Culture and the Curse

Renaissance writers insisted it destroyed grass, tarnished mirrors and dissolved asphalt. The sight of it, Australian aborigines believe, can turn a man's hair gray. Until 1967, campers at Glacier National Park were warned that its odor can incite bears to attack.

It is menstrual blood, and it is the source and symbol of a universal taboo. In most cultures, menstruating women are shunned as dangerous or vaguely contaminated. Throughout history, they have been isolated in menstrual huts, forced through purification rituals and sometimes beaten if they ventured into male company during their periods. Exactly why is a mystery. Some think the taboo arose from a general repugnance of having sex with a bloodily discharging woman. Others see it as caused by primitive man's sense of awe--and fear--at the sight of blood that does not clot and signifies neither illness nor death. Freud thought man made the taboo because bleeding women awakened his dread of castration. Karl Menninger saw the taboo as male anxiety over heightened female emotionality and sexuality during periods.

Psychic Slap. In her new book Menstruation and Menopause (Knopf; $10), Feminist Paula Weideger goes a step beyond Menninger. To her the taboo represents man's historic fear and envy of woman and a desire to keep her from gaining equal status. Argues Weideger, an M.A. in psychology and a staff associate of New York City's Women's Health Forum: "The taboo fills certain psychic and economic needs of men. It is alive, it is flourishing."

Weideger's book is the latest sign that menstruation is a fast-rising issue among feminists, who contend that the taboo teaches women self-hatred and worthlessness. Today, some Jewish women pass on the taboo with a hard slap to the face of a daughter at her first menstruation. Most other mothers, says Weideger, deliver the slap in psychic form, teaching daughters to feel shame about a natural process (the periodic shedding, brought on by a drop in hormonal production, of the lining of the womb when the ovum has not been fertilized).

What of the depression, cramps and pains accompanying menstruation? The traditional explanation is that they are caused by hormonal changes. In 1970 Senator Hubert H. Humphrey's personal physician, Dr. Edgar Herman, created a flap by announcing that "raging hormonal influences" made women unfit for high-pressure jobs. The most impressive work on the effects of menstruation--by Endocrinologist Dr. Katharina Dalton of London's University College Hospital--seems to lend plausibility to the Herman thesis. In studies over a 20-year period, Dr. Dalton found that the grades of female pupils showed a 15% drop when exams fell during days of "premenstrual tension." She also reported that about half of female job absenteeism, suicides, police arrests, traffic accidents and admissions to mental hospitals occurred in the four days before and four days after the onset of menstruation. Her conclusion: the physical changes of menstruation can affect judgment and slow reaction time.

Yet, Author Weideger suggests that many of the troubles attributed to menstruation can actually be traced to the taboo. The idea is not new. Some 50 years ago, Anthropologist Margaret Mead observed that in Samoa, where the menstrual taboo is mild, discomfort during periods is slight. The idea of severe cramps and pain, she wrote, "struck all Samoan women as bizarre when it was described to them."

Now younger feminist researchers are making the same point. Some argue that the Dalton data merely show that many women have absorbed the mythology of the menstrual taboo. Others challenge the interpretation of the data. For instance, Barnard Psychologist Mary Brown Parlee points out that stress can hasten a period; therefore, many menstruating women who do poorly on exams may be victims of stress, not menstruation. Concludes Parlee: "We believe that hormonal change brings certain sensory change, but there is no scientific proof that the hormones make any difference in a woman's behavior."

Three women psychologists at Pennsylvania State University found no significant difference in the amount of stress reported by eleven men and 22 women (half of them on the Pill) over a 35-day period. Psychologist Barbara Sommer of the University of California at Davis reports that 29 women she studied had increased positive feelings around ovulation time, but no increased negative feelings before menstruation.

Pittsburgh Psychologist Randi Koeske contends that the culture created and now reinforces the stereotype of premenstrual irritability by overlooking women's positive feelings and focusing on negative ones. Her advice to women: "Learn to identify premenstrual physical changes as irrelevant to emotion." Some women add several pounds of fluid because of hormone changes. If so, says Koeske, "Say 'Water retention makes my tear ducts feel full,' not 'I am depressed and about to cry.'

In a questionnaire study of 298 unmarried women, Psychologist Karen Paige of the University of California at Davis found that religious traditions had an influence on menstrual troubles. Among Jewish women, those who accepted the biblical ban on sexual intercourse during menstruation generally had the worst periods. Catholic women who saw motherhood as their goal had more menstrual troubles than Catholic women who were willing to pursue careers and childless marriage. Similarly, in a door-to-door survey of 1,000 men and women in northern California, Psychologist Paige found that those who celebrated the role of wife and mother were most likely to accept the menstrual taboo. Her conclusion: "Adherence to menstrual taboos should decrease as the importance of the family and woman's role as child producer decrease."

Cultural Cure. Statements like that have raised suspicions that the menstruation issue is just one more doctrinaire attack by working feminists on women who are housewives and mothers. "All we know for sure," says Psychologist Pauline Bart of the University of Illinois Medical School, "is that cultural expectations play a role in many menstrual problems. Beyond that it's all cloudy."

Many greet the new menstrual research with skepticism. Dr. William D. Walden, clinical assistant professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the Cornell Medical Center is "very wary of blaming everything on psychological problems." Weideger herself says "not all cases of menstrual or menopausal discomfort will be dramatically reduced or 'cured' by changes in attitude."

Weideger thinks that women will have to accept the reality of cyclical moods and deal with them, if necessary, through exercise or hormone treatment. Feminists are now exchanging home remedies all the way from lower back massage and raspberry leaf tea to taking calcium ("nature's tranquilizer," said Nutritionist Adelle Davis) before their periods. Some ardent feminists are even urging women friends to examine, smell and taste their own menstrual blood as a way of overcoming traditional attitudes toward menstruation. Others are promoting menstrual extraction--a risky suction procedure--to avoid days of bleeding.

What Weideger and other feminists want most of all is to end the taboo. One suggestion: a party for a daughter at her first menstruation. The taboo, Weideger insists, is based on "fears held by men and directed toward women. It is time for women to reclaim menstruation and define for ourselves how we feel about it."

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