Genuine question here – I learnt that back then, some working class women used to let their period flow down their legs. But also, fabric was very expensive and bed sheets were passed down for generation to generation. So, how did they manage to keep it clean ?
Blood spots are really hard to wash and can sometimes ruin a cloth, so surely they didn’t wash their bedsheets every morning (sounds like a waste or time). They didn’t sleep on the ground either, didn’t they ?
So yeah, it’s basically my question – how did they do ?
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Great question! I have been recently exploring the history of menstruation and can give you some info.
Though some scholars have argued that women free bled during the medieval or early modern period, a number of more recent scholars have argued against this. So, for example, Edward Shorter, in his 1983 work A HIstory of Women’s Bodies, makes the claim that most European women free bled into their clothes until the 20th century. However, he grants one page of his work to this topic, and his source base for the claim is limited (about three anecdotal pieces). More recent scholarship, such as Sara Read’s work Menstruation and the Female Body in Early Modern England, states that most women would not free bled unless they had very light periods. I concur with this assertion. Simply put, it would be uncomfortable for a woman to free bled into her clothes, especially with crotch-less underwear.
So what did women do? ( I think your question may have been about women in the middle ages, not middle aged women, but I will include a longer time frame), Women would have used clothes—often called ‘clouts’—and pinned or fastened them to their undergarments. These clothes would have often been rags or other cast-offs from household use. It’s also important to note that whatever these women did use would have been handmade and reusable. So, except for when some menstruators would have also used natural materials to contain blood, such as moss or grass, women would be cleaning their rags and would also have multiple sets to use during a cycle. Internal methods like tampons are sponges are very unlikely in the medieval European context, but have been used by different cultures for hundreds of years.
For sleeping, women would have used similar clouts/rags to absorb menstrual blood. It’s also likely that women had period undergarments, kind of like how women have period panties today, where once they’re stained they are mostly worn during a cycle. And again, like today, some women likely slept on top of clothes or used an extra layer of protection so that blood did not go into any of their blankets or furniture.
Further reading:
Sara Read, Menstruation and the Female Body in Early Modern England, 2013
Sara Read, ‘”Thy Righteousness is but a menstrual clout”: Sanitary Practices and Prejudice in Early Modern England,’ in Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal 3, no. 1 (2008-9)
Edward Shorter, A History of Women’s Bodies, 1983, https://archive.org/details/historyofwomensb00shor
Frydman, Tess, “America’s Bloody History: Menstruation Management in the Mid-Nineteenth Century,” Masters Thesis, University of Delaware, 2018
I’d also like to know if women in the Middle Ages menstruated as much or as often as we do. I’ve heard that modern Western women menstruate a lot more (volume and frequency) because we weigh more, eat regularly, and are healthier but also because we adult women are only pregnant for a couple of years (most of us) if at all while historically, women were pregnant, post-partum, and / or breastfeeding for more of their lives.