Untouchability: Menstrual Taboos

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.

Menstrual Taboos in Tribal and Band Societies

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. It is, however, extremely powerful, with a potential to be creative and energetic or destructive and even deadly. Thus menstruating women, like women who have recently given birth, had to observe strict taboos and to remain segregated from ordinary society, especially from men, who could be inadvertently hurt by a menstruating woman's mana.(It is noteworthy that males who had shed blood in war typically suffered similar proscriptions.)

Foragers such as the Eskimo feared the perceived danger of menstruating women on men's ability to hunt. The attitudes of Australian Aborigines, in contrast, are more complex and not altogether negative. Agricultural peoples too exhibit a variety of attitudes, with some making positive connections between agricultural fertility, the moon, and women's cycles, whereas others constructed symbolic oppositions between breast milk and menstrual blood as representations of birth and death and so found menstruating women to be a danger to crops and animals, and still others, such as Andean peoples, attached little significance to menstrual blood.

Menstrual taboos also serve to underline the gender segregation characteristic of many tribal societies, such as the Maori of New Zealand or the Arapesh of New Guinea. Sexual intercourse, in the case of the Mae Enga of the Central Highlands, was strictly limited in order to preserve male vitality, with menstrual blood, according to Mervyn Meggitt, perceived as especially corrupting to men's "vital juices."

Menstruating women, for the Lele of Africa, were prohibited from poking the fire or cooking for their husbands due to their polluting presence, while Bemba women feared pollution from the adulterous actions of men. These often rigid demarcations of sexual roles were thought to be necessary in upholding the foundation of community and preventing "sex pollution" from outside intermingling; the result, however, especially in the rigidly segregated societies of highland New Guinea, reflected and perpetuated a view that men and women belonged to two mutually distinct, hostile, and antagonistic spheres, both of which constituted a danger to the other.

Many such societies feature a special enclosed spaced, referred to in the anthropological literature as a "menstrual hut"—a nomenclature that reveals the unconscious biases of earlier scholars, who routinely referred to male ritual spaces as "men's houses," even when the "huts and "houses" were of similar size and construction. The retreat into sacred space protected the women themselves—as vulnerable carriers of a divine power—as well as other members of their society, who could be injured by a glance alone. Not all retreats to the hut constituted a punishment, however; for the Mbuti of Zaire, seclusion among women in the hut, or elima, gave rise to a spirit of community as younger and older women sang special songs to one another, sometimes to be joined by the musical replies of men who stood outside. Menstruation and isolation were also connected in rites of passage for young girls. Existing in a marginal state between childhood and adulthood, such girls could undergo seclusion followed by a ritual deflowerment, mortification, and beatings (as with the Uaupes of Brazil) or, in the case of the Deshast Brahmins of India, joyous celebrations, feasts, and the exchange of presents.

Menstruation and Civilization

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, for example, Pliny wrote that menstrual blood could "[turn] new wine sour," render crops barren, dull the "gleam of ivory," drive dogs mad, and even cause "very tiny creatures" such as ants to turn away in disgust from a grain of corn that had suffered contact with the offending woman. But what was an affliction—a curse—could also constitute a sacred gift or what the Romans called sacra ; enclosed within male boundaries, woman were graced as well as burdened by the cyclical days of blood they had to bear.

The great religions that developed with the rise of civilization tended to further these ideas in religious texts and doctrines, especially when it came to delineating rules of sacred and ritual cleanliness and pollution. Zoroastrianism placed purity as one of the most important tenets in the upholding of the faith, with those deemed impure—including women during their menses but also priests with bleeding sores—prohibited from entering the fire temple. In Hinduism, where rules of untouchability could be vast and complex, bleeding women were expected to avoid worship, cooking, and members of their own family through restrictions that were precisely proscribed; according to the Vendidad (16.4), a woman in her menses "should keep fifteen paces from fire, fifteen from water … and three paces from a holy man." Visiting a consecrated holy place during menses was highly contaminating and therefore forbidden, as were women's involvement in ritualistic worship practices in general. Such a stigma was explained in part by the Bhagavata Purana, which described the menstrual cycle as constituting a partial karmic reaction to Indra's inadvertent killing of a brahmana; according to the text, after Indra killed the brahmana, he proceeded to negotiate with four groups who agreed to absorb one-quarter of the karmic reaction in exchange for a blessing. Women received the blessing of engaging in sex during pregnancy without endangering the embryo in exchange for accepting the monthly menstrual cycle.

In the Judeo-Christian tradition, the biblical Book of Leviticus was the most central and influential text in postulating rules having to do with cleanliness and uncleanness or what the anthropologist Mary Douglas called purity and danger. Leviticus stated that while menstruating, a woman would be considered unclean for seven days and anyone who touched her would also be unclean. The taboo continued to be recognized by Orthodox Jews, who relegated bleeding women to their own secluded sphere or enjoined them to abstain from sexual intercourse for seven days, followed by immersion in the mikveh, or ritual bath. Such isolation accorded with what was thought to be women's special burdens—or Eve's multiplying sorrows—as the prophet Micah enjoined them to "Be in pain, and labour to bring forth, O daughter of Zion, like a woman in travail" (Mic. 4:10). Such rites were also, however, continuous with other treatments in the Old Testament concerning the mundane and symbolic use of blood, which was seen as life-giving as well as defiling and all-important in the preparation of food or the act of sacrifice.

In the New Testament, Jesus encounters and cures a "woman with issue" who has been menstruating continuously for twelve years when she touches the hem of his garment—not his body—and is told, "Thy faith hath made thee whole" (Matt. 9:20–22). But Levitican notions of cleanliness and uncleanness, isolation and contamination, continued to pervade the early Christian world in such debates as the acceptability of menstruating women entering churches or receiving communion. In early Syrian Christian texts as well as the writing of Origen, women undergoing menses were prohibited, like their Jewish counterparts, from entering church or "mixing" reproductive blood with the sacrificial blood at the altar; it would therefore become a notable development when Pope Gregory I (590–604) informed Augustine, the monk and bishop of Canterbury, that menstruating women should not be forbidden from entering church or receiving communion, though "if [she] out of a sense of deep reverence does not presume to receive communion, she must be praised" (Bede, 1:27). Despite such leniency, penitential texts as well as a later archibishop of Canterbury, Theodore, chose to uphold the prohibition, which continued well into the Middle Ages.

Medical Variations and Modern Interpretations

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.

See also Anthropology ; Motherhood and Maternity ; Untouchability: Overview ; Untouchability: Taboos .

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Sarah Covington