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Menstruation provides one of the few shared bodily functions that most women will experience during their lifetimes. Yet, these experiences are anything but common. In the United States, for the better part of the twentieth century, menstruation went hand-in-glove with menstrual hygiene. But how and why did this occur? This book looks at the social history of menstrual hygiene by examining it as a technology. In doing so, the lens of technology provides a way to think about menstrual artifacts, how the artifacts are used, and how women gained the knowledge and skills to use them. As technological users, women developed great savvy in manipulating belts, pins, and pads, and using tampons to e...
Menstruation provides one of the few shared bodily functions that most women will experience during their lifetimes. Yet, these experiences are anything but common. In the United States, for the better part of the twentieth century, menstruation went hand-in-glove with menstrual hygiene. But how and why did this occur? This book looks at the social history of menstrual hygiene by examining it as a technology. In doing so, the lens of technology provides a way to think about menstrual artifacts, how the artifacts are used, and how women gained the knowledge and skills to use them. As technological users, women developed great savvy in manipulating belts, pins, and pads, and using tampons to e...
A history of Toxic Shock Syndrome In 1978, doctors in Denver, Colorado observed several healthy children who suddenly and mysteriously developed a serious, life-threatening illness with no visible source. Their condition, which doctors dubbed ‘toxic shock syndrome’ (TSS) was rare, but observed with increasing frequency over the next few years in young women, and was soon learned to be associated with a bacterium and the use of high-absorbency tampons that had only recently gone on the market. In 1980, the Centers for Disease Control identified Rely tampons, produced by Procter & Gamble, as having the greatest association with TSS over every other tampon, and the company withdrew them fro...
Recognizing the different needs & desires of women & acknowledging the multiplicity of feminist approaches, this work offers a debate on existing & emergent technologies that share the goal of improving women's lives.
This open access handbook, the first of its kind, provides a comprehensive and carefully curated multidisciplinary and genre-spanning view of the state of the field of Critical Menstruation Studies, opening up new directions in research and advocacy. It is animated by the central question: ‘“what new lines of inquiry are possible when we center our attention on menstrual health and politics across the life course?” The chapters—diverse in content, form and perspective—establish Critical Menstruation Studies as a potent lens that reveals, complicates and unpacks inequalities across biological, social, cultural and historical dimensions. This handbook is an unmatched resource for researchers, policy makers, practitioners, and activists new to and already familiar with the field as it rapidly develops and expands.
Ranging from Aristotle to twentieth-century gynecology, contributions to this volume trace the semiotics of menstruation from magical act to evolutionary deficiency. The result is the first comprehensive historical study of how menstruation has been understood within various cultural traditions, with reference to political and social institutions, and medical and religious practices. Includes a guide for scholars on bibliographical and archival sources for the study of menstruation.
Queer Feminist Science Studies takes a transnational, trans-species, and intersectional approach to this cutting-edge area of inquiry between women’s, gender, and sexuality studies and science and technology studies (STS). The essays here “queer”—or denaturalize and make strange—ideas that are taken for granted in both areas of study. Reimagining the meanings of and relations among queer and feminist theories and a wide range of scientific disciplines, contributors foster new critical and creative knowledge-projects that attend to shifting and uneven operations of power, privilege, and dispossession, while also highlighting potentialities for uncertainty, subversion, transformation...
This perceptive, lively study explores U.S. women's sport through historical "points of change": particular products or trends that dramatically influenced both women's participation in sport and cultural responses to women athletes. Beginning with the seemingly innocent ponytail, the subject of the Introduction, scholar Jaime Schultz challenges the reader to look at the historical and sociological significance of now-common items such as sports bras and tampons and ideas such as sex testing and competitive cheerleading. Tennis wear, tampons, and sports bras all facilitated women’s participation in physical culture, while physical educators, the aesthetic fitness movement, and Title IX enc...
Winner, 2010 Emily Toth Award for Best Book in Women’s Studies, Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association The Modern Period examines how and why Americans adopted radically new methods of managing and thinking about menstruation during the twentieth century. In the early twentieth century women typically used homemade cloth "diapers" to absorb menstrual blood, avoided chills during their periods to protect their health, and counted themselves lucky if they knew something about menstruation before menarche. New expectations at school, at play, and in the workplace, however, made these menstrual traditions problematic, and middle-class women quickly sought new information and ...
Girls in Power offers a fascinating and unique look at the social aspects of menstruation in the lives of adolescent girls—and also in the lives of adolescent boys. Although there has been much research on other aspects of gender and the body, this is one of the few books to examine menstruation and the first to explore how it plays a part in power interactions between boys and girls. Talking openly in single- and mixed-gender settings, individuals and groups of high school–age girls and boys share their interpretations and experiences of menstruation. Author Laura Fingerson reveals that while teens have negative feelings about menstruation, teen girls use their experiences of menstruation as a source of embodied power in their interactions with other girls and with boys. She also explores how boys deal with their own reduced power. The book extends our theoretical and analytical understanding of youth, gender, power, and embodiment by providing a more balanced view of adolescent social life.