At 8:16 PM +0000 1/10/06, Caroline wrote:
If you are pregnant or breastfeeding you are unlikely to have monthly
cycles. Admitted women who are not sexually active won't be pregnant much
but once you take nuns out of the equasion most women wouldn't need sanitary
protection much during their life.
But they'd still need it enough of their lives for it to be a
consideration in their lives. (And even most married women were
probably not producing a child every year, or even every two years,
and so would have spent much of their mature lives menstruating every
month -- and not all women got married, remained married constantly
until menopause, were fertile, etc...)
In any case, since this was raised in the context of discussing
underwear, it is worth explicitly reminding ourselves that while
currently in the US and similar cultures we often deal with
menstruation by attaching something to underwear, this solution is in
fact extremely modern. When I first started menstruating (circa 1980,
give or take a couple years) many were still wearing special belts
with dangly bits to which sanitary pads were attached (no underwear
needed), and even as recently as the early 1990s when I was in
hospital in the UK, the hospital issue pads assumed such a belt
(which, naturally, I didn't have, not having used one since I was a
young teenager -- nor were any of the British women I knew still
using such things). And even though I have myself used such
non-adhesive backing methods in the past, I still tend to forget that
adhesive pads attached to underwear hasn't been around since time
immemorial -- that is, until forcibly reminded by hospital time-warps
or the like!
So, even if it were true that historically women didn't need sanitary
protection much during their life, that wouldn't explain lack of
women wearing underwear as underwear is completely unnecessary for
sanitary protection (even without tampons) and, further, modernly
underwear only became part of the sanitary protection solution in
very recent decades.
That is, sanitary protection tells us nothing about underwear, and
underwear tells us nothing about sanitary protection, except and
unless there is specific evidence linking the two frequently
unrelated variables in some specific context (such as, say, very late
20th, early 21st century US & similar cultures).
Sharon
--
Sharon Krossa, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Resources for Scottish history, names, clothing, language & more:
Medieval Scotland - http://MedievalScotland.org/
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