Five Quarts: A Personal and Natural History of Blood (7 page)

In the late nineteenth century, British social anthropologist James Frazer recorded various shocking instances of ritualized physical and social seclusion. In his book
The Golden Bough
(1890) he described, for example, the young women of the Kolosh Indian tribe in Alaska who, at menarche, were confined to an individual hut with but a tiny opening for fresh air and food. The secluded girl could drink only from the “wing-bone of a white-headed eagle,” which at first sounds like a privilege—the kind of vessel, say, reserved for a tribal chief—but wasn’t. So unclean was she rendered by her menses that the entire water supply had to be protected from her lips. She was kept in this hut for a whole year, Frazer explained, without sunlight, exercise, or a fire’s warmth, attended to solely by her mother. The length of the seclusion spoke to the depth of her community’s fears. With her first period, the most potent, a girl became a destructive influence that needed to be neutralized. As she was inseparable from the blood, both had to be separated from society. Her power was phenomenal. With a glance, she could spoil the hunt or strike men dead.

On an island in the Bismarck Archipelago in the southwest Pacific Ocean, girls were confined for up to five years in hanging cages to shield the ground from their polluting touch, according to Frazer. Upon getting her first period, a young woman of a tribe in southern Brazil was stitched into a hammock, leaving only a button-sized airhole, as if she were a butterfly shoved back into its cocoon. Keeping her in darkness was essential; she could poison the sun with a look. Similarly, the Native peoples of both southeastern Bolivia and British Guiana (now called Guyana) shrouded pubescent girls in pods hung from the rafters of darkened huts. Here they remained for months, “suspended between heaven and earth,” Frazer lyrically observed.

It all seems too awful to be entirely true. And indeed, one must question whether Frazer was embroidering or maybe just misinformed. After all, the occasional curious little girl surely disproved tribal beliefs by harmlessly peeking at the sky, say, or at a kid brother. Sure enough, as historian George W. Stocking Jr. suggests in his introduction to the current edition of
The Golden Bough,
a degree of skepticism is merited. Frazer, a man whose aspirations were more literary than scientific, was an armchair anthropologist who received his field reports secondhand, if not third or fourth. Knowing this helps explain why, despite Frazer’s liberal use of labels such as “savages” and “barbarians,” his accounts have such an engaging fable-like quality; even the book’s title sounds drawn from the Brothers Grimm. The stories of caged and suspended girls call to mind tales such as that of Rapunzel, kept for years in an impenetrable tower beginning at the pubescent age of twelve.

In contrast to Frazer’s method of observing life at a remove, the French historian Jules Michelet (1798–1874) rolled up his sleeves, conducting studies of menstruation that were nearly as invasive as gynecological exams. Michelet, renowned to this day for his panoramic
Histoire de France,
kept a private diary (published posthumously) in which he recorded in graphic detail the menstrual cycles of his wife, Athenais, who was thirty years younger than him. Entries included subtle observations of her daily flow—color, volume, density, odor—as well as an analysis of his own feelings, not hers, about her bleeding. Despite this particular fascination, his view of women in general was no more enlightened than was typical for his time. He reiterated in his essay
“L’Amour”
(1859) the belief that menstruation was a mark of women’s natural
“débilité mentale et physique,”
which sounds no less insulting in French.

His opinion was an echo of Aristotle, who, writing more than two millennia earlier, declared menstruation as proof of women’s inferiority. Aristotle also saw in bleeding an almost supernatural component. A menstruating woman’s reflection could stain any mirror with a bloody cloud, he stated in
De Insomniis.
Such superstitions can be found, tenfold, in the writings of the first-century Roman author Pliny the Elder. In his
Natural History,
a thirty-seven-volume encyclopedia that remained a credible scientific resource up through the Middle Ages, Pliny warned that the touch of a menstruating woman turned wine sour, made crops wither, dulled razors, rusted iron, killed bees, and caused a horrible smell to fill the air. “The Dead Sea, thick with salt, cannot be drawn asunder except by a thread soaked in the poisonous fluid of the menstruous blood,” Pliny wrote. “A thread from an infected dress is sufficient.” He was also certain that menstrual fluid could make a potent impact on natural events. If held up to flashes of lightning, for instance, it could halt a hailstorm or a whirlwind. But not a volcano, sad to say. Pliny died at Pompeii in
A.D.
79 while studying the eruptions of Mount Vesuvius.

It’s easier for me to understand viewing the Earth as the flat center of the universe than to fathom how such mistaken ideas of menstruating women endured. I have to wonder if Pliny, who lived well into his fifties, ever spent extensive time at home with a wife and daughters. Did the women in his life concur with his notions? More recent accounts, some written from an instantly more credible perspective—female—place menstruation in a broader social context. Among the customs of the Pacific Northwest’s Spokane Indians, the original inhabitants of the region where I was raised, a girl at puberty was temporarily moved to her family’s menstrual hut, a comfortable space where she was cared for by her mother, aunts, and grandmothers. This was hardly the cramped cage Frazer envisioned. The girl was welcomed into womanhood through intimate education on sexuality, health, tribal taboos, and social responsibilities. Though this tradition died out by the late nineteenth century, similar and even more progressive customs are observed today among Native Americans such as the Shoshoni of Nevada. Once a month, women retreat to separate quarters, leaving behind the men to take care of the kids, cooking, laundry, cleaning, and other chores. The men gain appreciation for the women, who in turn enjoy a week’s respite, an arrangement, as social anthropologists note, that helps foster cooperation and healthy relationships within the tribe.

Unique rites also take place within the confines of family, passed on generation to generation. My friend Maurice, who grew up in a small Brooklyn apartment in the 1930s, remembers with a touch of awe the privileges his older sister enjoyed whenever she had her cycle. In this close-knit Jewish household she ordinarily shared a bedroom with Maurice and their brother Jack; on many nights all three even snuggled in one bed. But the room was hers alone when Natalie, nine years older than Maurice, got her period. She secluded herself behind a locked door while he and Jack got booted to the couch. Even more luxurious than being given her own bedroom, Natalie was allowed for the week to smoke cigarettes, an indulgence denied the boys. Maurice still recalls the scent of her Chesterfields wafting through the keyhole, her room, he imagined, filled with pillowy clouds.

This wistful scene plays like a sweet spin on a grim script from Leviticus 15: When a woman has her period, the Old Testament prescribes, “she shall be in her impurity for seven days, and whoever touches her shall be unclean. Everything upon which she lies during her impurity will be unclean.” This idea found its way into our five-bedroom Spokane home through multiple routes. One started at the supermarket. On trips to Rosauer’s grocery, Shannon, like all my sisters, became well acquainted with The Aisle, an isthmus of pastel-colored cartons, a place boys didn’t go. Mom would usually send me off to get some cereal or to spin the comic-book rack while she and Shannon entered that female zone. There, the packaging was pale and the wording vague, as if the products were specifically designed
not
to be noticed.

Meeting up again at checkout, me hugging a king-sized box of Frosted Flakes, I’d see in our cart the familiar lilac Kotex box and other items of “feminine protection,” a word pairing of indeterminate promise. “Protection” from what? (Not prying eyes, I admit, although my unwrapping one of the mummified wads in the bathroom trash certainly discouraged a second airing.) Were I pressed into listing items of masculine protection, I’d have said a football helmet, catcher’s mitt, sports cup—gear to shield guys from outside injury. But girls had to be protected from themselves, from their own bodies.

This notion may have also been brought home from church with an oft-heard passage from Genesis on the consequences of Original Sin. God, punishing Eve for tempting Adam with the apple, tells her that He will “greatly multiply thy pain.” Though this is a reference to the pain of childbirth, biblical scholars contend that the meaning was deliberately misconstrued by early church fathers to include menstruation. Monthly pain was part of the punishment all women had to bear for Eve’s sin, a notion popularized in a common euphemism. Hence the so-called curse of Eve became simply “the curse.”

Now, at age forty-three, whenever I hear that expression “the curse” I think of Shannon, who was bedeviled by painful and heavy menstrual cycles throughout her teens and, in more recent years, by a series of gynecological health scares. The image that comes to mind is Henry Fuseli’s moody Gothic painting
The Nightmare
(1782), in which a defenseless, nightgown-clad woman is splayed atop her bed, except that it’s daytime in my version, Shannon’s wide awake, and the demon perched on her abdomen looks as if it is hatching plans: What vex to inflict next? I can see Shannon in that painting at all different ages—as a frightened girl, as a lonely teen, and as a vulnerable young woman.

This whole picture changed two years back when Shannon had a partial hysterectomy, surgery her doctors had recommended due to recurring, unusually large fibroids on her uterus. To celebrate this major life change, she joyously threw decorum to the wind and held a “Uter-Out-of-Me Party” at her Seattle home a week prior to the procedure. I was disappointed not to be able to fly up from San Francisco to attend, though she filled me in on the details by phone later that day. It was all good silly fun, she and ten women friends raising flutes of champagne to Shannon’s uterus and bidding good riddance to tampons, panty liners, diaphragms, and bleeding. A friend who’d had the same surgery a year before brought quiche and deviled eggs in honor of the ovaries Shannon’s surgery would leave intact, and organized party games, including rounds of Operation, for which the board game’s male patient was turned into a she with a felt pen.

Shannon sounded strong, happy, her voice fizzy with high spirits. Still, I, the worried brother, wondered if she was having any last-minute doubts about the surgery.

“No, I’m ready. I’m so ready,” she said. “Every year, every Pap smear, it’s been something. And these fibroids have caused havoc. I’ve had nonstop bleeding for weeks.” Then a pause. “At the same time, though, there’s a sense of loss.”

“Well, that’s understandable,” I said. “It
is
part of your body. I mean, I get sentimental about losing my hair”—at which point Shannon snickered. “I practically weep whenever I look at the top of my head.”

“Well, when you put it that way, I guess it’s okay to feel sad about losing my uterus.”

The inspiration for throwing the party had come, in small part, she admitted, as a reaction to something our mother had said. “Mom being Mom, when I first told her I was having the hysterectomy, she said right away, ‘Now, Shannon, don’t make a big deal of it.’ ”

We laughed. If the root of our family’s dysfunction could be boiled down to one sentence, it would be:
Don’t make a big deal of it.
How many times had our parents, now in their late seventies, given Shannon or me that admonishment? How many times had we done the opposite?

Shannon, according to family lore, entered the world creating drama. After Mom went into labor, my sister squirmed about and turned herself upside down, as if reluctant to leave the womb. An emergency Cesarean resulted, sparing mother and daughter a dangerous breech delivery. Henceforth Shannon was dubbed the child born backward, a characterization that endured and, unfortunately, sank in. Throughout childhood, she never felt good enough, smart enough, coordinated enough. Unlike Maggie, who possessed the grace of a natural athlete, or Colleen, who could be as poised as a beauty pageant contestant, Shannon was perpetually at odds with her body. This disharmony was never more apparent than when she had her period.

One episode burned into memory took place in the family car with me, Mom, and Shannon, who was thirteen. We’d been to the mall, though the purpose of the excursion and my reason for being there are forgotten. What remains is the tension in the station wagon as we drove home, the shopping trip scrapped because Shannon got hysterical. Mom had barely stepped foot into JCPenney when Shannon started sobbing and could barely walk because of cramps. My mother, who had precious little free time to shop, couldn’t very well drag her bawling daughter through the mall or just leave her in the car, balled up in the fetal position. Mom’s face as she gripped the wheel was a scramble of emotions—exasperation, concern, anger, and, I think, embarrassment. That Shannon’s behavior occurred in public made it more egregious. I’ll never forget how, back home, my mother, trying to be discreet, explained to Dad why shopping had been cut short: “She’s in her way,” Mom said, as if Shannon were a self-inflicted impediment.

To a degree, I think, Mom was dead on. Shannon did get in her own way. My parents took her several times to see Dr. Porter, who could find nothing wrong. The biological process that my mom and other sisters quietly managed remained a dramatic monthly struggle for Shannon. It was as though she had never moved beyond the frightful experience of her first period. My sympathy over the preceding year had settled into bewilderment. By this point in my boyhood, I well understood the notion of calluses. Why couldn’t my sister toughen up?

If Shannon’s tears didn’t announce her time of the month, her wardrobe did. Immediately after getting home from school, she’d bag her body in the same oversized, pale yellow “granny dress,” which she wore like a flag of defeat. In an odd coincidence, girls of the Spokane Indian tribe had historically worn their oldest dresses during menses, though the similarities probably ended there. Shannon retreated to her bed with a heating pad and bottle of aspirin, propping against pillows and taking up her embroidery. She was a Victorian spinster, prim and pitiful. I suspect her discomfort was symptomatic, too, of deeper anxieties about self-image and sexuality, which surfaced with the menstrual bloating and swollen breasts. She was a pretty girl, just over five feet tall, with flawless skin and a beautiful smile, but even on good days she carried herself as if boxed in by her body, hunched over, head down, arms strapping her bosom. I’m sure it didn’t help that the older sisters teased Shannon about her plumpness, nicknaming her Circle. In a house with so many women, she felt isolated, and for the week of her period she withdrew from the family. I was scared for her but also a little scared
of
her.