The curse: menstruation, medicine and femininity, 1800-1969

Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, understandings of menstruation as a physiological process and its relation to feminine identity were consistently re-negotiated within a medical, experiential and cultural context. Drawing on the interpretative methods of literary and cultural studies, this monograph marks a new direction in historical analysis by exploring the tensions between competing stories of menstrual experience in the context of complex social, economic and cultural change. Publication of this work will have cross-disciplinary relevance: it operates within the matrix between medicine and culture; questions the influence of cultures of consumption in shaping private experience; engages with the history of sexuality; and demonstrates the conflict (and collusion) between conceptions of modernity and tradition/ knowledge and ignorance.

Despite interest in theories of gendered embodiment, menstruation as a legitimate subject for serious historical inquiry in the Modern period remains unexplored. Instead, research is dominated by anthropological surveys of cross-cultural belief/practice, literary and film studies of vampirism, and feminist texts keen to explode taboo. Addressing this gap, my monograph makes an important contribution to debates on gender by situating menstrual narratives in 19th and 20th century medical, popular and consumer culture as pivotal to understanding shifting conceptions of feminine identity.
Constructed in terms of illness and missed conception, 19th century medical paradigms of menstruation proclaimed the inherent weakness and instability of femininity from the1870s, however, such narratives were increasingly challenged as women's professional opportunities in clinical practice and research expanded alongside growing calls for women's rights. From the end of the century, new menstrual narratives authored by women shifted from the rhetoric of negativity to embrace a language of modernity, health and vitality.
The dissemination of this 'new' knowledge escalated as female practitioner's campaigned to liberate adolescent girls from a popular menstrual culture of ignorance and disability. The early 20th century also saw the emergence of mass-marketing for sanitary products, the growth In magazine consumption and the 'discovery' of menstruation's function in relation to ovulation (of fundamental significance to understandings of contraception). In the early 1930s, the concept of 'pre-menstrual tension' entered the medical and, later, the public domain.

Assessing the ways in which menstrual narratives became a contested site for the negotiation of gender, the book evaluates how 'new' concepts of menstruation promoted a perception of women as mistresses of their own destiny rather than victims of their biology.
The shifting medical paradigms are situated within the broader context of commercial product advertising, feminism and expanding social, political and economic opportunities for women. The hypothesis underpinning the book is that, despite deliberate attempts to discredit 19th century menstrual narratives as myths based on ignorance and taboo, modern constructs created a sophisticated but prescriptive version of menstrual etiquette which remained tied, firstly, to conceptions of menstruation as problematic and taboo and, secondly, to perceptions of femininity that privileged marriage and motherhood.