“Every moment in history, someone is getting their first period,” Rachel Kauder Nalebuff, editor of Our Red Book: Intimate Histories of Periods, Growing, and Changing, writes in the book’s opening pages. “During the moon landing, during the fall of the Berlin Wall—at that exact moment. There is someone who has that story.”
Collecting these accounts has been Nalebuff’s mission since she was a teenager. Her first anthology, My Little Red Book (2009), was a compilation about first periods, with entries from an international array of contributors.
Our Red Book treads similar ground, but digs deeper, exploring the ways menstruation intersects with coming of age, sexual and gender identity, and growing old.
The collection features sixty-seven deeply personal essays, graphics, scholarly reports, and interviews. Together, they delve into political realities and zero in on the movement for menstrual equity, which operates in tandem with efforts to eliminate sexism, misogyny, heterosexism, and transphobia. The factors that shroud menstruation in secrecy, and give rise to shame and embarrassment, are deconstructed, making Our Red Book instructive as a primer for young people.
Simon & Schuster
What’s more, trans narratives and narratives from non-western writers enhance and expand readers’ understanding of the ways periods are treated and experienced. And, while I wish the book had included more data about how religious traditions have contributed to menstrual stigma, the collection is otherwise eye-opening, provocative, and emotionally resonant.
As Nalebuff writes in her introduction, the book is “not a comprehensive collection of every story there is to tell about first blood, last blood, missing periods, birth, bleeding after transitioning, staining things, aching, grieving, communing, and changing. Rather, it is a web of memories.”
These memories begin with an account of a conversation between Nalebuff and her Tante Nina. Her aunt’s story is set in 1940. Nina, then thirteen years old, was fleeing Nazi persecution and traveling by train from Poland to Belgium. Her account, told more than sixty years after the fact, is riveting and includes a vivid recollection of being strip-searched at a German border crossing.
“The guards were mostly searching for hidden jewelry,” Nina recalls, “and they looked in the most private places…In my fright, I completely lost it and peed my pants. But when I looked down what I actually saw was a stream of red.”
Nalebuff knew that her aunt had survived the war, but, she tells The Progressive, while she had learned about the Holocaust in school, “Tante Nina’s story cut through the history of the textbook and made the trauma real. It collapsed time.”
It also propelled Nalebuff into what she calls “a quest” to understand the connection between our emotions and our bodily functions. Periods, she learned, can be impacted by personal upheavals such as the death of a loved one, or by something more universal, like the COVID-19 pandemic.
This subject is probed in a wide-ranging interview between Nalebuff and scientist Alice Lu-Culligan. “We tend to discredit how important emotions are,” Lu-Culligan writes. “But they’re completely a part of our health—not just our mental health, but our physical health as well…An obvious example is stress—the stress hormone cortisol affects other hormones, including the hormones that control our periods.”
Not surprisingly, many trans boys experience tremendous stress as they enter adolescence and begin to bleed. “I was thirteen when my period started,” Axel Gay writes in the collection. “I was ashamed . . . I was afraid. Like this was the gavel slamming down, deeming me a woman. Inevitable and irreversible . . . . The misfit on her period.” Although Gay writes that he ultimately came to terms with being a menstruating man, he does not sugarcoat his pain. “Figuring out who I was took a lot out of me,” he adds, “but I don’t regret anything.”
The book reflects a multiplicity of trans perspectives. “I also wanted to point out that there is not one story about what it means to be trans,” Nalebuff tells The Progressive. “Some trans women are covetous of menstruation; others are content not to have to deal with it.”
This diversity is part of what makes Our Red Book so important.
Likewise, its inclusion of accounts from incarcerated writers is both enraging and enlightening.
Zhi Kai Hoffman Vanderford, imprisoned since 1987, writes that until the mid-1990s, pads had to be purchased from the prison canteen. “We were paid eight cents an hour but ten pads cost three dollars,” Vanderford recalls. “We made our own tampons from pads. These homemade tampons were considered contraband.” Later, the prison began supplying free menstrual supplies, but they still had to be requested from male guards.
Similarly, Kwaneta Harris writes about having to remove tampons and pads during “routine” prison strip searches. “It’s common to see trails of blood running down a leg or step in blood as we move closer to the front,” she writes. Cell searches involve guards opening pads and tampons to check for illicit materials, contaminating them. “There’s no need to open a sealed package,” she adds, “but they do.”
But as important as it is to share these accounts, Our Red Book goes beyond horror stories to envision a freer, more accepting society. Furthermore, it celebrates the victories that have already been won by the worldwide menstrual equity movement.
Scotland became the leader of that movement when, in 2020, it became the first country in the world to provide no-cost menstrual products in restrooms, schools, hospitals, courtrooms, restaurants, and sports stadiums.
Indeed, Scotland’s shift has inspired menstrual justice activists everywhere and students in the United States have joined the campaign, forming numerous organizations to address period poverty. Noting that menstruating students from low-income households continue to miss school because they cannot afford period supplies, activists are centering menstrual equity within the fight for educational equity more generally.
In an interview with Nalebuff, Maggie Di Sanza of Bleed Shamelessly, a youth-run grassroots organization, explains why they got involved in the movement: “I would like to live in a world where no one is inhibited by any sort of bodily function, in the sense that society no longer tells people with certain bodies that they are wrong for having those bodies or that those bodies are inherently disposable.”
Nalebuff wants that, too.
“Internalized shame and disgust about periods have been used as a form of oppression in Western societies,” Nalebuff tells The Progressive. “But everyone is somehow connected to menstruation. Whether it’s you, your partner, or your sibling, cousin, friend, coworker, or a parent, everyone knows someone who bleeds. How odd that it is so veiled in silence. Then again perhaps it’s not surprising that stories about menstruation are missing from our misogynist culture. I’m hoping that Our Red Book will open Pandora’s Box about other fundamental human rights that are not currently viewed as such, and contribute to the wider struggle for human liberation.”