Introduction

Every woman remembers her first period—where and when it happened, who, if anyone, she told, and even what she was wearing. And yet, despite our vivid memories of this momentous occasion, almost no one talks about it. Even fewer people write about it.

Why? Because first periods are an awkward subject. My Little Red Book is here to change that. This book is an effort to help us embrace and therefore end the awkwardness.  Think about it this way, if Napoleon Dynamite can be cool, so can periods.

As a first step, we can record our own stories and share them. The first-period stories in My Little Red Book are drawn from women across generations and backgrounds. The authors hail from New York to Nanjing and the stories range from a tween’s IM conversation to a grandmother’s reminiscence about the days before tampons. There are stories about slaps, sharks, little brothers, plumbing accidents, yoga, and getting out of math exams.

You may be wondering how I, a seemingly normal 18-year old, ended up collecting stories about menstruation. I like to think of the idea for My Little Red Book as the best mistake that ever happened to me. It all started with my first period.

I was thirteen, and visiting my widowed and rather stiff grandfather in Boynton Beach, Florida. I was waterskiing when I first noticed a brown stain spreading steadily across the territory of my yellow bathing suit. My interpretations of the evolving Rorschach blot on my butt led me to the logical conclusion that I must have sat on something, like mud or maybe beets. As I was in the middle of the lake, I had to ski all the way back to shore before I could go to the bathroom to investigate further. Once in the privacy of the lakeside stall, I started to break down. This wasn’t just some schmutz on my bathing suit. This was my period. AAAAH!!!!

No need to panic, I told myself, there was a cardboard stick that would solve all my problems. But twenty-five cents later, I was even more confused. Where did it go, how would I take it out, and most importantly, how would it clean up the mess?

My mother would certainly have the answers. I dialed her number. Ten times. No answer. Next I tried calling my grandmother. She valiantly attempted to coach me through the intricacies of tampon insertion. But it had been years since her last period, and her directions of “maybe a little bit to the left?” confirmed that this was the blind leading the blind. Frustrated and defeated, I stuffed my bathing suit with paper towels, and waddled back to the boat, determined to finish my afternoon of waterskiing without telling anyone that I had gotten my you know what. Let’s just say that waterskiing while trying to cover your butt could be classified as a new type of dance.

After all the paper towels had disintegrated and we were headed home, my grandfather made an unexplained detour. We ended up at the local pharmacy, where he reluctantly acknowledged what was going on by sputtering in his native French that I should go ask someone for assistance. His embarrassment was contagious, and I was too ashamed to approach anyone for help.

Perhaps because I didn’t ask, or perhaps because the Boynton Beach community experiences more incontinence than menstruation, the closest thing I could find to a pad was its distant relative, a Depends diaper. Here I was, finally all grown up, and back to wearing a diaper—not exactly the way I had imagined greeting womanhood.

When I finally did reach my mother, we had a good laugh and cry together. To my horror, she decided to share my tear-filled account with…everyone. At the next family gathering, my first-period trauma was the topic of dinner discussion. I had been betrayed.

But then something amazing happened. The women in my family starting sharing their stories with each other and with me. I learned that my grandmother discovered her first period by noticing a trail of red drops on the stairs. (See Twelve Step Program, p. tk.) I knew that my aunt Nina had fled Poland to escape being deported to a concentration camp. But I never knew that she got her first period on that trip, and that it saved her from being strip-searched by Nazis at the German border. (See Germany, 1942, p. tk.) The most amazing part of her story was that before she shared it with me, she had never told anyone—not her children, not her friends, no one.

With a sense of urgency, I realized that there was a whole generation whose stories would never be told unless someone did something. And so, for the sake of posterity, I decided to commit social suicide and started asking about first periods. Although my questions made some women cringe, the replies made it all worthwhile. With each new story, I felt that I had stumbled upon buried treasure that deserved to be shared. Thus began My Little Red Book.

Here I have assembled the very best stories that I heard. Imagine how Magellan saw the earth, Galileo looked at the stars, or Sophie Kinsella shops for high heels: that is how I have come to feel about first period stories—an infinite collection just waiting to be discovered. This book is an effort to bring periods into the arena of acceptable discourse, so that all of us can gather and share these experiences without a smidgen of self-consciousness.

In a world where we’ve embraced The Vagina Monologues, where Juno wins an Oscar, and, hell, where we've even seen Janet Jackson's left nipple, girls have no reason to feel ashamed of their bodies. As Katherine Mansfield puts it in her Bliss and Other Stories “Why be given a body if you have to keep it shut up in a case like a rare, rare fiddle?” It is time for the menstruation monologues.

That could have been the book’s title. Instead, I wanted to evoke Mao’s Little Red Book, the manifesto distributed to all Chinese citizens during the Cultural Revolution. My Little Red Book shares the revolutionary spirit of its Chinese namesake—minus the communist propaganda. It is a call to literary arms to reclaim our rightful history. It also makes for a nice bedside companion.

For girls who have just gotten, or are about to get your first period, this book will help you know what to expect and remind you that you are not alone. Hopefully, it will open your eyes to the women around you and let you see that even your bingo-playing grandma was once in your same position. And you don’t have to be a girl to enjoy My Little Red Book, either. These stories speak to universal experiences: dealing with parents, connecting with one’s cultural identity, feeling inadequate around siblings, being put on the spot, and grappling with growing up.

As I read these stories, I find myself coming back to the same questions. Why is there so little celebration of the event? What does the first-period experience reveal about one’s character? And is there anyone who hasn’t read Judy Blume’s Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret?

Blume’s tweenage saga seems to be the bible for girls going through puberty. It’s understandable why; for many contributors, Blume’s book was the primary source of information regarding first periods. For Meg Cabot (see p. tk), this meant believing that girls still wore belted pads, just like Margaret. All this leads me to conclude that it’s high time we updated and expanded our first-period canon. 

These stories teach us more than the facts of life. As Michelle Jaffe observes in Going to X-tremes (p. tk.), how a girl handles her first period says a lot about who she is and who she will become. Artist Nina Bentley’s instinct to draw a flower out of her stain was a sign of her future career (p. tk.). Bita Moghaddam’s frustration that only girls get periods foreshadowed her feminism (p. tk).

Most of all, the stories leave me wondering, where’s the period party at? Too often, menarche marks a somber occasion. In her story Loss and Gain of Responsibility (p. tk), Zannette Lewis writes that menarche historically marked the age at which a slave could be sold off as a woman. In The Harness (p. tk), Deo Robbins describes feeling humiliated when she first stepped into her mother’s belted pad. Several stories recount the pain of being slapped upon sharing the news.

Unfortunately, the taboo of menstruation is embedded in our religions, culture, and history. The Quran (2:222) declares that menstruating women "are a hurt and a pollution,” and orders men to “keep away from women in their courses, and do not approach them until they are clean." Jewish women are forbidden to have sex. French housewives can't make mayonnaise, and, as Shobha Sharma describes in her story Locked in a Room with Dosai (p. tk.), Indian women are exiled from their own homes. In ancient Rome, the philosopher Pliny the Elder wrote that contact with menstrual blood “turns new wine sour, crops touched by it become barren, grafts die, seed in gardens are dried up, the fruit of trees falls off, the edge of steel and the gleam of ivory are dulled…”[1]

Today, Pliny seems ridiculous, but discrimination and ignorance remain. The problems go well beyond being told to sit out during gym. In Pakistan, eighty-seven percent of girls haven’t heard about menstruation prior to their first period.[2] In Africa, a lack of sanitary supplies often forces girls to stay home from school during their periods, thereby depriving them of almost a quarter of their rightful education.[3] And then there are the various African tribes who mark a girl’s first period as the date for genital mutilation.

That is not to say that we haven’t made headway or that there aren’t any cultures that commemorate the occasion. One of the Navaho’s most important ceremonies is Kinaalda, the celebration of a woman’s first period. The four-day-long ritual is filled with joyous dance and song. If men had periods, you can bet that they would celebrate. This is the point of Gloria Steinem’s classic essay (reprinted on p. tk.) in which she imagines how men would glorify their periods. Of course, we don’t have to brag or throw stag parties. Celebrating might just mean telling your mom.

Even if you’ve missed the first opportunity to celebrate, each month provides a new chance. Isn’t it crazy that women living together get their periods in sync? Though our connection to the moon may not be scientific, it’s nonetheless empowering and cool. This monthly mutual “suffering” should bond and inspire us. No one puts it better than Erica Jong when she explains in What Do Women Want? that “the very source of my inspiration lies in my never forgetting how much I have in common with other women, how many ways in which we are all similarly shackled.” Indeed, Krista Madsen cites “the beautiful untidiness of being a woman” as a constant theme in her work, reappearing and reinventing itself each time she writes. Many contributors have told me that writing their first-period story was deeply introspective, calling forth buried childhood memories, a sense of identity and connection with all women. Periods are powerful stuff.

My hope is that this book will help you start a dialogue. I see the importance of this communication in my own life; talking about first periods has transformed my lunch-table conversations from gossip to discussions of women’s rights. For many contributors, writing their own stories prompted them to ask their mothers for their stories or talk more openly with their daughters. Two sets of mothers and daughters were even inspired to send in stories together (see The Simple Vase: Part I and II; Into the Woods and The Curse). By airing our own stories, we open channels of communication between women—mothers and daughters, sisters and aunts—and turn a taboo into a cause for celebration. The dialogue has already begun.