How did women tens of thousands of years ago deal with their menstrual cycles?
I suspect that they didn’t have many as they would have been pregnant from puberty onward. Apart from that, I guess that it was a minor annoyance compared with the general grind of staying alive.
Some traditional societies have menstrual huts where women live for a few days each month at menstruation time, when they are seen as ritually impure.
They didn’t have as many periods as we have today, but they did have some, and they did have postpartum bleeding like we do, which presents the same problem.
It depends on where they lived and what was abundant in their area. Strips of soft leather, dried moss, fluff from cattails, beaten fibers from fibrous roots or fruits, shreds of the outer shell of a coconut, wadded up leaves…or just let it flow and clean it off your legs when you get to the river to bathe.
We only lose an ounce or two of fluid with each menstrual cycle. It just seems like more because it’s slow, and our modern pads spread it out on a very white surface, making it extremely visible. Even today, some women “free bleed,” using no absorbent products at all.
I recall something I read about Cree women (Northern Canada) using moss as pads.
Mossy!
Many women used to wear period costume:)
Yeah, but do female reenactors use moss? I mean, what’s the SCA’s take on tampons and pads?
Well, if she wants a knight on the town, she’ll take him to her pad later.
There’s a reason why menstruation is still called “being on the rag.” That’s what they used.
Your underwear gets stained. It’s not really a big deal, especially if you’re some ancient woman not wearing underwear or you’re a modern woman who only buys black underwear. The only reason why women buy tampons is to keep their clothing from getting stained.
Well, yes. But we menstruated before cloth was invented.
If you’re not wearing any clothing it doesn’t matter. You don’t have to do anything. Men make such a big deal out of periods, but all that happens is your normal secretions change color from clear to red. Unless you have a health problem, in which case you’d probably die in the past.
There aren’t any humans we’re aware of that didn’t wear any clothing as adults. To go back before clothes, you go back before homo sapiens sapiens. And while menstrual stains aren’t a matter of life and death, we know from decorated and stitched fur, leather, and then cloth clothing that early humans were just as interested in their clothes looking nice as we are, so they probably did at least attempt to prevent staining.
Since yours was the first response, and since you said you"suspected" it, would you be so kind as to give us a cite?
According to wikipedia, the genetics of the human body louse support the theory that we’ve worn clothing for 100,000 to 500,000 years. I doubt we have much evidence about periods before then.
Regarding fewer periods in the past, I don’t think there is proof, there’s just things that people ponder. One is that without bright night-time and interior illumination, girls don’t start puberty as soon. Also, without sufficient calories, puberty is delayed.
Without contraceptives, women spend more time pregnant. If you’re interested in genealogy, you’ve noticed that women even a hundred years ago used to have more children. They didn’t all live to adulthood, but that’s still at least nine months, each, when periods were on hold.
There are arguments about whether nursing suppresses menstruation or not. I’m going to leave that one alone.
Also, women used to die younger, sometimes in childbirth. Death can cut off future periods pretty decidedly.
You forgot sponges. Apparently they were a popular choice in Ancient Greece and Rome where people had access to the sea-side or were wealthy enough to purchase them.
You’re also less likely to stain your clothes if you wear skirts (where the secretions wind up on your upper thigh) than if you wear pants. Even so, women sometimes wound up with stained clothing. It was once said of Joan of Arc that her clothing had never shown such staining, which, depending on which side you were on, was evidence of her holiness or her being a witch. Given that people didn’t have as many clothes in the past, and didn’t wash them as often as we do, clothing of working/peasant classes for the typical day had all manner of stains and one more went largely unremarked.
There’s a reason that the custom of a “Sunday best” outfit for church and special occasions got started.
Women in the past may also have had less heavy flow than modern women, which would make “free bleeding” more practical.
I did forget sponges, which are still in use today.
As I said in the baby poop thread, I read an article several years ago where an anthropologist went through the records of “menstruation huts” in an area of Africa. The conclusion was that between late onset, pregnancy, breastfeeding and low nutrition women typically had about half the periods modern western women have.
This was pointed out as a possible reason why women have higher rates of cervical and uterine cancer in the West, since the uterine lining is disrupted(?) far more than it used to be.
Cervical cancer is strongly linked to HPV infection (although not all cases are caused by the virus, just most of them). It will be interesting to see what the HPV vaccine does to the number of cases in a generation or two. In ancient times when populations were more isolated a lower rate of cervical cancer might have been in part because HPV wasn’t as widespread as in our modern world where one can travel around the world in a day or two, providing much more opportunity for any sort of infection to become widespread.
Increased rates of uterine cancer are, in part, because people are living long enough to develop cancer instead of dying from something else first. Nevermind that no one ever did (or could do) a proper study of cancer rates in our distant ancestors. Plenty of 40 and 50 year old hunter-gatherers might have had cancer, but given that only a minority lived that long, no one could diagnose those things back then, and people debilitated by a disease like cancer would also be far more likely to die of some sort of infection or internal obstruction/blockage before the cancer actually killed them, it becomes hard to draw a really firm conclusion about anything.
Really, though, increasing numbers of people living longer has as much to do with increased cancer rates as anything else. I’m sure in the bad old days very few men died of prostate cancer, but virtually all men who live to 90 are going to have some cancerous prostate cells. Unless they’re castrated early in life. Apparently soaking prostate cells in male hormones for decades often leads to cancer. On the other hand, the side effects of castration are such that most men would rather risk living to be old enough to worry about prostate cancer. Likewise, before recommending a lifetime of drug therapy to “fix” women having monthly period we should consider the risks as well as the benefits, both on populations and individuals. Or maybe I’d be more comfortable with drugging women from puberty onwards if the same people were proposing androgen blockers for all men over 40 in order to prevent prostate cancer.