A random piece of interesting gynecological history

[hrj]

It is incredibly frustrating to research issues around how medieval European women dealt with the practicalities of menstruation. (Medical manuals were most commonly written by men and rather glossed over the topic.) While working on medieval Arabic sources for the Lesbian Historic Motif Project, I think I've run across a reference to the use of something functionally resembling a tampon. It occurs in Al-Muhalla by Ibn Hazm Al-Andalusi (d. 1064) in a discussion of forbidden sexual contact involving a woman's genitals.

"If the woman inserts anything in her vagina that she is not permitted to insert, such as her husband's genitals or whatever she needs during menstruation, then she is not guarding it [i.e., her vagina] and if she does not guard it then she is increasingly insubordinate."

Comments

[marfisa.livejournal.com]

There's actually an entire chapter in volume 3 of the manga "Kaze Hikaru" about how the cross-dressing teenage heroine deals with her period when she starts menstruating for the first time after disguising herself as a boy and joining the Shinsengumi (a famously formidable militia/law-enforcement group dedicated to preserving the Shogunate and resisting Western influence in the years leading up to the relatively pro-Western Meiji Restoration [i.e., the 1850's]). Luckily the heroine has a geisha friend who helps her come up with improvised cloth sanitary napkins she can use to avoid awkward questions about bleeding wounds from her Shinsengumi comrades--and provides further cover for her by letting her stay at the geishas' teahouse for the first three days of her period every month. (The other Shinsengumi guys, most of whom are not exactly celibate themselves, assume that their "boy" cohort is spending the time being sexually initiated by his older "girlfriend" the geisha--an impression the one Shinsengumi officer who knows the heroine's secret encourages in order to keep her from being executed or otherwise severely punished if the others discover what many of them would consider her subversive subterfuge.) Unfortunately, I have no idea whether the mangaka actually managed to find some historical source that discussed how Shogunate-era women dealt with menstruation or just extrapolated the entire thing out of her own imagination.