also one of the founders of the 'Women's' equality party...
she got a first from cambridge in law, archaeology and anthropology, I think this anecdote was based on the musing of a lecturer. While it's certainly a stretch to suppose that the 'lunar calendar' (if that's even what it was) had anything to do with period tracking, I think the point might more have been about challenging the 'default male' assumptions made by some archaeologists when assessing their finds.

don’t know who Sandi Toksvig is, but they’re completely out of their depth.

She is a woman who has been discredited by her involvement in a political movement which was taken over by the gender warriors. I guess she is hoping for a bit of ( unsuccessful) credibility.

On this Solstice day, I've been vaguely wondering why New Year's Day isn't today, and now why we have 12 rather than 13 months. Nothing to do with feminism!

Happy Solstice all.

Yeah, well she should have picked a better example to illustrate “male assumptions” like all these prehistoric “warrior graves” that have been originally sexed as male based on societal assumptions of man=hunter & fighter and woman=gatherer. Recent DNA analysis is now flagging around 25% of these up as XX female warriors/hunters.

She shouldn’t have picked an preposterous thing like a 28 day tally and mused it was about periods FFS. She’s just made herself look a fool.

She didn't pick the example, merely recounted it ... and this would have been before the recent revaluations based on DNA. But yeah, it's a pretty weak story.

Ok. I’ll calm down then. 😉

It’s the Romans’ fault. They brought us the ten month year and then Julius Caesar added two months dedicated to himself to make it twelve.

I read this story. The lecturer apparently asked her class who might need a device to enable them to track 28 days.

It's not preposterous or idiotic to ask such a question.

It’s a garbled & possibly plagiarised anecdote, and it shows.

I have read the original, or an earlier version at any rate, from a feminist writer of the 70s or before (I wonder if it was Margaret Mead? Can’t remember). I read it in the early 80s.

It may have been used by one of Toksvig’s lecturers, perhaps, in which case either they or Toksvig misunderstood it. She did study anthropology & archaeology.

The point is that the moon’s cycle is 28 and a bit days. So a bone incised with 28 grooves might equally be a menstrual cycle OR a lunar month - there’s no way of telling.

But the bones which have been discovered were reported as having groups of grooves of between 25 & 32 incisions.

Which is no lunar cycle any human has observed, but might well be an irregular menstrual cycle.

The goddess Selene had 50 daughters, called the ‘menses’.
50 lunar months = exactly 4 years and although we think of the Olympics were ‘every 4 years’, they were actually every 50 menses or months, for the ancient Greeks.

Obviously the moon goddess Selene having a daughter every month, is referencing women having a period every month.

My feeling is that the 7 day week is also associated with menstruation - most women’s cycle is 28 days - mine is, it’s always been pretty bang on. 28 as a number can only really be divvied up in a few ways and 4 x 7 seems to be pretty sensible.

A lunar month is every 29.25 days, so it would make more sense to round it up to 30, divide it up and have 5 x 6 days weeks in a month.

Thanks everyone. (Well not so much the ones who called me idiotic 🤣😉 ) it was just something I was mulling over.
Really appreciated the facts people have been telling me partic about the menses.
I find it all very interesting.

I have 4 dds and their periods synch MagpiePi, thats a fun few days every month. 🙄

Isn't there something to do with electric light affecting us.

It is now, but wasn’t in prehistoric times. The moon has been gradually moving farther away from Earth.