Menstruation and the Holocaust

Former undergraduate student Jo-Ann Owusu turned her excellent BA dissertation from the ‘HI31Z Sexualities, Ethnicity, Class: Reinterpreting the Holocaust’ module into an essay in History Today. Jo-Ann identified the topic of menstruation in the Holocaust completely herself — did all the research and search for historiography — and then revised it for History Today. This is the first piece of work from the HI31Z module to be published. The piece is important because menstruation in the Holocaust is a total lacuna, and because it is one of the most stigmatised topics in the field. There are also many assumptions that women did not menstruate in the camps, or were happy that they stopped and she differentiates the picture greatly, showing what it meant to various women to menstruate or not, how women coped without sanitary pads, etc. She also connects her research to bigger issues of Holocaust victims’ agency, gender, and society in the camps being a genuine society.