Woman's Curse?, Meredith F. Small, The Sciences, Jan/Feb 1999, pp. 24-29.

Summary Paper

A Woman's Curse?

"Why do cultures the world over treat menstruating women as taboo?

An anthropologist offers a new answer - and a challenge to Western

ideas about contraception"

A Woman's Curse?, Meredith F. Small, The Sciences, Jan/Feb 1999, pp. 24-29.

In almost all mammals, menstruation does not occur; the discarded uterine lining is simply reabsorbed into the body if fertilization does not take place. In humans, as well as some higher primates, some of the shed endometrium is not reabsorbed, but discharged through the vaginal opening. The fact that menstruation is not common amongst mammals suggests that it must confer an evolutionary advantage specific to higher primates and humans. Meredith F. Small discusses how menstruation can be advantageous, by examining a study, by Beverly I. Strassmann, of the Dogon people of West Africa.

Throughout the world, menstruation seems to invoke primarily negative responses. In an effort to find the reason behind this, Strassmann spent over two years compiling data in the first long term study on behaviours towards, and beliefs about, menstruation in a traditional society. This data led her to propose a new theory of why menstruation evolved as it did, which is, essentially, a story of conserving resources. In fact, Strassmann estimates that "...a woman can save about six days' worth of energy for every four nonconceptive cycles." Obviously, this would prove useful to early hunter/gatherers, and give them an evolutionary advantage.

In evolution, the name of the game is making babies. The traditional taboos exhibited throughout the world seem to be simply fertility indicators, at least on a subconscious level. It is easy to identify whether a woman will be ready conceive on the basis of whether she is menstruating or not, which leads to another of Strassmann's ideas about the role of menstrual taboos: you can use menstruation to track paternity. Strassmann notes that by forcing women to signal menstruation, men are trying to gain equal access to one of the two important pieces of information for assessing paternity: timing of intercourse and timing of menstruation.

An implication of Strassmann's work dealing with women's health, suggests that modern lifestyles and the use of oral contraceptives are at odds with women's naturally evolved biology, which could lead to greater risks of cancer. Her data seems to indicate that, contrary to western medicine's thoughts, it is not normal for a woman to menstruate every month. Dogon women will menstruate about 110 times in their life whereas western women will menstruate as many as 400. A lifetime of nearly continuous menstrual cycling increases the risk of reproductive cancers. Investigators have determined that women in affluent cultures may be at 100 times greater risk of developing breast cancer than do women of a hunter/gatherer society. Smart suggests, therefore, that "Women might be better protected against reproductive cancers if their contraceptives mimicked lactation amenorrhea and depressed the female reproductive hormones, rather than forcing the continual ebb and flow of menstrual cycles."

By viewing the menstrual cycle as key to observing and understanding the interplay of biology and culture in human reproductive behaviour, Strassmann has shown that the important role of biology has been neglected when looking at human behaviour, which has traditionally had culture as its focus. She also laid to rest the idea put forward by Margi Profet, that menstruation had evolved to "flush" pathogens out of the vaginal canal, by showing that in early society women spent relatively little time menstruating. Menstruation, then, it seems, has played a key role in shaping who we are, and its significance can longer be ignored.

1 Lactation amenorrhea is the absence of menstruation due to lactation