This question is a bit strange, is there any information about women’s menstrual hygiene during Tudors times? Were they considered “unclean” during their menstual cycle?
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This is something that I've been curious about too but it is entirely skipped over in history books on the period, I think because it was not something that was really spoken about. We have had discussions over at The Elizabeth Files forum about menstruation - see http://www.elizabethfiles.com/forum/tudor-times/menstruation-and-tudorelizabethan-times/ and we think that women would have used rags (cotton cloth) to 'mop up' the flow.
There is an interesting article on Elizabethan attitudes to menstruation at http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Attitudes+towards+menstruation+and+menstrual+blood+in+Elizabethan...-a0209577950 and another one at ATTITUDES TO MENSTRUATION IN SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLAND by Patricia Crawford which can be purchased for $25. Medieval Blood by Bettina Bildhauer - http://litthe.oxfordjournals.org/content/20/4/475.full and on Amazon - looks good too.
Yeah and did the women have to walk around and have…blood go everywhere..?
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Claire Reply:
May 31st, 2011 at 11:08 pm
I think that they would have used cloth/rags to absorb the flow. The fact that the Queen’s sheets were checked to make sure she was still menstruating means that it was natural for the sheets to get bloodied. Not nice!
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I asked that because i’m not sure…well actually i doubt they had pads or tampons.
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Ugh, i’d hate to lay in a bed of blood though. And that sounds like an invasion of privacy but i guess they had to do what they had to do back then.
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There is evidence that ‘course cloths’ were used as a kind of pad, held in place by the Tudor equivalent of the ‘sanitary belt’ (some of the older generation might remember those!)
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