Abstract
This study examines how dominant societal discourses of menstruation are appropriated, rejected, or interpreted as adolescent girls make meaning of their menarche. Thirteen women ages 18–21 participated in flexible in-depth interviews to retrospectively recount their menarcheal experience. A variation of the Reading Guide was used for primary data analysis, which identified four themes highlighting girls’ ambivalence regarding menarche. Participants were conflicted at menarche about their putative status as ‘women’; used imprecise, distancing language when discussing menstruation; engaged in material and discursive practices of concealing menstruation; and referenced a community of menstrual suffering. Further, discourse analysis of participants’ talk suggests their continued discomfort. We argue that girls experience menarche ambivalently in relation to menstrual taboos, body shame and emergent womanhood. Negative discourses of menstruation and women’s bodies converge to set girls on a problematic gendered trajectory at menarche that can be expected to inform meaning making and experiences across the lifespan.
Currently within a range of societies, menstruation is a particularly mysterious phenomenon, viewed through a simultaneously reverent and fearful eye, shrouded in language of concealment and ambivalence (Lee and Sasser-Coen, 1996). This pervasive societal attitude toward menstruation has served to sustain its long history as a taboo topic and more recently as a subject of pollution theory, in which women were thought to carry and emit menotoxins that have a poisonous and damaging effect on others during their monthly bleed (Britton, 1996; Buckley and Gottlieb, 1988). While there is a wide and varied range of codes for menstrual conduct involving diverse purposes and meanings, rules associated with how one should act during menstruation exist everywhere, and women are responsible for adhering to these rules that often severely restrict their behavior (Buckley and Gottlieb, 1988).
In contemporary United States society, the menstrual taboo is manifested in implicit social and cultural rules that serve to govern how menstruation should be dealt with and spoken about (Kissling, 1996b). Dominant discourses concerning menstruation are highly negative, suggesting to women that it needs to be hidden and hygienically managed, and that it is a source of shame and embarrassment (Martin, 1987; Moore, 1995). These messages are reinscribed for women by a variety of sources. Overall, mothers are typically the primary source of information, though they often promote a tradition of silence and secrecy with respect to menstruation, hence simultaneously enforcing restrictions to be placed on female bodies (Costos et al., 2002; Lee, 1994). Educators are an additional source of information about menarche; however their messages often highlight the necessity to hygienically manage menstruation with sanitary products (Brumberg, 1997; Rembeck et al., 2006). Messages promoting secrecy are further instantiated through educational and advertising materials for menstrual hygiene products (Erchull et al., 2002).
Girls and women then engage with discourses stressing that they must control and manage their menstruating bodies quietly and secretly. In this way, girls are deprived of a potential connection with one another and may even distance themselves from other menstruating girls and women (Stubbs and Costos, 2004). Thus, they often meet menarche, a critical developmental moment, in isolation. The current study seeks to explore girls’ experience of and meaning-making related to menarche and their emerging identity as women, as expressed retrospectively within the interview context.
It is important to highlight the significance and implications of the fact that menstruation occurs in the body. Across societies, women are defined primarily in terms of their bodies, and their ‘natural’ bodies are deemed to be unruly, out-of-control and inferior (Davis, 1997). Bordo (1993) claims that the female body is a site at which males can exert disciplinary control, and through which norms of feminine behavior are established. As many feminists and psychologists have argued, women must follow a vast array of rules and regulations in order to create a ‘feminine body’ that is pleasing to the male gaze (Chrisler, 2008; McKinley and Hyde, 1996). If menstruation is viewed as a source of pollution that occurs in the female body, then, by extension, the menstruating female is polluted. She is then made to feel ashamed by this inescapable status (Chrisler, 2011; Morrow, 2002).
Recent literature has explored the construct of menstrual shame under the larger umbrella of women’s body shame, the negative evaluation of one’s body when it is perceived to fall short of feminine ideals for attractiveness (Calogero and Pina, 2011; Schooler et al., 2005), and more specifically reproductive shame manifested in the context of menstruation and lactation (Johnston-Robledo et al., 2007). Tangney (1995) stresses that body (and reproductive) shame is debilitating because it extends to a woman’s appraisal of her entire self, making her feel worthless and inadequate. When women feel body shame, they engage in body monitoring and management practices in order to temper the appraisal of the self as inadequate or failing, often desiring to escape or hide from others. Menstrual shame can be viewed similarly to extend to the entire body and the self.
Adding another layer of complexity to this issue is the fact that menarche establishes the reproductive potential of the body and is associated with a girl’s emerging sexuality. In many societies, menarche is ritualistically celebrated with emphasis placed on the entrance into a sexual life and the importance of the procreative function of girls to the maintenance of society (Delaney et al., 1976). Chrisler (2008) has argued that while menstruation requires women to align their behaviors with concrete forms of management and restriction, it can also serve to empower those women who recognize their key role in maintaining the population. However, Western societies have denied any significance, inherent power, or value to the menarcheal experience, failing to celebrate it through ritual and treating it instead as an embarrassing hygienic crisis. While individual parents may provide congratulatory words and gifts to their daughters, it is not a socially regulated or extensive practice (Chrisler and Zittel, 1998). Most girls in Western societies, then, are denied this positive experience, and menarche has further become detached from its potentially empowering association with reproduction and motherhood (Chrisler, 2008; Rembeck et al., 2006). While a culture of resistance has begun to emerge among menstrual activists and third wave feminists (Bobel, 2010), Western scripts of sexuality and sexual behavior for girls and women continue to extend women’s passivity and objectification (Tolman, 2002), and women are further made to feel ashamed about their bodies in the context of sex (Fahs, 2011).
Previous research concerning menarche has focused on factors associated with positive and negative experiences. These studies have shown that all girls are initially concerned with maintaining menstrual secrecy and moderating distressing symptoms associated with menstruation such as uterine cramps (Stubbs et al., 1989), and they experience a heightened sense of shame and humiliation (Koff and Rierdan, 1996; Morse, 1995), and a persistent fear of leaking (Chrisler, 2011). Lee (2008, 2009) discussed evidence indicating that many women felt contaminated at menarche, constructing it as a dirty and shameful process invading their bodies; others, however, associated beginning menstruation with the positive experience of growing up and entering womanhood. In contrast, Uskul (2004) observed that her participants reported a fear of becoming a woman and losing the innocence of childhood at menarche.
Previous research has also suggested that particular aspects of menstruation, specifically the construal of menarche as a rite of passage, may be more salient for women of working class or non-white backgrounds (Martin, 1987). Further, women’s sexuality may have an effect on a range of menstrual experiences, including the decision to engage in menstrual sex, as lesbian and bisexual participants are far more likely to report positive feelings associated with it (Allen and Goldberg, 2009; Fahs, 2011). This is an important point to which we will return in discussing the particularity of our sample in the conclusion.
Given that menstruation has been constructed as such a shameful, taboo topic, it is important to consider the contexts and circumstances in which talk and discussion about menstruation arises at all. Much talk that has been observed concerning menarche remains highly negative, promoting its existence as an unfortunate and shameful biological event that requires hygienic management (Beausang and Razor, 2000; Kissling, 1996a). More recently, however, Fingerson (2005) reported evidence suggesting that girls sometimes talk about menstruation as a uniquely feminine experience that empowers them in their interactions with boys in school.
As a concrete symbol, menarche holds particular psychological and sociocultural significance to the individual girl—it signals a potential need for her to reconceptualize her identity as a menstruating woman in a patriarchal society. Becoming a woman in a patriarchal society requires that one embody societal messages of femininity, dissociating from one’s own physical desires in order to conform to hegemonic constructions of feminine beauty, appearance and behavior (Tolman et al., 2006). As such, our study aimed to explore more explicitly girls’ identity construction and meaning-making processes as they navigated the symbolic transition from girl to woman. In particular, we examined how girls created meaning out of their menarcheal experience and how they appropriated, rejected, or modulated the largely negative circulating discourses of menstruation and femininity.
Approach and methodology
The theoretical framework underlying the present discussion is guided by a systemic perspective (Falmagne, 2004), in which the construction of ‘self’, thought and identity in social agents involves processes at three interrelated levels of analysis. These include macrosocial processes such as gender, ‘race,’ and socio economic class that organize the social world and have both material and discursive constituents; local discursive processes that involve the co-construction of meaning through talk and that are partly configured by macro level processes; and processes through which the person agentively constructs her or his identity and mode of thinking by appropriating, rejecting, or interpreting available societal discourses. Thus, we view women as social agents, constituted in and through their societal location, who draw from available discourses of menstruation and idealized femininity in making sense of their menarcheal experience.
Guided by this framework, we approached our study with several intersecting goals in mind. The first was to explore each individual girl’s experience of menarche as expressed retrospectively by the young woman within the interview context. Relatedly, we were interested in exploring how largely negative dominant discourses of menstruation were appropriated, rejected, or interpreted in informing girls’ construction of the menarcheal experience. Finally, and more broadly, we wanted to explore the women’s discussion of their bodies and societal constructions of femininity in relation to menstruation. Hence, as will be described later, while our primary analytic focus in this article is on the girls’ menarcheal experience at the time, we also place some analytic attention on the young woman’s current positioning in relation to menstruation as reflected indirectly in the interview.
Pilot data aimed at fine-tuning the method for this study were gathered with five graduate student participants aged 22 to 25 at a small, private university in the northern U.S. Those data are not analyzed here. Participants in this study were 13 women aged 18 to 22 years at the time of the interview, all students at the same university. Participants were recruited by the first author through several undergraduate courses. They were told that the researchers were interested in understanding young women’s menarcheal experiences and that their participation was entirely voluntary and confidential. Thus all participants were given pseudonyms. A US$15 gift card to a bookstore was offered as compensation. Those women who volunteered scheduled an individual interview with the first author, which lasted between 30 and 90 minutes, though most lasted approximately 45 minutes. The study was approved by the university’s Institutional Review Board for Human Subjects prior to the collection of any data.
Eleven participants were White and two were Asian. Two participants identified as upper-middle class, and all others suggested in their interviews that they were middle-class, which, in the U.S. context, might also refer, in some cases, to a working class background. Nine participants indicated that they grew up in nuclear families with heterosexual, married parents. Three participants indicated that they lived primarily with their mothers after their parent’s divorce, and one participant was raised solely by her mother who had never married her father. Ten women identified as heterosexual, two as bisexual, and one woman indicated that she had no prior sexual experience with men or women. The average age at menarche was 11.75 years with a range of 9 to 14 years. The decision to complete data collection was made during the data collection phase, when discussion around the meaning and experience of menarche continually cohered around negativity and ambivalence, and the input of additional participants did not reveal new material (Magnusson and Marecek, 2012).
In line with the goals of feminist interpretative research, we approached data collected with this relatively homogeneous sample from an intersectional perspective. This perspective highlights that social categories and identities are inextricably intertwined, and they take meaning partially in relation to one another (Crenshaw, 1991; Magnusson and Marecek, 2012; McCall, 2005). That is, social formations such as gender, race and class co-construct one another to produce unique social experiences and identities at the level of the person.
The relative non-diversity of the sample is representative of the student population at the campus where data were collected. It is further possible that the self-selection bias for participation in a study exploring a taboo topic such as menstruation (Burrows and Johnson, 2005) is reflected in this non-diversity. While this sample was more homogenous than what would enable a comprehensive examination of menarcheal experiences and their variations across particular social locations, we consider, through the lens of intersectionality, the formative social-discursive processes involved in identity construction around menarche. We return to addressing this point more fully in the conclusion.
The interview was flexible and guided by the participants’ responses as well as the underlying concerns of the research. The interview first briefly explored the woman’s societal location, cultural background and family and life history, then explored her menarcheal experience and subsequent experiences with menstruation. Each participant was asked to share the story that she associated with her first menstrual period. Depending upon the participant’s response, follow up questions were aimed at gathering details about how friends and relatives reacted to the participant; the participant’s feelings about her body, sexuality and femininity at menarche; and any changes in behavior after the onset of menstruation. Audio-recorded interviews were transcribed verbatim, retaining laughter, significant pauses, and other ‘inelegant’ features of speech including phrases such as ‘uh’ and ‘like’ (DeVault, 1999). Anonymity was maintained through the removal of identifying information and the application of a pseudonym to the transcribed data.
For the primary data analysis, which focused on both individual meaning making processes and societal discourses informing girls’ experience, we used a variation of the ‘reading guide’ originally developed by Brown et al. (1989). In accordance with this method, we approached participants’ talk about their memories of menarche and menstruation as representative of their experiences at the time, while, however, acknowledging that accounts of experience are never transparent and that memory is both partial and reconstructive. This approach was motivated by the importance of attending to women’s accounts of their ‘experience’ as underscored by feminist scholars (Devault, 1999; Kruks, 2001) without ignoring the complexities pertaining to the fact that experience is ultimately constructed through available discourses (Scott, 1992).
The analysis also included, where appropriate, attention to women’s talk from a discursive perspective (Wetherell, 2001), so as to explore the moment-to-moment construction of both feminine identity and menstruation as it occurred within the interview context. This methodology relies on a selective integration of representational and discourse-theoretic approaches to interview data, approaches that are viewed here as complementary (though selectively so) rather than dualistically opposed (Falmagne, 2009). The content of participants’ responses is assumed to be representationally related to their ‘experiences’ at menarche, evidently filtered by memory, while, inseparably, its formulation is inflected discursively by the participant’s current positioning and identity construction in this interpersonal context (Molder and Potter, 2005). We assumed that participants as social agents were engaged in memory work while they were simultaneously participants in the discursive context of the interview. While we do not assume that participants’ responses provide transparent access to their past experience, we do assume that they include an effort to convey the recollection in which they were engaged, in addition to the functional aspects of interpersonal communication and talk.
We engaged in a multi-stage analytic process. The first author initially applied the reading guide approach to the data, drawing on its ability to capture ‘the multilayered meanings of what a girl says and how she says it’ (Tolman, 2002: 38). This calls for the researcher to analytically consider an interview at least four times, systematically attending to and underlining with a different color pen, a particular aspect of each participant’s narrative ‘voice’ each time. The first author read through each interview five times:
The first reading involved attending to the story being told by the participant; that is, the focus was on what the participant says as well as the interpretation of how she says it The second reading involved attending to the manners in which the participant represents and positions herself as she recollects her experiences, and thus involved highlighting all statements where the participant says ‘I’ or ‘me’. The third reading involved attending to a participant’s recollection and construction of her menarcheal experience. This reading involved underlining text in which a participant discussed her perceptions of, reactions to, and feelings associated with her menarche. The fourth reading involved looking for a participant’s appropriation, modification, or rejection of dominant discourses of menstruation, and thus any statements referring to the secrecy, shame, or disgust associated with menstruation were underlined here The fifth reading involved attending to how a participant positioned herself in relation to dominant conceptions of femininity, underlining her references to women’s bodies, behaviors and sexuality, for example.
Both authors then jointly conducted a thematic analysis of the underlined data in order to identify themes and commonalities in the participants’ sense-making process around menarche (Braun and Clarke, 2006). All underlined passages were extracted, collated, and read to identify meaningful patterns. Ten initial themes were generated and defined by identifying commonalities among underlined passages. We checked that each underlined passage cohered within the themes and refined the themes accordingly. For instance the theme Hiding, Concealing and Managing Menstruation (to be discussed) was obtained by collapsing the initial themes Secrecy, Appeal to Dominant Discourses, and ‘It Wasn’t a Popular Subject’; and the theme It-ifying (to be discussed) resulted from broadening and reformulating the initial theme Distancing the Self. The themes Timing and Fear of Tampons were deleted as they were not coherently related to other identified themes. This process resulted in four themes that will be described in more detail below.
Once we developed our themes, during the process of refinement, we also engaged with the data discursively in order to examine the ways in which a participant’s talk highlighted her continuing construction and negotiation of menstruation. We approach discourse as a system of meanings, practices, and values that organize social life and individual experiences (Wetherell, 2001). As such we attended to the ways in which participants constructed, reflected on, and continued to make sense of their menarche and menstruation during the interview context.
Analysis: Meanings and ambivalences
Four themes highlighted the ambivalence with which the participants in this sample reacted upon reaching menarche. The themes were: participants’ rejection or appropriation of their newly ascribed status as a woman at menarche; material strategies used to hide and conceal evidence of menstruation; explicit linguistic avoidance of menstrual terminology; and reference to the comfort and safety provided by a community of menstruating peers.
‘Now you’re a woman’
Upon reaching menarche, girls are commonly told that they have become, or are on their way to becoming, women. Hence, they are led to begin identifying themselves as future women in compliance with, or resistance to, discourses about gender roles and expectations in a society that continues to devalue women (Lee, 2009). They may internalize negative messages about womanhood and react anxiously or ambivalently to becoming a woman, or girls may react positively because menarche allows for a greater acceptance of the feminine self (Koff et al., 1982), providing a concrete confirmation of womanhood that allows them to consolidate all other feminizing changes occurring throughout puberty.
In our current sample, participants provided diverse responses to the question, ‘did you feel more like a woman after starting your period?’ While a few young women reported reacting with excitement and anticipation, most reacted with ambivalence or denial of their newly ascribed status. Of particular note is Priscilla, a 20-year-old, middle-class white woman who was the sole participant to address, without being prompted, feeling like a woman after beginning to menstruate. She stated: I think I remember it wasn’t like a scared thing so much as we were almost like glad and excited because […] we were all very much aware of what was happening and like what to do with it and so I think it was like excitement that we’d finally gotten it and we were like women now. So it was definitely a big stepping stone towards getting the boyfriends and becoming a teenager. Looking back I think I realize now much more that like it definitely did mark the transition into me becoming like a woman.
Priscilla’s excitement at the prospect of beginning the transition to womanhood was not a reaction cited by any of the other women in this sample. It is important to note here that Priscilla, also in contrast to the other participants, highlighted her own preparation for the physical and psychological changes that would occur with the onset of puberty and menstruation. She attributed this to her participation in a ‘Body Basics’ class she attended with her female peers in her predominantly white and relatively affluent neighborhood during fifth grade.
In contrast and more typically, Tracy, a 20-year-old white, middle-class woman whose parents divorced prior to her reaching the age of adolescence, showed uncertainty when narrating in the interview context about whether she felt that she had become a woman at menarche: ‘I probably did. I felt like I was I guess maturing more than anything. And I remember I didn’t like to tell my dad. I don’t know. I guess I just didn’t want him to look at me differently.’ After pausing for a moment, she then continued by stating: ‘I felt more like a girl I guess ‘cause it was like women have it and if you have your period you’re more like a woman.’ Tracy seemed to have implicitly associated menarche, maturation and womanhood with emerging sexuality, as she reported being afraid, at the time of her menarche, to be looked at in a different, possibly more sexualized, manner. As an adolescent she was resistant to this facet of womanhood, but she also suggested that because all women have periods, by getting hers she was ‘more like’ a woman. Her ambivalence about becoming a woman is further evidenced discursively in the phrasing of her comment. When discussing during the interview how she felt at the time, she employed the use of the word ‘girl’ to accompany the personal pronoun ‘I,’ (‘I felt more like a girl’) and she used the word ‘woman’ with the more impersonal pronoun ‘you’ (‘if you have your period you’re more like a woman’), which can be read as distancing herself from this new status (Wetherell, 2001). In Tracy’s comments, there was an acknowledgement that becoming a woman means changing psychologically and physically, as well as interpersonally in relation to how others viewed her. Concurrently, her comments reflected her heightened awareness, as an adolescent, of the increasing differences between girls’ and boys’ bodies at puberty and resistance to what these changes to her body may have meant for her identity.
Several young women in the sample simply rejected the idea that they had become women at the onset of menstruation. Anna, a 19-year-old white, middle-class woman who grew up in a small town in Vermont with ‘reserved’ parents and two brothers, remembered being too young to feel like a woman at menarche: I remember when I first got it just thinking like that’s weird ‘cause the boys say like, ‘You’ve become a woman.’ And I just remember thinking how strange that was ‘cause I was in seventh grade, and it’s not like you’re a woman in seventh grade. And I remember thinking it was weird, like that meant that I could physiologically have a baby if I wanted to, and thinking how strange that was that when you’re thirteen or whatever you have the ability because you don’t feel like an adult or woman.
Anna reported associating the onset of her period with the potential for motherhood in a fashion that no other young women in this sample did. As Laws (1990: 28) suggests, ‘men maintain their social power over women in part through an ideology which defines women as inferior to men […] This includes universal heterosexuality and in many cultures universal motherhood’. It is possible, then, that Anna’s refusal to appropriate the definition of herself as a woman at menarche was based in an implicit refusal to be reduced to her bodily capacity for bearing children or to its association with motherhood—the empathic and nurturing characteristics associated with mothers and motherhood are not particularly valued in a patriarchal society. Instead, they are used as a site for women’s subordination (Bordo, 1993; Ortner, 1974), and yet, remain simultaneously compulsory.
At menarche, girls are inclined to begin the process of redefining and constructing their identity as separate from boys and other non-menstruating girls. As a group considered together, the young women in this sample typically remembered reacting with ambivalence to their newly ascribed status of woman. Some participants reported simply rejecting this status, refusing, at the time, to consider what being a menstruating girl meant for their identity or fearing how others might react in relation to this feminizing bodily change. Other participants reflected that they had created meaning and a new, emerging female identity out of their first menstruation by relating it to capabilities unique to women.
Hiding, concealing and managing menstruation
Menarche is still treated as a ‘hygienic crisis’ within contemporary U.S. society (Rembeck et al., 2006). This societal message, often perpetuated by menstrual hygiene companies in their advertisements and educational pamphlets (Erchull et al., 2002), reflects and reinforces the notion put forward by pollution theory that menstruation is a clear sign of dirtiness that needs to be hidden and controlled (Merskin, 1999). Young women in this sample were certainly influenced by this societal discourse, as they recalled engaging in practices that minimized the appearance of menstruation and used a wide variety of techniques to do so.
Several participants suggested that menstruation simply was not something to be discussed when they were girls. Regina, an 18-year-old white woman, who recalled a mostly idyllic life growing up in a ‘cozy town’ in central Massachusetts with her parents and sister, indicated that it was a matter of clear topic avoidance: ‘I didn’t really wanna talk about it to my friends. I thought it would be kinda weird. It was this sort of private thing that I didn’t really wanna get into with people.’ She subsequently dramatized this statement with an invented conversation: ‘It’s like, ‘Hey did you bleed at all today?’ ‘I sure did. Did you bleed at all?’ ‘Yes, I bled into my pad.’ So it’s like there’s not a whole lot to talk about I guess.’
Similarly, Jillian, a 20-year-old white woman, who described being unable to trust her parents and having had a long-time struggle with ‘body image issues’, makes a similar comment when asked about her adolescent conversations about menstruation with her sister: ‘It wasn’t like we cozied up on the couch and said like, ‘So how’s your period?’ And I know that some people do, but to me that never seemed like an option I guess. It just seemed weird to do, to talk about it on such a close basis.’ Both Jillian and Regina’s indication that discussing their periods with others when they were girls would have been ‘weird,’ reflects the cultural notion that talk about menstruation should be limited or hidden. Interestingly, both women used humor within their interviews when recollecting how they felt about discussing menstruation in the past, perhaps as a device to manage their continued unease with talk around menstruation, given its construction as an unmentionable topic (Braun, 1999). Indeed, a discursive analysis of the function of this humor suggests that these dramatizations convey the women’s ongoing discomfort regarding menstrual talk, as humor is often incited to allow a speaker to cope with discussing a difficult or taboo topic (Hay, 2000).
Two young women remembered feeling the need to keep menstruation hidden specifically from boys and men. For example, Anna, who identified herself as a heterosexual woman during her interview, discussed hiding menstruation from boys at a material level as an adolescent: ‘In class if you ever had to go like change your pad or tampon you always had to hide it or like it was always hard to try to be secretive about it, ‘cause well boys would make fun of you for it.’ Her desire to avoid drawing attention to her menstrual maintenance practices arose out of a fear of being ridiculed or shamed, specifically by boys, who typically view menstruation more negatively than do older men (Fingerson, 2006). Reflecting a predominant prescription from menstrual hygiene advertisements that girls and women vigilantly hide menstruation from boys and men (Merskin, 1999), or suffer the consequences of allowing their menstrual status to be known, this perceived reaction served to restrict and control this participant’s behaviors.
A topic highlighted by the majority of young women was the material management required to keep menstruation concealed. Regina recalled an experience where she was unable to engage in what she considered proper material management of her period: ‘I didn’t like it in the dorm bathroom before they put the trash can in one of the stalls. Like I was really upset that we had to bring it out to the main trash can. I thought that was awful.’ Regina’s inability to hide the fact that she was using feminine products, which signaled to other women that she was currently menstruating, caused her great discomfort. Evidently, she had appropriated the cultural discourse that ostracizes menstruating girls and women, and so felt she needed to keep invisible the material maintenance practices associated with her menstruation.
Another participant, Priscilla, recalled that even before she had reached menarche, she began changing and adapting her behaviors in preparation for its onset: ‘Right before I got my period, cause I knew it was coming, I stopped wearing anything white ‘cause I was like I’m gonna definitely get my period in this and that would be scary.’ Her fear of wearing white is associated with a fear of having menstrual blood stain her clothing in a highly visible fashion. To foreclose the possibility of being a visibly menstruating girl, she engaged in protective behaviors requiring conscious thought and effort. This strikingly illustrates the power of the ‘rule’ that menstruation must be hidden and the fact that adolescent girls are particularly vulnerable to messages of shame and embarrassment associated with menstruation (Chrisler, 2011): this young woman remembered fearing the repercussions of a potential failure even prior to the onset of her menstruation.
The range of discursive and material methods employed to hide, conceal and manage menstruation recalled by young women in this sample reflects the extent to which they have appropriated the societal discourses that mark menstruation as shameful, humiliating and dirty. In light of the negative construction of menstruation, which continues to be adopted and reiterated among this predominantly white, middle class, and heterosexual sample of participants, it can be seen why the recent medical trend toward menstrual suppression with continuous-use oral contraceptives has become appealing as another, albeit extreme, option for controlling menstruation (Johnston-Robledo et al., 2003). Women respond to the social stigma associated with menstruation by correcting or obtaining an antidote for their ‘tainted condition,’ recently to the extent that they are attracted to the prospect of completely eliminating or, at least, severely reducing the frequency of menstruation with continuous use of oral contraceptives (Coutts and Berg, 1993: 188; Johnston-Robledo et al., 2003).
‘Correcting’ the tainted condition is not always simple, easy, or comforting, as many of the young, mostly heterosexual women in this sample illustrated. They recalled maintaining great fear and anxiety that their menstrual status would be discovered if they failed to properly manage and conceal it, especially from boys and men. Indeed, menstrual leaks are a highly visible, stigmatizing mark, symbolically representing a lapse in ‘proper’ feminine behavior and perceived by women and men alike to be disgusting (Chrisler, 2011). Scripts associated with proper menstrual practices (Kissling, 1996b), then, seem to have arisen largely in order to minimize others’ awareness of and discomfort with menstruation.
It-ifying
Many women in this sample avoided the use of the terms ‘menarche’, ‘menstruation’ and ‘periods’ (itself a euphemism), choosing instead to refer to menarche and menstruation simply as ‘it’ or ‘this.’ In fact, at some point during their interviews, all of the women in this sample referred to menarche or menstruation as ‘it.’ This was not merely a deictic grammatical construction. These women described menstruation as a foreign invasion, invented code words for talking about menstruation, or made vague references to menstruation when discussing its practical or material aspects. From a discursive analytic perspective, lexical devices such as these serve to distance the women (and girls) from menstruation (Wetherell, 2001).
When asked to recollect the story associated with their first period, eight of the young women in this sample referred to their menarche as ‘it’ within the context of the interview. Kayla, a 19-year-old, middle-class white woman who was the oldest of four girls in her family, recalled being unable to even utter the word ‘period’ when she told her mother that she had begun to menstruate: ‘I was like, ‘Mom, I got my…can you say it? I don’t wanna say it.’ And then she was guessing and she said it, and she was like, ‘Oh okay,’ and she just showed me how to do it and stuff.’ Before Kayla narrated the story of her menarche, she mentioned that she was a late starter in comparison with her friends, remembering that as a girl she was actually impatient to start her period and wondering why it had not happened to her yet. It is interesting that though she recalled expecting and even hoping that she would begin menstruating soon, she avoided using the terminology when speaking with her mother at the time, (‘Can you say it? I don’t wanna say it’) and she still avoided it as a young woman during her recollection of her menarcheal experience (‘she just showed me how to do it and stuff’). As this quote demonstrates, Kayla remained very imprecise in referring to the process of managing her menstruation with ‘feminine hygiene’ products. From a discursive perspective, her use of the phrase ‘how to do it’ within the interview enabled her to avoid discussion about menstrual products and signaled that dealing with menstruation as a girl was a foreign task that she was not yet ready to confront or even verbally reference.
Regina recalled, in discussions with her sister, an unwillingness to even refer to menstrual products as pads and tampons. Instead, they had invented a humorous code word for them: ‘We call the supplies Moses ‘cause they part the Red Sea.’ This humor may have served to ease their discomfort with talking openly about menstruation and products associated with it. The fact that a non-prompted humorous detail from the past was reported during the interview holds particular significance as well. In fact, all participants consistently used laughter in the interview context when reflecting on their experiences with menarche and menstruation, perhaps as a discursive device to manage their continuing discomfort and unease with its discussion (Braun, 1999; Kissling, 1996b).
Still when discussing menstruation with her close friends after several of them reached menarche, Kayla recalled that girls continued to avoid the use of the term ‘period’ with one another: ‘They would just be like, ‘Oh I have that thing this week,’ and then I would be like, ‘Got it.’’ By not referring to menstruation directly, these adolescent girls were following the culturally scripted ‘rule’ that menstruation is not a topic to be discussed in public. It is interesting to consider this trend in light of the broader pattern according to which girls and women, as well as boys and men, employ the use of euphemism to avoid talking about any facet of women’s reproductive bodies (Braun and Kitzinger, 2001). Menarche and menstruation, then, represent more unmentionable aspects of the female body for which dismissive, and often demeaning, referents are invented.
By referring to their menarche as ‘it,’ adolescent girls distanced themselves from the onset of their menstruation. They signaled that their menstruation was separate from them, a foreign ‘thing’ that had, as Lee (1994) suggested, invaded their bodies, happening to them at menarche. We concur with this interpretation, but also contend that referring to menstruation as ‘it’ further serves to keep the topic of menstruation from entering open public discourse. Adolescent girls have constructed menstruation as something that is so shameful that it must not be talked about openly or publically (Kissling, 1996b). This common and consistent use of a discursive device to avoid the outright reference to menstruation is yet another example of how girls and women alike have devised elaborate strategies to distance themselves from menstruation and conceal its presence in their lives.
‘A community of suffering’
Though many young women remembered feeling the need to conceal and control their menstruation both materially and linguistically, about half of the young women in this sample recalled the availability of a support group among their female friends. In these peer groups, they found a safe space to discuss menstruation comfortably and openly. Brittany, a 20-year-old middle-class white woman who was the only child growing up with her parents in a small town in southern Maryland, stated: ‘It was nice to know that there was a larger community who instead of just going around doing our thing, we were all suffering. And we could all complain about it to each other.’ Similarly Anna recalled conversations with her friends about menstruation: ‘We talked about just the, ‘Ahhh! Our periods suck. They’re so annoying.’ Like if we were on our periods at the same time, we would just like complain about it.’ While these girls reiterated that menstruation is an annoyance, they were bringing discussion about it from the private into the interpersonal realm. It is of further interest to note from a discursive analytical perspective that young Anna employed the use of a commonly used and accepted menstrual euphemism (‘period’) with her peers in this context. In this way, the ‘open’ talk is a form of resistance, albeit delimited and bounded within female peer groups, to the scripts that tell girls and women to keep menstruation hidden and stoically endured. It is important to highlight, however, that while Brittany and Anna were engaging in an active form of resistance to dominant social rules, they and their peers were not bonding over or ‘celebrating’ their femininity; rather they commiserated over, and sought support from one another in, their shared experience of distress (Stubbs and Costos, 2004).
In another manifestation of ‘solidarity’ among menstruating girls and women, two young women remembered helping or being helped by their peers with respect to menstrual management. Mandy recalled a distinct fear that menstrual blood might leak through her trousers; however she soothed her anxiety by calling on her peers for assistance: ‘I’d be like, ‘Hey can you check my pants. Is there anything wrong with them?’ Like you could actually ask your friends and have them watch out for you.’ Tracy recalled a similar experience as a member of a female sports team: ‘I even remember people saying, ‘Tell me if I start to like go through if you happen to notice.’ Because it is a concern.’ While these young women recalled maintaining constant vigilance to conceal menstruation, they also recalled relying on a support network of girls and women to help them manage this task. Seeking out and receiving social support allowed them to feel more secure rather than to fear being shunned by their peers for inadequate menstrual management.
Participants in this sample indicated the creation of a safe space amongst selected other girls and women with whom they could commiserate in their discussion of menstruation and upon whom they could rely for help in its practical management. This points to an interesting tension in the collectivity around menstruation that the women in this sample reported. Within these communities, girls and women often reiterated societal messages about the hassle and humiliation associated with menstruation (Chrisler, 2011; Kissling, 1996a) and provided practical advice in order to help each other conform to societal messages demanding the concealment of menstruation. However, they were also able to provide one another with a support network for maintaining the, often demanding, rules and standards for ‘proper societal menstrual etiquette’.
Discussion
Extending and building upon the results of other empirical and theoretical work showing that menarche is often experienced as a shameful and humiliating event requiring great care and control in its management (Chrisler, 2008; Kissling 1996a), this study explored the nuanced ways in which negative societal discourses of menstruation impact women’s recollection of their menarcheal experience and its relevance to their feminine identity construction. Themes identified in the girls’ experiences of menarche reflect how they have simultaneously appropriated negative discourses of menstruation in materially managing and concealing its presence while rejecting messages that instruct them not to discuss menstruation as they engage in ‘open’ talk about their menstrual suffering with their peers. Discursive analysis indicated manners in which participants continued to express discomfort and embarrassment with menstruation in the present as they recollected previous experiences.
It must again be highlighted that this is a particular and located sample of young women, most of whom are white and heterosexual, coming from a predominantly middle class background, and attending a liberal private university in the U.S. Martin (1987) has suggested that the recall of the menarcheal experience is significantly affected by a woman’s racial and class background. She posits that working-class women, positioned outside of middle class women’s investment in a productive labor market, are better able to resist the application of a productive system to their reproductive bodies, and instead focus on the experiential qualities of menarche and its construction as a developmental rite of passage into womanhood. Perhaps this provides an interpretive account for the ambivalence with which the mostly middle class women in the present sample reacted to the suggestion that they had become women upon reaching their menarche.
The predominantly heterosexual composition of our sample could also partially help to understand participants’ lack of discussion of positive aspects associated with menstruation. Indeed, Fahs (2011) observed that lesbian and bisexual women were far more likely to recount positive experiences related to their menstruating bodies, especially in the context of sexual activity; and Ussher and Perz (2008) discussed evidence that women in lesbian relationships experienced more support and responsiveness from their partners in regards to a variety of premenstrual changes or distress.
Notwithstanding these differences, the existence of negative discourses of menstruation must also be understood within the broader societal constructions of femininity, the feminine body and female sexuality. Female bodies have been conceived of throughout history and across disciplines as problematic, representing irrationality and unruliness (e.g. Bordo, 1993; Ortner, 1974; Ussher, 2006). They are constructed as sites requiring male control to tame and temper them. Already being defined and controlled by their bodies externally, girls then experience menarche as an unwanted, polluting, and foreign internal disturbance to their own bodies, which robs them of control to a greater extent (Chrisler, 2008; Ussher, 2006). Paradoxically, girls and women are convinced that they must contain and manage their polluted bodies, while feeling increasingly alienated from, and objectified by, them (Lee, 1994; Ussher, 2006). At menarche, then, girls are both defined by, and separated from, their sexualized bodies.
The resulting tension can also be seen in how the young women in this sample described in great depth and detail the need to engage in highly calculated and measured behaviors to conceal, hide, and manage their menstruation both materially, and linguistically. Materially, they recalled being secretive about the disposal of their used menstrual products and wearing a subset of clothing that would mask their menstrual flow if it leaked uncontrollably. Linguistically, they recalled using evasive language to discuss menstruation, often circumventing the use of menstrual terminology entirely; discursively they also distanced themselves from the topic of menstruation by employing the use of impersonal pronouns. At some point during their interview, all women engaged in these linguistic management strategies, even if they reported that menarche was ‘not a big deal’ or ‘nothing special,’ evidencing a tension between their construction of menarche as an innocuous event and their alignment with negative dominant discourses.
Yet, given that a macrosocial menstrual taboo continues to exist (Ussher, 2006), we must consider what it means within the interview context to talk about menstruation. Women indicated their ongoing and continued discomfort with the open discussion of menstruation and menstrual product management both explicitly and discursively: the interviews were brimming with pregnant pauses and the continuous ringing of laughter (Tolman, 2002). Participants also often recalled, non-prompted, humorous details and memories within the interview context, further illustrating how menstrual humor and euphemisms provide them with a ‘secret language’ for communicating about this taboo topic (Ernster, 1975). Evidently, women’s current views toward menstruation and body shame, both of which are deeply affected by their societal location, enculturation, and developmental stage will necessarily affect the recall and construction of the menarcheal experience. That the young mostly white, middle class and heterosexual women in this sample reported reacting so strongly with negativity at menarche and maintained this discomfort in discussing menstruation within the interview context is a clear indication that many of them had appropriated societal messages of shame and contamination. This further reflects the medicalization, and failure to acknowledge or discuss the experiential aspects, of menstruation that Martin (1987) observed in her white, middle class participants.
Adolescent girls are particularly prone to appropriating and reiterating dominant negative discourses about menstruation, having had little to no prior experience from which to counter these dominant narratives (Fingerson, 2005). Further, at puberty, girls are simultaneously identified with and separated from their constantly changing bodies. This tension can create a heightened sense of shame and susceptibility to messages in the media encouraging girls to sanitize, manage and maintain their out of control bodies. The systemic perpetuation and instantiation of these and broader societal discourses of menstruation serves to prevent girls from developing a healthy, positive feminine identity during this pivotal developmental phase. Current negative discourses of menstruation, womanhood and the body, then, converge to set girls on a highly problematic gendered trajectory at menarche that is likely to influence their meaning making as well as affective and behavioral experiences across the lifespan.
Footnotes
Acknowledgments
Special thanks to the women who volunteered to be interviewed for this study and the Francis L Hiatt School of Psychology for providing funding for their compensation. Thanks are offered to members of the ‘Library Group’ Kathryn E Frazier, Heather Mangione, and Joseph R Schwab for their feedback and stimulating discussion. Many thanks to two anonymous reviewers and Virginia Braun for their valuable suggestions and comments that helped to strengthen this manuscript.