New this week: Some recent developments in the science and medicine of menstruation,
prepared by Anna Simpson: Disturbed sleep and
dysmenorrhea, menstrual disorders and smoking, the
timing of breast-cancer surgery, and women
in the U.K., France and U.S.A. have similar premenstrual
symptoms and are reluctant to seek treatment
- Sex Facts for Women, by Richard J. Lambert,
Ph.G. [sic?], M.D. (booklet, 1936) - humor
There Will Be E-mail
Problems to MUM
This site has at last moved to its new Internet
service provider (ISP), and your e-mail may
return to you or not be answered for the next few days
until I get everything figured out. Send it
again in a few days if that happens.
Letters to Your MUM
A student at a Dutch university writes
about her cat and tampons:
Just wanted to mention my cat's favorite toy - o.b.'s
[tampons]! Any tampons left lying around are chased unmercifully - I think
it's the crackly cellophane and the handy size, plus of course the resemblance
to a white mouse, which they've always been
called in my family.
Here's more about cats.
And not only tampons are used as toys:
Dear Mister Finley,
My mother, born in 1923, Palo Alto, California, told me a little story
of her very early childhood. She remembers seeing some lovely little hand
made dolly mattresses in the closet. She got
one down, and was letting her little china doll "sleep" on it.
Her mother saw her and gently explained that they were not dolly mattresses.
I believe she also saw her mother washing out these home-made sanitary
napkins at another time. The experience was not surprising or frightening
in any way. Just thought you'd like to know.
The Women's Environmental Network exchanges
links:
I am developing our Web pages and want to include your site on menstruation.
Do you want to reciprocate? [Yes! See below and on the links
page.]
Have a look at our site. There's no menstruation stuff up there as
yet but we have campaigned on the issues for the last 10 years.
Yours,
Helen Lynn
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Helen Lynn
Health Co-ordinator
Women's Environmental Network
87 Worship St
London EC2A 2BE
Tel: 0207 247 3327
Fax: 0207 247 4740
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Trickle traffic,
- wonderful term! - praise for the museum and washable
pads:
[I'm] glad I found your page. I heard about your museum a few years
ago on a [Canadian] public television program called "Under
Wraps," and I'm glad it's online. Keep it up!
I've linked to it from my trickle-traffic page called Femme
Stuff. I even recognize some of the washables you have in your pictures: I have the same leopard- and tiger-print
pads. They're done up by the company Many Moons,
in case you'd like to set up a link there [already have!]. Janet also promotes
the Keeper, a reusable menstrual cup.
And I love the jokes. Don't take down the
humor section! :-) [A few people have objected to it; see previous news pages; keep clicking back.]
Elfie
She supplies a joke I had forgotten:
Hello Harry,
I have been very remiss in not e-mailing you sooner. I absolutely love
your site and recommend it to all my friends, female and male. I found
it as a link from an 'angry housewives' site.
I just visited it again after a long absence and checked out your humor section. You said "wood eye" was
from a joke you don't remember. I do remember that joke and here it is:
There once was a girl who went to a school dance but knew that no one
would ask her to dance. This is because she had enormous buck teeth. So
she stood against the wall along with all the other plain girls.
Well, lo and behold, this guy with a wooden eye gets up the courage
to ask her to dance.
He shyly approaches her and says, "Would you like to dance?"
She is so overjoyed she says, "Would I?! Would I?!"
At which the man angrily replies,"Buck teeth! Buck teeth!"
Many thanks! I believe the American writer and humorist Mark Twain
told a version of this joke.
By the way, I just read (in Der ängstliche Adler: Friedrich
Nietzsches Leben, by Werner Ross, 1984, dtv) that Friedrich
Nietzsche, the German philosopher, read some
writing of Mark Twain aloud at a party when he was a twenty-something professor
of philology at the University of Basel, Switzerland. Humor is not
what we associate with the philosopher, whom the Nazi's claimed.
A great gift, Australians like tampons
without applicators, and cats exchange greetings:
Dear Harry,
I have been reading and enjoying your site for some months now!
As I collect old magazines I'd like to offer you a millennial gift
of a bundle of advertising from Australian Women's magazines of the 50s
to the 70s. [Fantastic! I accept!]
It might interest you to know that in Australia, although we seem to
have basically the same major brands on sale, the
ratio of o.b.-type tampons [those with no applicator, the latter having
been introduced by Tampax
in 1936] to applicator types is basically the reverse of that in the States.
When I lived in Nebraska (in the early 90s) I really had to search to find
plain ordinary tampons without extra packaging and gizmos. Here you'd probably
have to go to a few shops to find the applicator variety. I guess it's
part of the American obsession with hygiene. I'd
say Australia fits somewhere between the U.S. (high) and the U.K. (well
you can take your dog anywhere, as in much of Europe) in this regard.
My feline companion Baron Bastet the Bold, Scourge
of Dachshunds, wishes to convey his greeting to the distinguished
professors and lovely interns. [And they send theirs!] He adds that
he would be happy to convey his latest discoveries in the field of anti-dachshund
warfare to Mack and his entourage should this
be of use. [Excellent! He will contact him via the cat underground. Enough
said. Over and out!]
Thanks for running a great site! [You're welcome!]
It's ABOUT TIME! Is this the new millennium?
This site has a good explanation - it walks you through, with tables
yet!
According to the U.S. Naval Observatory [Washington, D.C., the timekeeper
for the U.S.A.] the end of the second millennium
and the beginning of the third will be reached on January 1, 2001 [not
2000!]
This date is based on a calendar created in 526 A.D. by Dennis the
Diminutive, the head of a Roman monastery who forged a common calendar
from the divergent dating systems of his day.
Help Wanted: This Museum Needs a
Public Official For Its Board of Directors
Your MUM is doing the paper work necessary to become eligible to receive
support from foundations as a 501(c)3 nonprofit corporation. To achieve
this status, it helps to have a American public official - an elected or
appointed official of the government, federal, state or local - on its board of directors.
What public official out there
will support a museum for the worldwide culture of
women's health and menstruation?
Eventually I would also like to entice people experienced in the law,
finances and fund raising to the board.
Do You Have Irregular Menses?
If so, you may have polycystic ovary syndrome
[and here's a support association for it].
Jane Newman, Clinical Research Coordinator at Brigham
and Women's Hospital, Harvard University School of Medicine, asked
me to tell you that
Irregular menses identify women at high risk for polycystic ovary syndrome
(PCOS), which exists in 6-10% of women of
reproductive age. PCOS is a major cause of infertility
and is linked to diabetes.
Learn more about current
research on PCOS at Brigham and Women's
Hospital, the University of Pennsylvania and Pennsylvania State University
- or contact Jane Newman.
If you have fewer than six
periods a year, you may be eligible to participate
in the study!
New this week: Some recent developments in the science and medicine of menstruation,
prepared by Anna Simpson: Disturbed sleep and
dysmenorrhea, menstrual disorders and smoking, the
timing of breast-cancer surgery, and women
in the U.K., France and U.S.A. have similar premenstrual
symptoms and are reluctant to seek treatment
- Sex Facts for Women, by Richard J. Lambert,
Ph.G. [sic?], M.D. (booklet, 1936) - humor
© 2000 Harry Finley. It is illegal
to reproduce or distribute work on this Web site in any manner or medium
without written permission of the author. Please report suspected violations
to hfinley@mum.org