The Modern Period: Menstruation in Twentieth-Century America

Conclusion

Conclusion Over the course of the twentieth century, Americans radically revised their ideas and practices surrounding menstruation, to bring them in accord with a desire to become “modern” and attain middle-class standing. American women adopted Progressive ideals of efficiency, education, and good management, and applied them to menstrual management. Both women and men idealized a body that could work and play at full efficiency all month, and a way of handling menstruation that would force it into the background of self-presentation and bodily sensation as much as possible. In configuring the modern period, they collaborated with a variety of experts, many of whose roles had also emerged out of the Progressive impulses and large-scale social changes of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Sex educators, physical educators, industrial hygienists , advertisers, and menstrual product manufacturers worked to give shape to new desires and ideals, often in self-interested ways, but also with an eye to what women would find persuasive and worth adopting. Women and experts alike emphatically rejected ways of managing menstruation they regarded as old-fashioned and that indeed generally had roots reaching back centuries, even millennia. Like many generations of their forbears, interviewees born early in the twentieth century typically learned about menstruation haphazardly, used and reused cloth rags to manage bleeding, and hesitated to bathe or swim during their periods for fear of negative health consequences. They explained how these pre-”modern” ways of handling menstruation left them feeling ashamed, confused, physically and emotionally uncomfortable, and vulnerable to public embarrassment. They felt that “modern” ways alleviated much of their discomfort and much better supported the self-presentation and range of activities they and others were coming to expect of them all month. Changes in three areas—menstrual education, health beliefs surrounding 194 The Modern Period menstruation, and menstrual technologies and practices—constituted the creation of the modern period. First, sex educators wrote books and pamphlets designed to be given directly to girls, rather than through their parents, and began to disseminate them through schools and libraries. Kimberly-Clark and other manufacturers became the most important distributors of menstrual education materials, reaching millions of women by the end of the century, and urging that girls be informed before menarche. Women began to look to published sources of information containing scientific explanations of the menstrual cycle and, as interviewees explained, saw them as positive, helpful sources, much more thorough and reassuring than most of their parents had been. They began to give pamphlets to their daughters at or before menarche, using them to facilitate a mother-daughter interaction they otherwise found awkward and difficult. Interviewees born in the 1940s and 1950s were most enthusiastic about modern menstrual education and were most likely to seek out information themselves as teens. When they had children themselves, they tended to turn to modern, scientific explanations to talk about menstruation with them, and they sometimes allowed their children to witness and help with menstrual management in the bathroom as part of sharing information with them before menarche. The sex education texts themselves and the novel educational venues in which discussion of menstruation was made newly acceptable were important in helping women feel that they could manage menstruation more effectively, efficiently, and matter of factly. In addition to modern menstrual education, women and new varieties of “experts” adopted a new set of beliefs about health and menstruation, gradually abandoning millennia of concern about the necessity of regular menstruation to general and reproductive health. Starting with the “new women” of the late nineteenth century, they began to challenge the idea that women needed to take special precautions during their periods to maintain their general and reproductive health. Physical educators and industrial hygienists established new norms for all-month play and work in colleges, factories, offices, and department stores. By midcentury, the idea that emotional shock during menstruation was dangerous had been long forgotten, “modern” women bathed without worry during their periods, and many of those interviewed for this book believed that swimming during menstruation was an issue only because it was difficult to manage the blood in that situation, not realizing that their foremothers had serious health concerns about the practice. While they did not necessarily rush to break taboos against sex during menstruation, they agreed with twentieth-century sex research- Conclusion 195 ers that it was primarily a question of aesthetics and convenience, not a health or moral...