Untouchability

Ancient medical writers onward believed menstrual blood constituted a toxic substance that needed to purge itself from the body, with Hippocrates arguing that that fermentation in the blood precipitated menstruation because women were unable to rid themselves of their impurities in the blood through sweat alone. Aristotle for his part assumed that menstruation represented the excess blood not incorporated into the fetus, while Galen believed it to originate in part from residual blood in food that women were unable to digest. During the Middle Ages, menstruation continued to be regarded as malignant and unclean, emanating from the "imperfection" of women, though by the end of the sixteenth century, according to Ian Maclean, there was far less stress on the noxious nature of menses, and the majority of texts "stress their harmless excremental nature" (Maclean, p. 40). Still, sexual intercourse during the menstruation cycle, for example, continued to be a particularly charged subject for theologians and medical writers, with Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century rendering the deed a mortal sin, unless the woman's cycle was unusually prolonged and consummation was absolutely necessary. Such medical and theological ideas would decline only slightly in the early modern period, when Cardinal Cajetan demoted intercourse during menstruation to a "minor sin," though it remained, in Thomas Sanchez's words, "unseemly." Seventeenth-century writers continued to perpetuate the stigma that attached itself around the menstrual cycle, with the Englishman Helkiah Crooke questioning, "What pleasure of contentment could any man finde in a wife so lothsomely defiled, and that perpetually." The notion that a woman had to remain sexually untouchable, for her own sake as well as for her partner's, became especially pronounced in the nineteenth century, for example, when it was believed that gonorrhea could be transmitted to men through menstrual blood or that such emissions in general constituted a physiological as well as psychological threat. The new preoccupation with women's hysteria, and the frequent recommendation that such women be isolated in bed rest or asylum, was inexorably attached to the menstrual cycle, while a minority of physicians as late as 1920 could describe menstrual blood as containing highly toxic substances.

In the twentieth century anthropologists and psychoanalysts recognized the opportunity of examining culture through the prism of such a powerful taboo, which reflected a society's cosmological, symbolic, and social attitudes toward women, sex, blood, hygiene, and power. For Freud, the segregation of a woman during her menses might have served a hygienic purpose, though it above all reflected ambivalent notions and phobic fears about women as a whole; in the 1960s William Stephens continued the psychoanalytic treatment of the taboo, arguing that castration anxiety, from the sight of bleeding genitals, resided behind the imposition of untouchability onto menstruating women across cultures. Bruno Bettelheim, on the other hand, argued that male envy had originally attached itself to the biologically powerful act of menstruation, with quarantine an attempt to level the playing field between the sexes. Feminist and matriarchalist theories would advance Bettelheim's relatively positive treatment of the powers inherent in menstruation, arguing for a more subtle approach in which the "forbidden" and the "holy" are conjoined and the very terms taboo and defilement contain more complex associations than those that cohere around oppression alone. Such ideas also harkened back to the interpretations of Émile Durkheim and Sir James Frazer, who argued that society's repulsion actually reflected the positive, or at least formidable and respected, "sacred," or "priestly," power inherent in menstruation, with women segregated not for their inferior status but rather their power. Still, negative vestiges of the taboo linger in euphemisms or "red humor" jokes, in the politiciatization and stigmatization of premenstrual syndrome, or even in continuing claims over menstruation's "toxicity"—evidence of the continuation of the myth of the bleeding woman who bears "Eve's curse" in silence and sorrow.