This week is Women’s Health Week, and it felt like the right time to write about something that is bloody hard to talk about….literally. Think of this as the sequel to my earlier piece, Hysteria, Witch Hunts and the Wandering Womb. That article looked at the ways history has treated women’s bodies like mysterious ticking time bombs. This time I want to zero in on menstruation itself, because if women have been bleeding once a month since the dawn of humanity, why is society still acting like it is an unsolvable riddle? And what better time than the Pain to Power Day of Women’s Health Week
For those following along at home, yes, this also ties into my doctoral research, which is now waiting final review. Looking good – though let me assure you, I am still not a real doctor. At best, I am someone who randomly who knows a little too much about the politics of the uterus. And honestly, maybe that is scarier than someone yelling “Is there a Doctor in the room?” and everyone looking at me. Can’t do CPR, can do a literature review.
I digress.
Here is the bottom line up front for this article – menstruation is natural, normal and sometimes life-changing, yet it is still surrounded by silence, stigma and shame.
If we want young women to grow up with dignity and health, we need to talk about it openly. Women’s Health Week is the perfect time. Pens out, pads ready (see what I did there?) – class is in session.
Blood and bad ideas
Humanity can stream cat videos from space in real time yet still acts stumped by a monthly biological event you can set your watch to. Whole civilisations have risen and fallen in the time it takes for one menstrual cycle to pass, but the collective response to it has ranged from magical thinking to outright disgust. Even now, people still snicker about it or roll their eyes like it is some sort of optional hobby, which is impressive considering those reactions almost always come from people who will never bleed in their lives. It is very convenient to dismiss something as trivial when you do not have to personally wake up at 3am in a pool of your own biology and negotiate with your uterus like a hostile foreign power.
Women in medicine – Herstory
The funny thing is that men have historically taken it upon themselves to be the leading experts on the subject. Now, now, now – before you think this is me going on a good ole anti-man rant, hear me out. I have facts! Medicine has always claimed to be about saving lives, but historically, when it came to women practicing medicine, it was more about saving men from the horror of female competence.
Formally, medicine was a closed club that barred women from entry. Informally, women were there anyway as, thankfully, women knew better than to stay demure and obedient. Otherwise history would have carried on pretending their hands were only fit for embroidery rather than surgery.
From Queen Shubad of Ur, buried with surgical instruments in 3500 BCE, to Egyptian women studying at Heliopolis in 1500 BCE, to Roman medicae running busy practices, women have always been central to healing. They were teachers, surgeons, obstetricians, and they embodied what women have always done; they juggled multiple roles, kept communities alive and made it look effortless. I struggle to drive without spilling my coffee, yet these women held entire health systems together. They were the quiet backbone of a health system that often took their skill for granted, but could not function without it. They were the hype squad before hype squads existed. The OGs.
These accounts reveal not only the presence of women in medicine but also their recognition and respect within their communities. Their skills were celebrated in art, preserved in medical texts and praised by their peers.
Far from being anomalies, these women stood as integral contributors to the progress of medical knowledge in the ancient world. And if history sometimes forgets their names, herstory will never allow for their legacy to be erased. Women have always shown up, lifted each other up, and proved again and again that healing has always been a team sport.
The Misogyny Ages
Then came the Middle Ages, or as I like to call them, the Misogyny Ages. In Paris in 1313, women were only allowed to practise surgery if they passed an exam by a “competent jury”, defined as a group of men who thought bloodletting was the cure for everything from fever to bad vibes. Headache? Open a vein. Coughing? Open a vein. Personality too lively? Open a vein. It was less medicine and more a compulsory sacrifice to the gods of trial and error and somehow these were the same men trusted to decide whether women were “competent” enough to practice medicine. In the 14th and 15th centuries widows were deemed “competent” and allowed to inherit their husband’s practice. Because what could be safer than handing sharp objects to a grieving woman with nothing left to lose?
With the rise of the male-dominated church, women were pushed firmly into an inferior position (because nothing says “holiness” like ensuring only men could wield a scalpel). Nevertheless, some cracks of light broke through.
In Salerno, Italy, in the 11th century, a woman named Trotula wrote the first medical text on gynecology, which was so well written that it became the gold standard for centuries.
Imagine that – the church working overtime to silence women, while every physician in Europe was still sneaking a peek at Trotula’s homework.
By the 13th century, when practitioners were first salaried and organised into guilds, women were active participants. Of course, once the guilds became powerful in the 17th century, the drawbridge went up. King Henry VIII famously declared that “No carpenter, smith, weaver or woman shall practice medicine.” Which is rich, coming from a man whose own medical plan for his wives was decapitation. Then in 1540 he handed the surgical keys to the Company of Barber Surgeons, because obviously the best qualifications for cutting flesh were trimming beards and knowing your way around a bowl cut. Women were gradually excluded from practising medicine, as if healing the sick was fine when done quietly in the shadows but unacceptable once it came with a title, a salary and recognition.
The first women Doctors and Surgeons
Fast forward to the 19th century when the only way women could operate was to literally impersonate men.
Dr. Miranda Stewart lived her entire life as “Dr. James Barry,” rose to the rank of army surgeon, and performed one of the first successful C-sections in 1820, a feat centuries ahead of its time.
The medical community applauded the work while completely missing the point that their “beardless lad” was actually a woman. It was a plot twist so obvious it would have been rejected by a Home & Away script writer. Only at her death was it revealed that she was a woman, proving that the medical community could accept a female surgeon (but only as long as she lied about it until her dying breath). Upon her death, a friend commented that “She chose to be a military doctor. Not to fight for the right of a woman to become one, but simply to be one.”
Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell fought her way into Geneva Medical College in 1849, after more than 20 rejections.
She was admitted only because it went to vote to the male students and they thought it would be hilarious to let her try and fail. Instead, she graduated top of her class, forcing them all to eat their words along with their anatomy notes. Thankfully she refused to give up, because, if she had, we’d still be waiting for that student prank that accidentally produced a surgeon. How awkward.
Dr. Blackwell proved early what we still know now – if you tell a woman she cannot do something, she will hand you her drink, tell you to hit record, and then make herstory while you watch
Dr. Emily Stowe’s path into medicine was littered with closed doors. In 1865 she applied to the University of Toronto’s medical faculty and was bluntly told, “The doors are not open to women, and I trust they never will be.” It was less a rejection and more a declaration of war.
Rather than accept her fate, she packed her bags and went to the New York Medical College for Women, graduating in 1867.
When she returned to Canada, no hospital would offer her an internship or residency. She practised anyway, treating patients without official recognition for more than a decade until, in 1880, she became only the second woman licensed by the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario. By then, she had already done the work, built a patient base and raised a family.
Her answer to every barrier was the same “Watch me find the crowbar”. If the medical schools would not admit women, she would help build institutions that did. She played a pivotal role in the founding of Toronto’s Women’s Medical College, ensuring her daughter, Dr. Augusta Stowe-Gullen, became the first woman to graduate from a Canadian medical school in 1883. Dr. Stowe did not simply open doors for herself. She smashed them off the hinges with her crowbar so that the next generation of women could walk through unchallenged. She basically invented the original girl-gang group chat, only with scalpels.
Dr. Mary Edwards Walker became the first female surgeon in the U.S. Army during the Civil War.
She received the Congressional Medal of Honor for her efforts treating wounded soldiers and operating across enemy lines, becoming the only woman to receive the medal, and one of only eight civilians. During this conflict Dr. Walker was a prisoner of war for four months. After her release, she went straight back to duty, running a hospital for women prisoners in Kentucky.
However, Dr. Walker found that the clothing (long hooped skirts) provided for the women were too restrictive for her work. Her outfit of choice instead? The Bloomer costume: trousers under a short dress that had gone out of fashion decades earlier. Fashion critics may have sneered, but try sprinting through a battlefield in a hoop skirt without turning yourself into a human tumbleweed. Eventually she ditched dresses altogether and wore men’s suits, claiming she had government permission. Authorities disagreed and arrested her for impersonating a man. Not once. Not twice. Several times. Her reaction? To keep wearing the clothes. Dr. Walker basically invented the concept of “Come at me bro” only with waistcoats. She wasn’t just accessorising with defiance. She was the 19th-century version of that friend who refuses to believe that leggings aren’t pants.
However, in 1917, Congress decided Dr. Walker wasn’t close enough to the front lines and revoked the medal. She refused to give it back, wearing it daily like a middle finger on a ribbon until her passing in 1919. It was finally reinstated in 1977, which is roughly the speed at which institutions like to admit they were wrong. Her wearing the medal for those last two years of her life wasn’t defiance, it was accessorising with spite.
Menstrual myths and misery
We have looked at women throughout herstory who reshaped medicine with grit and scalpel in hand. But to really understand the uphill battle, we also need to look at how menstruation itself was treated; not as biology, but as myth, mystery, and occasionally a public hazard. The Egyptians get the honour of being among the first to document menstrual management. They softened papyrus and used it as makeshift pads. It was the original DIY project, minus the trip to Bunnings and the token snag on the way out (don’t slip on the onions). Practical, cheap and far more dignified than what would come later. Meanwhile the Greeks and Romans were less about practical solutions and more about mystical nonsense.
Menstrual blood was credited with the power to cure gout, drive away evil spirits and ruin crops if you so much as walked past a field. Pliny the Elder claimed menstrual blood could even stop hailstorms when exposed to lightning.
One wonders if he ever tried it, or if he just wrote it down between glasses of wine and hoped someone else would test the theory.
By the Renaissance and Enlightenment you might expect science to have kicked superstition to the curb. You would be wrong. In the 16th and 17th centuries women were told to try leeches and bloodletting to “balance” the body during menstruation. Victorian women were advised to lie down and sniff smelling salts when cramps became unbearable. It is almost as if fainting was considered the only dignified option. Apparently, the medical consensus was that the uterus could be cured by either draining half your blood or knocking you out cold….the world’s worst choose-your-own-adventure.
The 19th and early 20th centuries brought innovations like washable sanitary rags (the origin of the phrase “on the rag”). Then came sanitary belts, essentially a chastity contraption strapped around the waist to hold a pad in place. Tampons appeared in the 1930s but were considered scandalous. Doctors and priests warned they might destroy virginity or encourage moral corruption. Because nothing says moral corruption like a bit of cotton with a string attached.
By the 1960s, discreet advertising emerged, though with blue liquid rather than red, to not shock viewer. So yes, the world was fine watching guts spill across a battlefield on TV, but a drop of period blood? Absolutely not, think of the children.
Science finally notices
For centuries menstrual pain was dismissed as hysteria. A painful period was not seen as a medical condition but rather as proof that your womb was throwing tantrums, sulking in the corner until you pulled yourself together. Instead of investigating why women were doubled over in agony, doctors decided the pain was psychological, spiritual or simply exaggerated.
Conditions like endometriosis were diagnosed, if at all, by how much blood a doctor thought was “excessive.” No scans, no proper criteria, just a man in a waistcoat taking one look at your face and deciding whether your uterus was behaving acceptably. Unsurprisingly, many women went undiagnosed or were told to “toughen up.” Some were even prescribed marriage, pregnancy or a holiday as cures. Because obviously the solution to crippling abdominal pain is a husband and a trip to the seaside. Nothing beats a Jet2 Holiday.
If men fainted, vomited or missed work once a month from genital bleeding, research would have been fully funded by the Renaissance. Instead, women were written off as hysterical, their wombs accused of misbehaviour like badly trained pets.
Endometriosis: Undone science
For all the taboos around menstruation, the stigma gets dialed up to eleven when it comes to a chronic condition like endometriosis. It is common, it is debilitating, and yet, it has been brushed off for decades as “Just bad periods.”. That phrase has the same energy as telling someone with a torn ACL that it’s “Just an inconvenient walk.”.
Clinically, endometriosis is a chronic gynaecological disease with a messy symptom list. Chronic pelvic pain. Painful sex. Heavy bleeding. Infertility.
Estimates say about one in ten women are affected worldwide. Some studies put almost half of infertile women in that group. It has even been called the missed disease. Not rare. Just ignored.
It can cause pain so severe it mimics appendicitis. Yet the average time to diagnosis in Australia is still around seven years, during which patients are told to take Panadol, toughen up or go on the Pill.
Here is the kicker. Even as reported cases have risen, the average time to diagnosis is still too long. Why? Because endometriosis lives in the space between what women say and what the system is prepared to hear. A teenager learns to time her life around pain that arrives like weather, sits in her GP’s waiting room where the clock ticks louder than her voice, and is told that her periods are meant to hurt or that stress will pass and so will the cramps. Years slide by before a diagnosis in many systems, while surgeons argue about what they see during laparoscopy. The consensus is that there is no consensus. Only medicine could turn uncertainty into a checkbox. On paper it looks like progress because there are stages and scores and tidy diagrams. In real life it is a woman curled on the bathroom floor, deciding which part of her day to sacrifice.
History set the trap. For centuries women’s pain was filed under hysteria, then pathologised as failure to reproduce, so testimony became mood rather than data and menstruation became a problem to be managed rather than a signal to be understood.
Because hysteria was historically framed as proof that women were unstable, deviant, or incapable of fulfilling their expected role as mothers, scholars have argued that endometriosis and hysteria share the same sociohistorical roots, both shaped by cultural narratives that pathologised women’s bodies and dismissed their pain. The so-called “menstruous” woman was often portrayed as both physically unwell and psychologically fragile. While some physicians suggested that menstrual flow might enhance a woman’s “personal loveliness,” the dominant discourse cast menstruation as unfortunate, unpleasant, distasteful, something best avoided in polite conversation and, ideally, hidden from women themselves. It is as contradictory as praising Crocs for comfort while banning anyone from admitting they own a pair (but they are very comfortable).
As such, if a Doctor begins with the assumption that a woman’s body is unreliable, then they will design tests that arrive late, they will teach clinicians to doubt first, and they will offer pregnancy as a cure when really, what is needed, is respect, empathy, imaging and a plan. The myths are there with neat certainty. “Endometriosis as a career woman’s condition”. “Teenagers do not get it”. “Perfectionism causes symptoms”. Each story moved the lens away from biology toward behaviour, which meant the burden to change fell on women, not on science or policy.
Even as recent as three weeks ago our national wildlife princess, Bindy Irwin, revealed that she was made to feel ashamed after been told by multiple doctors that her pain, which had been present for ten years, was “Just part of being a woman”. “Young girls and women shouldn’t feel alone with pain in the driver’s seat of their lives,” she wrote in an Instagram post to her 5.7 million followers. “We need to take away the stigma of talking about women’s health. It’s time to have open discussions and make change on a global scale.”
The impacts of endo are not theoretical; they walk into classrooms, workplaces and bedrooms every day. Pain that empties classrooms and workplaces does not vanish when it is dismissed as normal or “Just part of being a woman”. Sex that becomes painful gets pushed into silence because embarrassment is easier to carry than disbelief. For women already fighting bias, especially First Nations, queer, migrant or otherwise minoritised women, the hurdle is higher again because their credibility is contested before the consultation begins. In practice it means that when a woman says her pain is an eight, the system records a four, and the gap between those numbers is where trust goes to die.
The Military Lens
The military adds another layer of complexity. Women veterans with endo often face not only the physical pain, but also the career risk of disclosing it. The choice becomes: struggle in silence and stay deployable, or seek help and risk a medical downgrade. Neither outcome is fair, but both are common. The irony is that these militaries all over the world, who are focused on “force readiness”, are often sidelining women who could be perfectly effective if their conditions were managed with the same seriousness as, say, a male soldier’s knee injury.
The absurdity of this medical gaslighting cannot be overstated. If men experienced pain during sex at the rates women do with endometriosis, the Nobel Prize would have been handed out decades ago for solving it. Instead, women are still having to advocate, plead and sometimes scream just to get their pain believed.
Military life has a way of magnifying problems that civilians can at least attempt to work around. At a training establishment, I once had a PTI declare to us trainees “Having your period is not an excuse.”. Cue the women staring at the ground, already calculating how to hide pain.
Then a male trainee raised his hand and said, “My wife gets her period and sometimes can’t even move. Surely if the females are like that, it’s okay?” There was half a second of silence before the PTI unleashed on him. In that half second, I thought about marrying him. Not because I am sentimental (I am about as straight as a Twistie) but because for the first time I saw a man stick his neck out for us women instead of us having to minimise or mask.
A unicorn in service dress who not only knew women had periods but also believed the pain might be real (and knows that we don’t attract bears).
Why Women’s Health Week matters
Policy has been late to its own meeting. Guidelines arrived years behind need. Research priorities and funding skipped endometriosis even as costs to productivity and family life piled up in plain sight. Families plan holidays around flare-ups. Partners tiptoe around intimacy. Female veterans schedule fitness tests around their cycles. Employers quietly lose talent from teams that could not afford to lose any. Advocacy filled the vacuum. Women built charities and support groups and turned diaries into datasets. A hype squad with spreadsheets forced ministries to look up from their calendars.
Raising this matters because every week, months and year of delay is a more time of narrowed choices. Fertility windows close. Careers bend. Confidence shrinks.
The price is paid by individuals first, then by families, then by economies that pretend not to see sick leave, lost promotions and early exits from sport, service or study. If we want a different herstory, we need different rules.
Fund aetiology research that does not stop at a single favourite theory. Build non-invasive diagnostics so teenagers do not have to prove pain under anaesthetic before being believed. Train primary care to treat pelvic pain as urgent and legitimate. Rewrite classification so it speaks to lived experience as well as surgical findings. Set targets for diagnosis time and make them public. Measure what matters, like pain relief, function and dignity, not just what is easy to count. Ok, I’m almost ready to put away my soap box.
Menstruation has been misunderstood, ridiculed and stigmatised since the first histories were written. We have gone from papyrus pads to period underwear, from blue liquid to conversations about period poverty. Yet the truth remains the same. Menstruation is not a curse, not a joke, not an optional lifestyle choice. It is a vital sign of health, sometimes joyful, sometimes devastating, always human.
So yes, menstruation is natural. It will not kill bees, sour wine or blunt swords. It is not an excuse for stigma or silence. What it is, is a reminder that women’s bodies have always been political battlefields. And until we treat menstruation with the same seriousness as any other biological process, we will keep bleeding time, money, and dignity.
And this is why Women’s Health Week matters. Turning up the volume now is not charity or toke, it is not a “women’s issue” and it is not a passing trend. It is public health, it is social progress and it is respect owed centuries overdue. And the good news is that women have always worked better together. We have been each other’s hype squad since Isis, Hygeia and Trotula. That collective voice is what will finally turn microphones into megaphones. So let’s do this! Share this article. Start the conversations, especially with teenagers and men. Use a crowbar to break down the barriers (figuratively of course). Tell the PTI that burpees will never be ok. Little by little we can start to make change.
About the author:
Liz Daly is an Army Health Officer, accidental historian of uteruses, and a PhD student whose research focuses on female veteran health. Her previous article, Hysteria, Witch Hunts and the Wandering Womb, explored how medicine spent centuries accusing women’s bodies of misbehaving. She enjoys trading medical jargon for plain English and a few cheap laughs, because nothing says public health like defending leggings as pants. She likes good research, bad puns and reminding readers that Crocs are both comfortable and, unfortunately, part of her brand now. She proudly fights like a girl.