Regulating Menstruation: Beliefs, Practices, Interpretations (review)

Etienne van de Walle and Elisha P. Renne, eds. Regulating Menstruation: Beliefs, Practices, Interpretations. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2001. xli, 292 pp. $50 (cloth), $20 (paper).

Regulating Menstruation is a welcome experiment in cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural analysis. A collection of essays by historians, demographers, and anthropologists on the broad theme of menstrual regulation, this volume sheds new light on the continuities as well as discontinuities of women’s reproductive experiences across time and place. Menstruation, as the central marker of fertility and its regulation, these essays demonstrate, has always been of central importance to women. From a variety of disciplinary and cultural perspectives, the scholars gathered together—first at a conference, then in this book—to ask such questions as: How have women themselves constructed the idea of menstruation? What differences are there between medical and lay models of menstruation? How can we best understand the multiple meanings of the menstrual process? How ought we to interpret the idea of menstrual regulation?

Not surprisingly, many of the authors argue, women view menstruation simultaneously in positive and negative terms. On the one hand, regular menstruation is a symbol of sexuality and fertility; on the other, it is often viewed as pollution or a failure of one’s womanhood when a desired conception does not occur. These essays take the reader from ancient Greece to contemporary Guatemala, and their subject matter ranges from fertility enhancements to abortifacients and the various interpretations of the phrase “menstrual regulation” across time and space. Although today considered a code word for early abortion, in several contemporary cultures as well as historically, the meaning of the term more broadly describes the ways in which women across time and cultures have attempted to regulate menstruation in order to enhance as well as to limit fertility.

Taking a single topic and exploring it through case studies that cover almost the whole of western history as well as the contemporary developing world allows readers to make significant intellectual connections that might otherwise elude scholars. The volume includes essays on the pharmacological properties of emmenagogues, menstruation in the ancient world, and historical perspectives on menstrual regulation in the western world from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, juxtaposed with the work of cultural anthropologists who report menstrual practices in Nigeria and Guinea in Africa, Indonesia and Bangladesh, Guatemala and the Andes.

Although most of the essays could easily stand alone as individual contributions, the full impact of the scholarly contribution of this volume calls for the book to be viewed and read as a whole. A historian whose work focuses on the United States or Western Europe might find it not only striking but surprising that there are such strong similarities in the way colonial American women and those in contemporary rural Guatemala interpret their menstrual functioning. Enabling the reader to make those connections is perhaps the greatest strength of this volume. If there is a weakness, it is the omission of a concluding chapter that would explicitly make the connections evident in many of the essays. While most of chapters are fascinating case studies, the real value of this volume lies in the implicit cross-cultural comparisons. I would have liked to see a concluding chapter that made that cross-cultural perspective explicit. Such a quibble, however, does not diminish the overall value of Regulating Menstruation. This volume is a significant contribution to the comparative study of the cultural dimensions of reproduction.