menstruation

• suggested blood as creator of child

84:2.1The woman’s pe­ri­odic hem­or­rhage and her fur­ther loss of blood at child­birth early sug­gested blood as the cre­ator of the child (even as the seat of the soul) and gave ori­gin to the blood-bond con­cept of hu­man re­la­tion­ships. In early times all de­scent was reck­oned in the fe­male line, that be­ing the only part of in­her­i­tance which was at all cer­tain.

• grievous sin to be detected in; complete quarantine

84:4.8The so-called mod­esty of women re­spect­ing their cloth­ing and the ex­po­sure of the per­son grew out of the deadly fear of be­ing ob­served at the time of a men­strual pe­riod. To be thus de­tected was a griev­ous sin, the vi­o­la­tion of a taboo. Un­der the mores of olden times, ev­ery woman, from ado­les­cence to the end of the child­bear­ing pe­riod, was sub­jected to com­plete fam­ily and so­cial quar­an­tine one full week each month. Ev­ery­thing she might touch, sit upon, or lie upon was “de­filed.” It was for long the cus­tom to bru­tally beat a girl af­ter each monthly pe­riod in an ef­fort to drive the evil spirit out of her body. But when a woman passed be­yond the child­bear­ing age, she was usu­ally treated more con­sid­er­ately, be­ing ac­corded more rights and priv­i­leges. In view of all this it was not strange that women were looked down upon. Even the Greeks held the men­stru­at­ing woman as one of the three great causes of de­file­ment, the other two be­ing pork and gar­lic.

84:4.9How­ever fool­ish these olden no­tions were, they did some good since they gave over­worked fe­males, at least when young, one week each month for wel­come rest and prof­itable med­i­ta­tion. Thus could they sharpen their wits for deal­ing with their male as­so­ciates the rest of the time. This quar­an­tine of women also pro­tected men from over-sex in­dul­gence, thereby in­di­rectly con­tribut­ing to the re­stric­tion of pop­u­la­tion and to the en­hance­ment of self-con­trol.