Chapter Girlhood menstrual management and the 'culture of concealment' in postwar Britain

Abstract

In 1996, 238 cis-gendered women responded to the Mass Observation (MO) Directive ‘Women’s sanitary protection and menstruation’. The Directive asked for stories, anecdotes, beliefs, and observations about menstrual management, education, technology, and stigma. Challenging what Karen Houppert termed the ‘culture of concealment’ surrounding menstruation, the responses to this Directive are a rich and rare source base about a hidden aspect of everyday health. This chapter uses this source material to examine the day-to-day menstrual management experiences of girls growing up in Britain between 1960 and 1980. Utilising phenomenological insights, it explores the thoughts, feelings, and sensations elicited by managing menstruation, illuminating the importance of girls’ sensory perceptions of dress, space, and place to their menstrual experiences. Many women wrote in detail about the physical and emotional aspects of how it felt to menstruate, wear menstrual products, and live in a culture that prioritised menstrual concealment. A focus on descriptions of sensation and feeling reveals the ubiquity of feelings of shame and embarrassment amongst young menstruators, but also reveals that it was not just stigma that made menstruation an uncomfortable experience for girls. Drawing on Joanne Entwistle’s work on the phenomenology of dress, this chapter understands menstrual technologies as items of dress that, like clothes, orient individuals to the world, shaping their self-esteem, interactions, and comportment. Interpreted in this way, this chapter reveals how ill-designed, ill-fitting, and ineffective technologies made menstruation more difficult for girls in postwar Britain, compounding their anxieties about menstrual concealment and their own menstruating bodies.