Sharon Maloney: A positive menarche experience, where a girl is honoured and empowered and taught to be in contact with her own needs, facilitates her later giving birth fearlessly and powerfully.
Gun Rombeck: Widespread derogatory attitudes to menstruation and the lack of recognition, mentoring or celebration at menarche contain powerful, often unspoken, messages about the value of a girl’s status and what she can expect as a mature woman in Western Society.
Chris Bobel: Menstrual literacy is the capacity to read and understand the body. (The Managed Body)
Eve Ensler: The menstrual cycle is a vital and vitalising process in women and girls. It is a stress sensitive system and when properly understood, physically and psychologically, provides a unique means of inner guidance and self-care.
My new philosophy is a longing for women to stop trying to transcend their body, in an assertion of intellectual equality, but to name and return to it as the source of female wisdom and power. Women have fallen for a post-feminist delusion that the greater their physical self-control, the greater their prospects of happiness, not realising that alienation from their own bodies actually destroys the possibility of empowerment. (The Vagina Monologues)
Geraldine Matus: The better you come to know how your body works as a woman and research the effects of various reproductive health treatments, the more you will be empowered and informed in such a way that you can operate with informed consent.
China Gallard: My enemy is my own way of ignoring the authority of my own experience. (Longing For Darkness – Tara and the Black Madonna)
Natalie Angier: The uterus grows. The uterus retreats. It is not unlike the heart, a large powerful muscle that swells, shrinks, twitches and be-bops. Oscillations and deep rhythms are the source of life, the principle of life; even cells work through pulsatile mechanisms…
If we respond to music viscerally, it is because our viscers are the original percussionists, and the heart and the uterus are among the most perceptible of our natural pacemakers. Beyond rhythmicity, the heart and the uterus share another quality, their association with blood. Not all women breed, but nearly all women bleed, or have bled. (Woman: An Intimate Geography)
poem in praise of menstruation
if there is a river
more beautiful than this
bright as the blood
red edge of the moon
if there is a river
more faithful than this
returning each month
to the same delta
if there is a river
braver than this
coming and coming in a surge
of passion, of pain
if there is a river
more ancient than this
daughter of eve
mother of cain and of abel
if there is in the universe such a river
there is somewhere water
more powerful than this wild
water
pray that it flows also
through animals
beautiful and faithful and ancient
and female and brave
Lucille Clifton, 1991
