Are You Hysterical?
Or Just Really Angry…?
May 28th was Menstrual Hygiene Day. May was also Mental Health Awareness Month. At first glance, the two might seem unrelated, but let me show you how they are intricately connected.
My intent is not to give you another biology lesson like the ones you had in school. But if this article leads you to reclaim a part of your biology, then that’s amazing.
My intent is not to force you to think of your periods as magical from now on.
But if this article leads you to reclaim your menstrual magic, then that’s amazing.
My intent is not to tell you how you are supposed to feel every single day.
But if this article leads you to become more mindful of how you feel, then that’s amazing.
I’d like you to remember that living a cyclical life is an act of rebellion against the patriarchal capitalist paradigms that we live in today. Just by honoring and following our inner and outer natural cycles, we are fighting back. So maybe, we’ll be able to see our menstrual cycles not as a biological burden or as some God-given sign of our inferiority, but rather as the source of our inner power and as a war cry in this fight to reclaim our humanity.
Take whatever resonates. Leave whatever doesn’t. Change whatever needs to be changed. I ask only one thing: that you have an open heart and an open mind. Because periods are not the same as womanhood. They are not the epitome of neo-spiritual feminine energy. They are not a sign of our only purpose in this life.
Deconstructing Period Shame
Think back to your very first period: what was that experience like?
When did it happen? How did you notice? How did it make you feel? Who—if anyone—did you tell about it? How did they react? Who—if anyone—taught you about what was going on?
My mother meant well when she said something along the lines of “Welcome to womanhood!” I remember I was in a lot of pain; the cramps were really bad from day one. And here’s not only my mom but the whole world, really, wanting to celebrate my womanhood… It didn’t make me love my womanhood, obviously, because pretty much from then on, I connected womanhood with pain. I’m sure, I’m not alone with a story like this. And I’m also sure that we all recognize this for what it is: shame. This toxic tool of the patriarchy is closely connected to our period blood and menstrual cycles, and I will show you how.
It started roughly 2,500 years ago in Ancient Greece. That’s when the term hysteria was first coined by Greek philosophers.
Hysteria comes from the Greek word for uterus (“hystera”) and it described a "wandering womb," a condition which was thought to be caused by a free-floating uterus. The idea was that the moon had such a strong pull on the womb, that it could block passages to the heart and lead to madness. Hippocrates (~500 BCE) and Aristotle (~350 BCE) both believed the wandering womb was a physical symptom of bad humors in women*.
These beliefs were then perpetuated during the Roman Empire. Pliny the Elder, a Roman author, naturalist, and philosopher who wrote “The Natural History” in the 1st century CE, claimed that period blood was dangerous.
Of course, the Abrahamic religions had something to say about menstruation, too. The Talmud (Rabbinic law) as well as the Christian Bible both considered periods to be “dirty and polluting”, and they each exempt women from participating in rituals and excluded them from social activities.
By the onset of the Middle Ages, menstruation was seen as a sign of a woman's sinfulness and a punishment for the "Original Sin". Any related maladies, such as painful cramping or mood swings were considered a normal part of this punishment.
By the end of the Middle Ages, as we were in the middle of the Burning Times all over Europe, menstrual health took another major hit. The burning of all heretics and witches left the continent in dire need of home healers and herbalists. As a result, we see women pushed out of the early Christian “medical schools” in the following centuries, as “the healing arts” were suddenly synonymized with battlefield medicine practiced by men alone, instead of home healing with herbs and holistic remedies that was practiced by witches and herbalists.
Even during the Renaissance (16th & 17th centuries), when the first autopsies on women showed that a uterus cannot actually move around the body, ideas around hysteria didn’t change much. While from then on it wasn’t considered a physical condition any longer, the narrative turned to hysteria being a mental illness that could only affect women. Beliefs around menstruation remained negative: having a period was still medically described as a dangerous and debilitating condition. Paracelsus, famous alchemist and natural philosopher of the 16th century, even wrote that hysteria is caused by women’s sexual depravity.
By the 19th century, female hysteria was an extremely common psychological diagnosis in people of all genders, but still predominantly in women, as they were believed to be naturally predisposed to mental and behavioral conditions. This widely held belief was heavily politicized during the Suffrage Movement (~1840’s) and during the First Women’s Rights Convention in the United States (1850’s).
At the turn of the century, Sigmund Freud further developed ideas around hysteria by adding the dimension of repressed sexual desires to the mix. This, in turn, was politicized again during the campaign for women’s right to vote (1918 in the United Kingdom and 1928 in the United States).
Even still in the 1970’s “raging hormones” were believed to “make women unfit for public life, work, and even motherhood.” [Thompson, Lana. The wandering womb: a cultural history of outrageous beliefs about women. United States, Prometheus Books, 1999.]
It wasn't until 1980 that the American Psychiatric Association stopped diagnosing "hysterical neurosis" as a mental health condition.
To sum this up: we are just barely coming out of 2,500 years of pathologizing periods, equating our cycle with womanhood, and in turn making womanhood itself symptomatic, all while doing nothing to actually support people with periods to live healthy & happy lives. Modern research of PMS, its causes, and potential cures did emerge from this history of hysteria, but even here the idea that it’s all just in our heads lingers in society like a festering little tumor.
So, a valid question here is this: are women and folks with periods mad, bad, or are we just really angry?
Because while the diagnosis of hysteria is no longer recognized in modern medicine, its legacy persists in the form of stereotypes and stigma around our emotions and menstrual cycles. There is a large gender health gap that only widens further, when we take skin color into account, or other gender expressions. Everyone with a uterus still faces ridiculous levels of medical gaslighting. And that’s just for female gender-affirming care…
Birthing has become the most medicalized and unnatural process of our time. (In fact, I highly recommend the movie “The Business of Being Born” https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0995061/)
Our cycles are being “regulated” away with artificial hormones. (Hendrickson-Jack, Lisa. The Fifth Vital Sign: Master Your Cycles & Optimize Your Fertility. N.p., Fertility Friday Publishing Incorporated, 2019.)
Period cramps are still considered normal. So much so that we are now debating whether or not to introduce federal “menstrual leave” for employees with periods, all over Europe. (https://sifted.eu/articles/paid-period-leave )
Our modern hormonal birth control pill was first tried and tested on completely unwitting Puerto Rican women who had no idea what they were even taking, let alone allowed or able to obtain it later when it finally was FDA-approved and released. “Sexual freedom” for some, on the backs of MANY. (This play about the topic just premiered in NYC https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-01175-5)
Young children with female genitalia are still horrendously butchered in the name of religion and societal norms, all over the world. (https://endfgm.eu/female-genital-mutilation/what-is-fgm/)
Period poverty is sky-rocketing, even in the western world, the pink tax is REAL, and the call for free period products is still widely countered with an “Oh, don’t be ridiculous!”. (Period.org is advocating for period equity: https://www.periodactionday.com/)
Serious conditions such as endometriosis and PCOS are “treated” with hormonal birth control or even complete hysterectomies. (https://endometriose.app/en/therapy-options/)
And that’s if they even get diagnosed! It still takes on average 10 years to get a diagnosis, by which time it’s usually too late to save the uterus anyways. (https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/why-does-receiving-diagnosis-endometriosis-take-so-long)
Dietary tips, health indices (such as the BMI), workout regimens, supplements—all of this research is still primarily done on male test groups; women are treated simply as “small men.” After all, we couldn’t possibly include people with cycles into such studies, lest the scientific studies get a little more complicated than we like. (Perez, Caroline Criado. Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men. United Kingdom, Random House, 2019.)
In some ways, it seems the pendulum has swung the other way—but still within the same limited box of binaries. Nowadays we often simply treat women as small men. While on the one hand, female biology and womanhood have been used against entire groups of people, in other areas of life, we simply pretend that it doesn’t exist at all. Convenient isn’t it? Not only is the modern world not designed for us (https://www.forbes.com/sites/evaepker/2023/09/12/fasten-your-seatbelts-a-female-car-crash-test-dummy-represents-average-women-for-the-first-time-in-60-years/), it’s also still dangerously not informed enough about how to help us when we need help (https://blackmamasmatter.org/bmhw-2024/).
Each of these facts is an invitation for you to do more research, educate yourself, and learn to discern between what you always believed to be true and what has conveniently been omitted from health education.
Reclaiming Menstrual Health
As Dr. Gabor Maté says, “healing is the journey to wholeness.” So, let’s start reclaiming the menstrual cycle. Because no matter how hard the pharmaceutical industry, the church, or politicians might try to keep us uninformed and distracted, the menstrual cycle is a part of (our) nature and we have the right to fully understand it. That is a crucial part of bodily autonomy. Being able to make informed decisions and having the capacity to consent to medical procedures or birth control or any sexual activity are entirely basic and yet entirely vital elements of our health, fertility, and even activism that we are so often denied.
No matter how much the TERF-y, patriarchal-divine-feminine groups of beige Insta accounts will have you believe your period is some divine feminine initiation into womanhood, it isn’t. At least not without the necessary deconstruction (which I invited you to in part 1 of this article). Listen closely to their argument. They often boast about the excruciating pains and struggles they endure by “being a woman”. They wear their hardships and physical ailments as a badge of honor that distinguishes them from men. And while technically these physical experiences are all valid in their own right, if you really listen, you’ll hear the underlying pain—the “Original Sin”-pain, the “God is punishing me”-pain, the “I deserve this”-pain. Their badge of honor suddenly reveals its true face: the symbol of religious & societal hetero-normative oppression that it actually is. So, let’s find compassion for them, too, and work towards healing our relationship with this very natural body function, instead of forcing more meaning onto it than is absolutely necessary.
Your first period really is an initiation. But not just into womanhood. How limiting. Rather, it’s an initiation into a new phase of life—your literal and figurative fertile phase of life. A new archetypal energy of raw creation. A transition from the maiden to the wild woman, the mother, and the witch archetypes, if you will. Think of your first period as an initiation into the life-death-rebirth cycle of nature that surrounds us all. A thing that connects to the moon goddess of love and war, Inanna herself—Her priests & priestesses were tasked with tracking Her menstrual cycle, after all! (Dickens, Risa, and Torok, Amy. Missing Witches: Recovering True Histories of Feminist Magic. United States, North Atlantic Books, 2021.)
If you could go back in time, what would you tell your younger self? How would you support them? What would your younger self like to do and to know? How would you celebrate with them?
I invite you to do this every time you bleed.
I invite you to do this even if you don’t bleed anymore.
I invite you to prompt your loved ones when they bleed.
And if you struggle with this practice, I suggest reading the essay “If Men Could Menstruate” by Gloria Steinem (& mentally insert “cis-het” when you read it). She writes “Clearly, menstruation would become an enviable, boast-worthy event: Men would brag about how long and how much. Gifts, religious ceremonies, family dinners, and stag parties would mark the day.” (https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/if-men-could-menstruate-gloria-steinem/6QEtWIh0RC0Zig?hl=en) So, if necessary, fake it till you make it. Pretend you have the audacity of a cis-het white guy. How would he celebrate his period? What if your period was not the thing that made you less-than? What if instead, it was the thing that gave you inherent knowledge of life, death, and everything in between?
Final Thoughts
The patriarchy has suppressed our emotions, taken away ovulation, and left us with a demonized & often painful period. It’s obvious how reclaiming the menstrual cycle is about so much more than just womanhood.
Actually, I hope I managed to disentangle periods from womanhood, altogether, today.
Because not everybody with a uterus or female biology experiences periods.
Because not everyone with a cycle has to worry about fertility or pregnancy.
Because not everyone with a cycle can proudly scream it from the rooftops, for their own personal safety.
Regardless of where you fall on the spectrum of gender identities, take a minute to acknowledge the fact that we are all here because of a healthy ovulatory cycle.
It absolutely does not matter who you are, in order to honor and revere the biological and energetic cycle that brought you into this world.
Here are my final thoughts:
First, they diminish Goddess & everything She represents: the life-death-rebirth cycle, holistic leadership, community-building, and the fertility of our creation powers.
Then, they demonize and shame Her, by turning her into the Devil, putting a dark and evil spin on our entire nature, and creating a skewed focus on love & light ascension practices.
And finally, after a couple thousand years of this, and since cyclical nature cannot be eradicated, ever - no matter how hard they try - they are now well-equipped to keep us linear and boxed up by weaponizing fear and shame to force us back down.
That’s what you’re fighting when you accept, understand, and reclaim your cyclical nature.
That’s what you’re rebelling when you bring these teachings into your families & circles.
That’s what you expel from your body, when you sync with your cycles.
Nothing less.
Resources
On Instagram
@myperiodisawesome
@wombenwellness
@periodmovement
@thewombroom
@bloodygoodperiod
@red.school
@flowwithyourflow
@babayagaapp
Books & Essays
Lister, Lisa. Code Red: Know Your Flow, Unlock Your Superpowers, and Create a Bloody Amazing Life. Period.. United States, Hay House, 2020.
Lichterman, Gabrielle. 28 Days. United Kingdom, Adams Media Corporation, 2004.
Thompson, Lana. The wandering womb : a cultural history of outrageous beliefs about women. United States, Prometheus Books, 1999.
Hendrickson-Jack, Lisa. The Fifth Vital Sign: Master Your Cycles & Optimize Your Fertility. N.p., Fertility Friday Publishing Incorporated, 2019.
Dickens, Risa, and Torok, Amy. Missing Witches: Recovering True Histories of Feminist Magic. United States, North Atlantic Books, 2021.
Perez, Caroline Criado. Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men. United Kingdom, Random House, 2019.
Gloria Steinem, essay "If Men Could Menstruate"
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These are vital & incredible mindset-shifts! Thank you Natalie!