The Rite to Bleed

Researched and written by Yamilah Bhyat

Somewhere, in time immemorial, beneath an ancient sky, a young girl became a woman for the very first time.

She experienced menstruation long before humanity had the language to explain what her blood meant, and we will never know what story was told around that first blood — whether it was met with fear, or reverence, or something in between. But since then, societies throughout history have endeavoured to shape our understanding of it to achieve their own ends: sacred, dangerous, impure, divine — powerful.

Despite centuries of these shifting narratives, one simple truth has remained unchanged:

Women bleed.

And perhaps it is time we reclaim that rite.

In many ways, to define menstruation, by its very nature, is to define womanhood, and that is precisely why it has always carried such power — because it is inseparable from the female body itself. Hundreds of years before the first blue liquid ad, this blood was understood as a symbol of the inherent power that women possess and was widely celebrated and honoured as the force through which life is created and destroyed.

So how then did something once understood as sacred become the device of our silence? How did we come to inherit shame for the very thing that was so central to our humanity? To answer that question, we must look beyond menstruation alone and toward the colonial reshaping of the female body. In doing so, you will quickly come to understand that the story of menstruation is much less a story about blood, and more so a story about power.

Before us, menstruation existed within a wider cosmology.

It’s no secret that pre-colonial societies globally existed in ways that are quite foreign to our modern world: From tribes native to the Southern tip of Africa, to the earliest stewards of the Arctic Circle, it has been documented that Indigenous peoples worldwide viewed menstruation as spiritually significant and woven into their broader worldviews that positioned women as central to communal, spiritual, and cultural life. Because of this, women held significant agricultural, medicinal, spiritual, and political authority and in this landscape, their bodies were understood as deeply connected to the rhythm of creation and essential to the continuity of their communities.

While unpacking this, it’s important to understand that in these contexts, spirituality was not separated from ordinary life, nor was the body viewed as something that was disconnected from the sacred. A woman’s relationship to her body, her land, her community, and the spirit world were considered intertwined. Therefore, in the native worldview, menstruation wasn’t solely biological, but also part of a larger relationship — one connected to ancestry, creation, and the sustaining of both the people and their way of life.

One tribe that reflected this way of life were the Lakȟóta. To these indigenous people historically rooted in the northern Great Plains of modern-day North America, menarche (which is a girl’s very first period) was momentous and they understood it as the awakening of unrivalled generative, spiritual power. They ritually celebrated this transition from girlhood to womanhood in a ceremony called Išnáti Awíčalowaŋpi. Menstruation thereafter was a sacred period known as their “moon time,” during which women would retreat to special moon lodges, not as punishment or exile, but as spaces of rest, reflection, and communal, inter-generational bonding with other women. Ironically, these secluded spaces were the exact places young women went to explore. They were where women connected to their spiritual worlds and to one another most deeply. Rather than hiding menstruation, the Lakȟóta placed it within a broader understanding of women as Cultural Bearers in their society and spiritually potent beings who were,and still are, deeply connected to the rhythms of the earth and cosmos. And to that, I say: Right on!

Similarly, on my home continent, the Yoruba people of present-day Nigeria, Benin, and Togo, also linked menstruation to spiritual power and feminine authority. Women in these communities were believed to possess heightened spiritual power and influence during their cycles. Menstrual blood was seen as so energetically powerful that it was believed the presence of a menstruating woman could conflict with other spiritual energies. Once “mature”, older priestesses often guided younger women in understanding their Àṣẹ (a fundamental Yoruba concept that represents the divine, spiritual force that creates, animates, and changes the universe. It is essentially the power behind willing events into existence – what we know on a much smaller scale as manifestation).This exchange shows us just how influential women in these communities were, and how central their existence was to their unique cosmologies.

Herein lies our pressure point: the colonial project could never comfortably coexist with these intricate systems in which women carried such sacred, spiritual, and communal

authority, because to control a people, the empire first had to dismantle the very cosmologies that positioned women as powerful.

In Her Blood Is Gold, Lara Owen writes that “ignoring or despising menstruation is one of the ways that misogyny manifests itself,” and the colonial project understood this intimately.

European colonial powers carried with them a rigid toolkit of patriarchal frameworks shaped by religious doctrine, emerging capitalist systems, and gender binaries that positioned women as subordinate, domesticated, and morally suspect...shocker. Within this new imposed worldview, menstruation, and the female body as a whole, became something fundamentally different.

Take the Lakȟóta for example. With the arrival of European settlers, practices that had once been regarded as sacred quickly became reinterpreted through the colonial lens as primitive, immoral, and threatening. The previously mentioned moon lodges were condemned by Christian missionaries and colonial authorities who viewed female spiritual autonomy with deep suspicion. The very idea that menstruating women could possess heightened spiritual power stood in direct opposition to European patriarchal beliefs that associated women’s bodies with temptation, weakness, and impurity. And so, what colonialism could not assimilate, it sought to erase: ceremonial practices were discouraged, Indigenous spiritual systems were suppressed, and generations of young girls were gradually separated from the communal traditions that had once taught them to understand their bodies, and blood, as sacred.

Ultimately, controlling women’s bodies was about something much bigger than just controlling women.

It was about controlling lineage.

Ritual.

Knowledge.

Inheritance.

Community.

Memory itself.

Feminist scholar Silvia Federici argues that the rise of colonial capitalism depended upon disciplining women’s bodies and reproductive power. As she writes in Caliban and the Witch, “the body has been for women what the factory has been for male waged workers: the primary ground of their exploitation and resistance.”

The body itself became a site requiring discipline. But to attempt to discipline the body in menstruation is to insist a tree not dance in the wind. And, when its leaves fail to remain motionless, to shame it for being itself.

Over time, that shame became internalized. Women were taught not only to conceal menstruation from society, but to distance themselves from the reality of their own bodies entirely. As menstruation became synonymous with moral impurity, concealing our blood became yet another obligation and duty we were expected to shoulder without complaint or recourse.

The most effective systems of control are often the ones that become invisible. And menstrual shame has become so normalised that many women inherit discomfort with their own bodies before they are ever taught where that discomfort originated. Many of us are raised to experience our cycles primarily as inconvenience, dysfunction, or disruption rather than as natural bodily rhythms. This deeply internalised shame manifests itself in women, who frequently suffer pain, hormonal disorders, and reproductive health concerns in silence.

And so we come to understand that that severing did not only reshape how menstruation was viewed socially, but it reshaped how women understood themselves. The legacy of that transformation continues to shape our lives today.

Across the world, our blood remains shrouded in silence, and many of us come of age learning about our own bodies through whispers. Our blood they once condemned and controlled is now commodified and sold back to us as a problem to be managed. After

centuries of teaching women to feel ashamed of menstruation, modern society now profits from selling us the tools to hide it.

By the dawn of our modern era, menstruation had become increasingly medicalised through the rise of the “feminine hygiene” industry, which reframed our cycles as something women should navigate discreetly and invisibly. Blood disappeared from public imagery altogether, replaced with sterile blue liquid and the language of freshness, cleanliness, and concealment because, as menstrual advertisements have long implied, the ideal woman is one who bleeds without ever allowing the world to notice.

For millions of women and girls, that concealment comes at a cost. UNESCO estimates that one in ten girls in Sub-Saharan Africa misses school during their menstrual cycle due to lack of products, sanitation, or fear of humiliation. In this way, menstrual shame is not abstract, and it materially limits education, dignity, mobility, and opportunity. And so the same blood once understood as sacred has become yet another site through which inequality is lived on the female body.

We see now that while the colonial project may have formally ended in many parts of the world, the disciplining of women’s bodies never truly disappeared. It simply evolved. Shame replaced ceremony. Silence replaced communal knowledge. Concealment replaced reverence.

To reclaim menstruation is not to romanticise pain, nor to suggest that all native worldviews were perfect, or that we all experience menstruation in the same way. It is something far simpler, and far more radical: the refusal to inherit shame.

There is power in the female body. Not because we bleed, but because within us exists the profound rhythm of creation and loss, life and death. Each cycle prepares the body to sustain life, and when that life does not come, the body releases that possibility once more...

To begin again

Somewhere, in time immemorial, beneath an ancient sky, a young girl became a woman for the very first time.

We will never know the story that was told around that first blood but if I had to imagine it, it was one of power, passed from mother to daughter and through every woman after her, carried forward not in written record, but in the body itself.

Women still bleed, as we always have.

And reclamation is not as far away as we are made to believe. It is not something we must construct, but something we must remember, carried through bodies that have never stopped knowing who they are.

And in that continuity, in that unbroken line, perhaps there is nothing more powerful than a thing that survives centuries of being taught to hate itself and still finds a way to call itself sacred again.