Menstrual seclusion honored women’s heightened spiritual power, not their uncleanness
Evidence
The conventional wisdom of anthropologists is that menstruating women were isolated from daily life because they were unclean. But this interpretation grew from the cultural assumptions of the anthropologists and not from indigenous women themselves, who tell a different story. Yurok women describe a time of meditation and speak of special mountain pools where only moontime women were permitted to bathe. Iroquois women tell that any prohibitions on women’s activities in their moontime arose because women were at the height of their spiritual powers at this time, and the powerful flow of energy could disrupt the balance of energy around them. In some tribal people, menstrual seclusion was a time of spiritual purification and training, akin to the sweat-lodge training of men. Tucked among the objects in their huts must have been baskets of mosses, selected with great care for their purpose. It seems an inescapable conclusion that women were skilled observers of different moss species, knowing their texture and creating an intimate taxonomy long before Linnaeus. The good missionary ladies must have grimaced in horror at this practice, but I think something was lost in the transition to boiled white rags. — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Gathering Moss, 433
Categorization
- XREF: Directly echoes the reader’s own published piece on complaints about immodesty/moral panics — outsiders’ moral assumptions misreading indigenous women’s practice; also links to missionary disgust theme. — connects to: Nineteenth-century anthropologists’ gender bias rendered women’s moss uses invisible — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural…, 430; Menstrual blood’s impurity derives from its link to feminine fertility, not the blood itself — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 338
Broader Connections
- Menstrual blood’s impurity derives from its link to feminine fertility, not the blood itself
#expands(0.85) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 338