Super weird question, but how did women in ancient times deal with their periods? Was it taboo? Was it acknowledged at all?
Pretty much everywhere, women on their menses have been expected to take special care, as bleeding is viewed as disruptive. What “disruptive” means, however, varies, and here we get into technicalities that can sound a bit odd to modern ears. Stick with me. I’m going to divide this into “How menstruating women were viewed” versus “What women actually did about it.”
Part I: How menstruation was viewed
Throughout the ancient Mediterranean and Ancient Near East (ANE), both women menstruating and women who’d just given birth were regarded as “ritually unclean.”
This should not be confused with sin. First, “sin” was much more of a thing in the ANE (and Carthage) than in Greece and Rome, where “impiety” mattered more. This is not hair-splitting. While “sin” could include strictly religious affronts, it also embraced a lot of what we’d call immoral behavior. By contrast, “impiety” might include moral affronts, but was more focused on religious error.
I’m trying to avoid going down the rabbit-hole of sin vs. impiety. The main thing I want to point out is that sin in the ANE carries different overtones than Greco-Roman impiety. And neither of them is necessarily connected to ritual impurity.
Certain aspects of human life were “unclean” and all involved bodily fluids. These “unclean” actions or states are things that you are not allowed to enter a sanctuary after doing, or are not allowed to do in a sanctuary. And I say “sanctuary” (temenos) because this is the broadest term for “land that is cut off as sacred.” Sacred space was set apart for the gods.
For the Greeks, one was not permitted to kill in a sanctuary, or have sex. One might be bad, but the other wasn’t. Similarly, someone who’d committed murder (not in war), especially kin murder, was barred, even if the killing was accidental. And not only could you not have sex IN a sanctuary, if you’d had sex the night before, you couldn’t enter until taking a special bath. Likewise, a woman on her menses couldn’t enter a sanctuary, nor could a woman who’d given birth. A certain number of days were required for a new mother to wait. That doesn’t mean having a period, much less giving birth, were “bad” things. Certain diseases weren’t permitted in some sanctuaries (except those to Asclepius). All Greek (and Roman) sanctuaries had “rules” about who was, and wasn’t, allowed inside that could be highly arbitrary. Some sites permitted only members of that city-state, or perhaps barred members of certain other city-states. Spartans might be barred from sanctuaries in Argos, for instance. Some sites wouldn’t allow women, others allowed only married women, etc. Many if not most chthonic sites required the one entering to have no bindings, from sandal lacings to braided hair. The restrictions depended on the god (or hero) involved.
But the broader matter of ritually clean or unclean spanned sites. Being “cleansed” was usually pretty easy. It involved taking a bath, or waiting a given set of days. In the case of murder, it might be more complicated, and involve a trip to Delphi (to be thwapped on the shoulders with a laurel branch), but the MORAL side wasn’t considered. So if you had sex with your wife, or committed adultery with your neighbor’s wife… either way, you’re ritually unclean. If you killed your brother with premeditation, or just knocked over somebody accidentally in the street who hit his head on a rock (and died)…you’re ritually unclean.
It’s not that murder or adultery wouldn’t carry their own CIVIC repercussions, but in terms of religious purity, it’s a different matter.
In the ANE, similar restrictions surrounded menstruating women (or those who’d recently given birth). There, it was also ritual purity, not sin, and the concern is sacred space.
Now, if you want a completely different view, I give you American Indian attitudes, at least those I know of the NE woodlands. Here, also, menstruating women were restricted in their contact, mainly with medicine men (not necessarily medicine women), as well as where they could sit relative to the Grandfather Drum. But in this case, it’s because menstruating women were regarded as so much more powerful than men, they disrupted male medicine. Why? They could give birth. (How this fit into ideas of the third gender varied, but there were men, and male-bodied; women and female-bodied, so a menstruating man might be subject to the same restrictions.) In any case, here, too, women’s menses were disruptive but for positive reasons.
We have to figure out how any particular group actually understood what was going on, not make assumptions based on our (culture-locked) views of their (equally culture-locked) actions.
Part II: What did you do when Auntie Flo came to visit?
Before I go into details, let me first recommend a really great book that addresses not just the status of women in ancient Greece but women’s health using the Hippokratic Corpus. As I frequently tell my students, the status of women in ancient societies depends on two things: control of fertility, and control of her own finances. Demand’s book addresses especially the former, and she talks about the states of a woman’s life, from birth to first menses to marriage to childbirth to menopause (for those lucky enough to live that long).
Birth, Death and Motherhood in Classical Greece, Nancy Demand, Johns Hopkins UP, 1990.
So, the practical side.
The BIG problem with such logistical matters is 1) that stuff doesn’t survive except under special, unusual circumstances, and 2) men mostly ignored what women did about Those Things. So they didn’t write about it. But we know a few things.
The first tampons, at least in the west (not counting Americas), seem to have been invented by the Egyptians. Softened papyrus around a reed. (Even softened…ow.) I note that women in Egyptian society had relatively high status and more freedom, so the fact they invented tampons doesn’t surprise me.
I wish we knew more about societies like the Scythians, where women regularly rode and (past a certain age) fought on horseback. Similarly with the Illyrians. But at least the concept of a “plug” was out there early. The Hippocratic corpus says Greek women put lint around a stick: same purpose. Romans used wool.
But these societies aren’t giving tampons to virginal girls. And not just because it might be uncomfortable. It could break the hymen…and that’s potentially disastrous for her reputation. But also, ancient tampons probably wouldn’t have been easy for young girls to use. (Modern tampons aren’t always easy for young girls to use,)
There are mentions of something like a menstrual belt, with clips for cloth pads. One can assume an enterprising ancient woman came up with the idea of a pad between the legs and something to hold it up pretty early. Certainly, the notion of the “girdle” was known to the Greeks and associated with virginity, first menarch, and marriage.
Other societies, however, weren’t that kind. Women stuffed rags into their underwear. Or they simply bled into their clothes. (Yuk.) My impression, though, is that just because the society in question isn’t writing about it (assuming they’re writing at all) doesn’t mean women IN that society hadn’t figured out how to deal with Auntie Flo. Certainly, there’s also hints of various teas brewed to deal with cramps.
A final, sorta wacky ancient idea I’ll leave you with … as I’ve mentioned in a few asks before, the ancients mostly had bad knowledge of women’s bodies. They thought the womb sorta wandered around inside the body causing havoc unless a woman was preggers. They also didn’t understand that menstrual “blood” was mostly fluid (and a little blood to give it color) from the womb shedding. They thought it was blood, which came from all parts of the woman’s body. And they assumed she was losing a LOT more of it than we know today to be true, even for those with a heavy flow.
But they also believed it was that blood from which babies were made. It was almost like soil, into which the father planted seed. Once fertilized, the blood turned into flesh and “built” a baby.
Yeah, weird, but they didn’t understand reproductive cell replication.
Another titbit…even at a very early period, menstruation was connected to the moon. Modern research has shown little connection between lunar cycle and menstruation (aside from the 28-day thing), but the ancients believed in it. So “moon-bleed” is a not uncommon term for menstruation. And of course, the term “menses” is the plural of the Latin word for “month.”