The Modern Period: Menstruation in Twentieth-Century America (review)

In its simplest sense, this history of menstruation in the United States during the twentieth century is a story of progress and modern advancement. Over the century, women gained—through new science and technology, school-based education, and advertising—a better way to manage their menstrual cycles. Lara Freidenfelds argues that the "modern period" is an improvement on past millennia of practices, when women monthly wore uncomfortable and reusable cloth to catch the flow and girls were ill informed (if informed at all) about menarche and its management. The new menstrual practices represent a radical and relatively fast historical shift, brought about by sex educators, physical education, new technology, and increasingly efficient menstrual products. Changes in health beliefs and practices marked an increased striving toward middle-class American ideals and were keyed to Progressive reform and rational science as well as to a vision of the well-managed modern body.

Freidenfelds is sensitive to the potentially "whiggish" narrative she tells and does a good job of seeking to make it more complex and nuanced. She interviewed 75 women and men of different generations, finding them by the "snowball" method, representing for the most part three different groups (white New Englanders, Southern African Americans, and Chinese-American Californians) and uses their stories effectively to personalize and expand upon the archival and secondary materials. She expected to find cultural differences among these groups, but, except for tampon use, which merits its own chapter, she found "an amazingly robust shared vision of 'modern' menstrual management." (7) And even with tampons, the differences were that Chinese-American young women were slightly more reluctant to go against their family traditions and thus used tampons later than the other groups. She made up names for her interviewees and does not include those names in the book's index, making it difficult for the reader to follow individuals. Nonetheless, their stories are poignant and revealing.

The book follows three constituent parts of the story - education, or the scientific narrative; changing health beliefs and practices; and technology and the body - over the century. Freidenfelds begins with a short historical look at practices before modern menstrual management, then focuses on early twentieth-century women, who followed many of those traditional patterns. Mothers generally did not tell their daughters what to expect or give them much practical help with managing their monthly cycles. Girls shared information among themselves and vowed to inform their own daughters more thoroughly. Early women washed their menstrual cloths and reused them, which put many in the predicament of being found out by other family members. Culturally, with all the groups, menstruation was not something to be talked about or made publicly evident. Although disposable sanitary napkins were available from the 1880s, they were not widely adopted before Kotex appeared in 1921. Kimberly Clark carried out an advertising blitz about their new absorbent cellucotton and in the 1920s and 1930s convinced even women whose budgets were tight to stretch their money to cover the disposable and much more convenient napkins. Other products and brands followed rapidly, although Kotex had 70% of the market through 1953, and women made the switch rather quickly. When schools introduced sex education and girls learned the basics away from home, mothers actually expanded their own conversations and sharing with their daughters and menstruation became a more public subject that even could be talked about with brothers and boyfriends. Judy Blume's widely read book on the subject in the 1970s expanded the discussion, as did TV and movies. But until the very recent period, women continued to find it awkward to converse about menstruation. Women's experiences over the generations have changed dramatically and the trajectory has been toward greater and greater ease and comfort, in practice and in cultural conversation.

Some of the story of women's adoption of sanitary products has been told elsewhere, and the subject touches on other areas of women's personal hygiene and care such as birth control and...