[quote=""MLE""]One aspect rarely touched on is that there wouldn't actually be very many menses, except for the unfortunate women who were infertile or unmarried. I have three kids spaced two years apart, all of which I breastfed an average of 14 months each--which meant that for seven years I went without a period. If a woman marries as soon as she is fertile (the age of puberty has been creeping downward for the last century) and nature takes it's course until menopause, the number of periods in her life might actually be quite few.
One of the noblewomen my guild re-enacts had 22 surviving children. Only one set of twins. How many periods do you think
she had in her lifetime?[/quote]
Yeah, I'm aware of that aspect in societies where women are kept constantly pregnant. There was a poignant moment on "Call the Midwife" where the main character asked a patient with twenty-some kids when was her last period and the women said, "I've never had one." Mostly I read about that phenomenon in the contraception literature where using a patch or implant is considered better for a woman's body (only one period a year), because we didn't evolve to have periods each month.
However, contraception is an ancient, if not precise science, and where women had the education and the choice, they usually chose to limit their pregnancies. Barrier methods (everything from beeswax to camel dung seems to have been tried) and pre-or post-coital douches have been used forever. In historical times there are ample writings about "herbs" that prevent or terminate pregnancies. Augustus offered bribes (tax breaks) to families with more children. He (and numerous other Roman rulers) considered the low birth rate a national problem and created legislation to boost it. Those Roman women must have been doing/using something to reduce their fertility and having periods when they did. Plus there are all the categories of women who didn't (or weren't supposed to) have sex: sacred virgins/nuns (many women entered religious life (of all brands) to escape the constant round of pregnancy and childbirth), unmarried girls (not all societies married them off the second they became fertile), widows, etc.
Then there's the tragic situation when nearly the entire (of age) male population goes off to war. I doubt all the women left behind in Sparta or Rome played around with the slaves, old men and young boys. (
Visions of Bette Davis singing "They're Either Too Young or Too Old" is dancing in my head.) In modern times, the UK had a name for all the unmarried women after WWI, but I can't recall what that is. They had between 6-7 million serving during the war and lost nearly 900,000 husbands/potential husbands.
Again, not arguing that entire villages of women met in the metaphorical red tent to goof off every month, but I'm sure in any significant population there were a few menstruating women and there seems to be enough oral evidence from different societies that there were rituals around this physical state. Some saw this time as defiling and the women had to be kept in isolation so they wouldn't "pollute" a man. Others saw it as a sacred time and the women met to celebrate it. In either case, there must have been a basis for the rituals. Why create rules for something that never happens?
