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MUSEUM OF MENSTRUATION AND WOMEN'S HEALTH
The Modern Period
Menstruation in Twentieth-Century America
Book by Lara Freidenfelds (Johns Hopkins Press, 2009)
Review
As far as I'm concerned, this is the best cultural history of menstruation
of twentieth-century America.
You'll learn (as I did) how the Kotex makers struggled over its box
design for years and why that was important. And why Americans had trouble
accepting tampons. And read a good history of how men and women have increasingly
been able to talk more openly about periods. And how those Kotex and similar
booklets evolved. (This museum contributed an illustration
to the work, and the author mentioned the variety
of booklets on MUM. Those constitute this museum's connections to the
book although the author did visit the museum when it was in my
house when she was a graduate student at Harvard.) And, as they say,
a lot, lot more.
C'mon, don't turn your eyes away from the section of sex
during menstruation with comments from actual people!
What a nice combination of seldom-reported pre-twentieth-century history
and details of how women transitioned into modern America!
Ms. Freidenfelds enlivens and makes personal the occasionally dense
social history by letting people tell their own menstrual experiences. She
interviewed men and women - white, black, Chinese-Americans, and others
(but no Latinos) - whose often riveting but pungent narratives illustrate
best how people dealt (and deal) with a experience men (including me) can't
imagine and sometimes exploit. She and her interviewees made valuable contributions.
What a shame we can't read many such stories from previous centuries. So
much has been lost.
But I looked and looked and didn't find menstrual
cups and menstrual underwear. The Instead
cup gets a couple mentions but Tassette, Tassaway and their cousins get none. The same goes
for special underwear like panties and aprons,
which most women wore to carry pads and protect themselves from stains for
most of the century.
And the book lacks other cultural aspects such as music, literature
and much about language that were sketchily covered in Delaney, Lupton and
Toth's "The Curse: A Cultural History of Menstruation," the book
that opened my eyes and the speechless female clerk's who sold it to me
at Reiter's Bookstore in downtown D.C. many years ago.
Hey, you can't cover everything of this huge topic.
But, ahem, a future museum could.
I found small errors. Ads on this MUM site indicate that women could
buy Tampax (from the first Tampax company) and
Kotex before the dates the author gives. And while
not errors, it would have been nice to learn more about the tampons and
pads that preceded and were contemporary with these Big Two.
Go buy the book! You'll get a clear narrative,
something you won't find on this jumbled MUM site.
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Many menstrual & sex education booklets for girls,
boys & women directory
© 2009 Harry Finley. It is illegal to reproduce or distribute any
of the work on this Web site
in any manner or medium without written permission of the author. Please
report suspected
violations to hfinley@mum.org\
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