Untouchability - Menstrual Taboos - Menstrual Taboos In Tribal And Band Societies, Menstruation And Civilization, Medical Variations And Modern Interpretations
women mysterious female subject
Menstruation is a physiological process often imbued with powerful cultural and religious symbols. For men, it is a mysterious and sometimes frightening phenomenon—the shedding of blood without visible injury. For women, it has been a double-edged sword. Far too often, it has been used in misogynist ideologies as evidence of the defiling and ungodly nature of the female body, leading many societies to subject menstruating women to taboos that limit their autonomy and agency. However, not all societies have interpreted menstruation in the same way: in some cultures it has been perceived as relatively unimportant, subject to neither stigma nor taboo; in others, menstruation has been a sign of the magical power of the female body, in all its mysterious fecundity. Indeed many societies exhibit profound ambivalence where menstruation is concerned, imbuing it with both positive and negative meanings, making it difficult to arrive at a single interpretation of menstrual taboos.
Additional Topics
The more positive or neutral associations of menstruation typically are found in small-scale, relatively egalitarian societies, where misogyny is in general less well developed. In many such societies, the menstruating woman was perceived as emitting a supernatural power, or mana; as anthropologists such as Mary Douglas have found, this sacred power is neither inherently good nor inherently bad. I…
In general, however, the greater social inequalities and restrictions that accompany the rise of civilization brought with them an increase in negative attitudes toward women and their bodies and a greater attention to controlling female agency and reproductive powers. This can be seen in many of the great religions of the world and in the cultural traditions of the West. Among the ancient Greeks,…
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 inco…
Bede, the Venerable Saint. Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People. Edited by Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors. Oxford: Clarendon, 1969. Buckley, Thomas, and Alma Gottlieb. Blood Magic: The Anthropology of Menstruation. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988. Delaney, Janice, Mary Jane Lupton, and Emily Toth. The Curse: A Cultural History of Menstruation. New York: E…
Citing this material
Please include a link to this page if you have found this material useful for research or writing a related article. Content on this website is from high-quality, licensed material originally published in print form. You can always be sure you're reading unbiased, factual, and accurate information.
Highlight the text below, right-click, and select “copy”. Paste the link into your website, email, or any other HTML document.
User Comments