Special Issue

‘A Crisis of Transition’: Menstruation, the Female Lifecycle and Fin-de-Siècle Scottish Psychiatry

By the later nineteenth century, Scottish psychiatry had achieved professional status. Asylums were recognized as the officially approved response to madness, and mass institutionalisation allowed the medical profession unparalleled opportunities to observe, classify and treat those deemed insane, generating knowledge that was consolidated and disseminated through new specialist journals. The depiction of madness as a ‘female malady’ in asylum records and medical publications has become a popular theme in historical scholarship, doctors allegedly portraying the female sex as more vulnerable to insanity due to the perceived instability of their reproductive system. This article will examine prevalent theories that connected insanity to the various biological ‘crises’ of the female lifecycle – puberty, pregnancy, childbirth and menopause, considering whose interests it served to pathologise the female body, and with what consequences. It will also attempt to offer a more nuanced interpretation of the supposed gendering of madness, by comparing how the male lifecycle was portrayed.

The prolific and widely cited doctor, Thomas Clouston – physician-superintendent of the Royal Edinburgh Asylum (1873-1908), Scotland’s largest and most prestigious asylum – will offer a particularly illuminating case study, in his conceptualisation of the fragile menstruating female body and the demands placed on the female mind by her transition from child to womanhood. Clouston portrayed asylum doctors as ‘priests of the body’, tasked with protecting females from themselves. In particular, girls were urged to reserve their finite energy for motherhood, and to avoid the perils of over-study and a ‘misdirected education’. Such attempts to provide medical legitimacy to a patriarchal worldview will be contextualised within contemporaneous moves towards female emancipation and attempts by women to gain entry to medical schools. By examining the multiple ways in which the female reproductive body and lifecycle were constructed within fin-de-siècle Scottish psychiatry and the wider significance of such portayals, this article ultimately seeks to highlight the enduring tension between perceptions of menstruation as a normal or pathological process, and the deleterious impact of menstruation upon female access to education, both features of the recent period poverty debate.

Bloody Presence & Absence: Exploring the Visual History of Menstruation in Scotland

Menstrual art has always been important to menstrual culture and discourse, but how much do we know about menstrual visual culture in Scotland? This article will critically reflect on the initial stages of the authors’ collaborative project Blood Lines: Exploring the History of Menstruation at the University of St Andrews, and the significant impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on the project. It will focus on the dynamic of presence and absence, working outward from the particular challenges presented by undertaking a residency when the artist cannot be present, to examine how this might parallel – and provide an important analytical perspective on – the wider problematic of menstrual presence and absence in Scotland.

Blood Lines was conceived to investigate the recent legislative developments in Scotland, seeking to understand attitudes in St Andrews, and provide evidence of change (or lack thereof) connected to new policy. While menstruation is more present in public discourse, and menstrual materials are present in bathrooms, and food banks, these structures also sustain the careful (re)production of menstrual absence/invisibility through their use.

Here, Røstvik and Spencer will explore the historic contexts of feminist art in St Andrews and Scotland, broader histories of menstrual art, visual culture and performance, alongside the history of menstruation in Scotland. They will assess collections of menstrual visual culture in Scotland, including at Glasgow Women’s Library, Surgeons Hall Museum Edinburgh, and  Lifespace in Dundee, reflecting on how their histories might be both present (institutionalised) and absent (when not on display). The authors will situate Hughes’ art practice alongside these histories and their experiences of St Andrews. They/Hughes will reflect upon the project, exploring the tensions which emerge when external factors make it impossible for the artist to be in residence through considering the presences/absences inherent in the project, in menstrual products, and the menstrual cycle, alongside the materiality of menstruation.

‘Place a Duty’: Menstrual Education and Menstrual Bills in the U.S. and Scotland

In this essay I examine the politics of “sterile” menstrual education and its films in the 1970s and 1980s. By “sterile” I indicate the way product companies crafted menstrual instruction in a particularly positive way so as to promote and sell their products. Working on films from both the U.S. and Scotland, in particular the American film Naturally … a Girl (1973) and the Scottish film Having a Period: Menstruation (1980), I seek to connect the discourse around menstrual instruction from forty years ago with today. I explore the media constructions of the period as related to puberty and sexuality to examine the longer thread of discourse that appeared in the Period Products (Free Provision) (Scotland) Bill. As such, this essay asks, broadly, “how have U.S. and Scottish messages around menstruation changed (if they have) over time and in what ways do these messages maintain the idea of sterility?” and “How have these messages transferred to actual political bills.” Depending on the parameters of the essay and my sources, I may include discussion of the American bill the Robin Danielson Feminine Hygiene Product Safety Act to talk about difference ways that American legislative/Scottish parliamentarian bodies constructed the period.

This essay fits in the larger collection alongside Pavel Vasilev’s work on feminine product introduction and advertising in Russia in the late 1980s and into the 1990s and with Bettina Bildhauer’s analysis on Scottish product usage as exhibited in the Scottish bill. My article, alongside Pavel’s, will show an alternative to the Scottish perspective while tying issues of education and product placement to the current debate and concerns in Scotland. I am not conducting solely an analysis of the Scottish bill, and thus will not duplicate Bettina’s work in anyway.

Researching the researchers: Menstrual stigma and the lived experience of studying menstruation

Menstruation has been historically stigmatized (de Beauvoir, 1953; Johnston-Robledo & Chrisler, 2013) through a variety of strategies cross-culturally (Buckley & Gottlieb, 1988) which include silencing and marginalization (Pascoe, 2007; Vostral, 2010). Such stigmatization has affected the inclusion of menstruation as a topic of research across disciplines (Owen, 2020). In addition, stigmatization has been shown to affect the career paths of academics focused on menstrual research (Chrisler et al, 2011). The research detailed in this paper set out to discover the effects of such stigmatization on menstrual researchers themselves.

The research cohort studied was an interdisciplinary group of ten scholars from the humanities and social sciences, living and working in the UK, USA and Russia. This group came together in 2020 to research the antecedents and details of new Scottish legislation to provide free menstrual products in the community. Thus the group’s research took place within and covers a historic junction during which time the social and political capital of menstruation was changing in the public domain, for example through the recent decision of Scottish legislators to take meaningful account of difficulties undergone by menstruators in certain contexts, such as poverty. Funds for menstrual research had become more available, more researchers had entered the field, and the cultural capital of the menstrual researcher appeared to be changing.

My qualitative research concerned both the longer term and more recent impact of doing menstrual research on the lived experience of the researchers, including their inner as well as their professional lives. I was also curious as to how the collegiality of the project may have affected their experience. My research utilised semi-structured interviews via online video meetings, and took place over a six month period between 2020 and 2021. Contributions were anonymised and data analysis was performed using a dual bureaucratic and charismatic technique (Sullivan 2012, Owen 2020). I was also a member of this group and to incorporate my self-reflexivity, the paper is structured through an autoethnographic enquiry.