There Will Be Blood

An interview about periods with "Our Red Book" author Rachel Kauder Nalebuff

Rachel Kauder Nalebuff wants to know about your period.

Despite the fact that half the population menstruates, period stories — apart from those YM “Say Anything” embarrassing moments, which inevitably included the tale of white shorts, a cute guy, and a surprise visit from Aunt Flo — are rare, even in families, even among friends. Rachel set out to change that. What began as an oral history of menstruation inspired by her own conversations with family members ballooned into a much more ambitious project. The outcome is Our Red Book: Intimate Histories of Periods, Growing & Changing, out now. Our Red Book includes stories and art about periods, from interesting women the world over. There are a few names you might recognize — Gloria Steinem, Judy Blume — and accounts from people we don’t hear from quite so often: teens and grandmothers, trans folks and incarcerated women, feminist activists and feminist dads.

I spoke with Rachel about the stories we don’t often hear, if periods really are still taboo, and why menstruation is political. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

---

Jill: Rachel, hello. To start, can you tell me a little bit about your background? 

Rachel: I am a writer and a teacher and a lot of my own work circles around oral history. I really got my start working on an early version of this book: it began as a family oral history project inspired by hearing one story in my family from my great-aunt that catapulted me into becoming a family archivist. Twenty years later, that's still what I'm doing, but for many more people. 

Jill: Tell me more about that. What was the story and how did it lead to this book? 

Rachel: Getting personal really fast, this really started with my first period when I was a teenager. My mom, much to my huge embarrassment, decided to share that I had become a woman with everybody in my family over a Passover seder. I was horrified, but my great-aunt, who was a hidden child during the Holocaust, pulled me aside and told me the story that she had never told anybody before, which was about how when she was fleeing Nazi-occupied Poland, she actually got her first period on that journey. It happened literally on a train, in the worst possible case scenario, on a train while everyone was being strip searched by SS officers, because they were looking for signs of Jewish jewelry and valuables in body cavities. It's a very traumatic story, and I now understand her first period was  probably a trauma response.She told me this story while sitting on her bed. I was 12.. I remember feeling like, first, I understood part of her history in a way that I had never been able to before. It felt so different from the kinds of stories you hear in history textbooks. But also, even though I had no kind of political consciousness at that age, it prompted this question for me of what stories get passed down, what stories get archived, what stories are dismissed as unimportant or taboo. 

Her story opened the floodgates, so to speak. Everyone was shocked that my great-aunt had never shared that story. People were upset. Her own daughter didn't know. My mom hadn't shared her story with me. My aunt and my mom didn't know each other's stories. So we started sharing and archiving our stories and it quickly became this collective outpouring of stories that was a real bonding experience. 

We collectively had this idea of, should other families be invited to talk and what could we do to do that?  So what began as a family project then became a community project in New Haven, where I grew up. But then everybody kept pointing me to somebody else.As I got older, I started to also see how these stories about first periods are so entangled with stories of our sense of identity, how we change, how we evolve. 

Initially this was a collection of stories about first periods that was published as a book in 2009 called My Little Red Book. After that came out, I talked to a lot of teenage girls. I kept hearing from their parents about "wait, what about a book about menopause?" and "what about a book about miscarriage?" And everybody wanted a book for their own experience that hasn't been shared, where it feels like you go through something in isolation, even though it's what half the population goes through. And so, I've been working for the past couple of years on a more expanded version that includes stories from all ages and also across the gender spectrum. That's Our Red Book.

Jill: Fantastic. And you call it "a people's history of menstruation," which was a term I quite liked. What does that mean to you? Why that phrasing? 

Rachel: I really want to emphasize the way that everybody's story is valuable and that there's a collection, an archive in everybody's family, in everybody's community. I also didn't really have a choice in how this book was made. I think there are a lot of anthologies that follow a format where it's curated voices of well-known figures. But with this project, I was really on a trail that relied on trust.  One person pointed me to the next. And everybody that I talked to, I ended up sharing my own family story and my story. The project required a kind of intimate exchange behind the scenes. I also think of it as a people’s history because, while no book like this could be totally comprehensive comprehensive, it's choral and incredibly diverse and global. Hopefully the momentum of these voices carries a reader into asking questions among their own community.I'm really inspired by the oral historian Svetlana Alexievich, she wrote the Unwomanly Faces of War and Secondhand Time, and she has this idea of history belonging to all of us and the soul of history being really in the street. Hearing these stories makes that so evident. You really understand huge historic events through these very intimate personal accounts. My great aunt's story being one example. 

Jill: And this is certainly related to my next question, but what is the greater purpose of a project like this? Other than just giving people a platform to speak and be heard, which is certainly important, but what's the bigger picture goal here? 

Rachel: First, when there's any kind of fame or taboo or erasure, there is something healing about talking. Sharing these stories connects you with a missing part of yourself and it also connects you to others. 

On a cultural level, sharing personal histories of menstruation is a kind of  correction, a personal correction, but also a correction in a larger archive and in a larger culture that is missing this very important thread that is essential to our daily lives and cultural understanding of where we come from. There's a political project that's also very much a part of this work: can these stories expose how misogyny has lodged itself in the American imagination and intervene? To do this, we need to go to the very beginning and look at how most young people in this country  learn about sex and learn about bodies, because this is often where we learn to feel shame.  There was a phrase you used about House Bill 1069 in Florida that would ban talking about menstruation before sixth grade: legislating shame. But even outside of Florida, we're still doing that by keeping half the population in the dark when we teach young people about menstruation and tell half the class to go outside. That shame grows and becomes progressively more harmful as we get older. 

So, the idea for a project like this is to encourage conversation, yes, among people who menstruate, but also to invite readers across the aisle - dads, brothers - into the dialogue and in a very gentle way through these wonderful stories that are funny and poignant and literary. Some of them are graphic novels and very easy to read. These stories remind us how we're all connected and that you also don't have to wait until sixth grade or the dreaded puberty lecture to talk. 

One of my favorite stories in the book comes from a contributor in Brazil who talks about educating her infant son about menstruation basically when he starts asking, "where did I come from?" Which every child asks. And so, there are opportunities from the very beginning to talk openly about menstruation. One notable part of that story is that she also uses her menstrual blood to water plants. In her Indigenous tradition in Brazil, menstrual blood is viewed as a sacred life source. “Watering” her plants is  a monthly activity that she and her son participate in together. When I heard this account, it lodged itself in my mind. I couldn't stop thinking about how far a world that is from the way that I grew up. If this book can bring us anywhere closer to a world where it's not only not shameful, but something that can be part of our everyday and cultural lives, that's the hope.