Blood, Bread, and Roses: How Menstruation Created the World

Judy Grahn is one of those rare people who are truly original thinkers. This breakthrough book, which gives an entirely new perspective on the creation of culture, is based on several years of cross-cultural research as well as the author's ability to think way outside the box. A highly recommend this book.

I am reading this book and so far I'm loving it. It has reminded me of how important women were, are and always will be for our society. It's a shame we sometimes let the men underestimate us.

Dr. Grahn's book was way ahead of its time. Both thought-provoking and transformational, she gives us nothing less than a new origin story in which women are at the center, without relegating men to the fringe. I highly recommend this book as well as the New College of California journal Metaformia: A Journal of Menstruation and Culture, www.metaformia.com. Page One describes how this theory returns women to a crucial place in cultural origin stories, in our histories, in our rituals, in our religions, and in the ordinary and extraordinary everyday things that billions of women do all over the planet-so women can again identify themselves as being part of culture creation in major, leading, and centralizing ways.

The first time I picked up this book I got to the part about menstruation being the inspiration for chairs, and like another reviewer here, thought Grahn's ideas way out there and put the book aside. Fast forward five years and it makes a lot more sense to me. Grahn is a poet and relates a world before there was language, when what would become humans lived in trees and struggled day to day along side the other animals. Grahn posits that the correlation of the female menstrual cycle with the cycle of the moon served as the first physical distinction between animal and environment, and provided the metaphorical correlation necessary to all language. Lacan describes this as the mirror stage which happens in infancy. What Grahn describes is similar but takes place not with an individual but with an entire race, haltingly, and over a very long period of time. None of us knows what happened in the dawning of human consciousness. Grahan weaves a credible account based on commonalities between ancient cultures, myths, and language. Still, her narrative departs so acutely from what we generally do, or or have not bothered to, imagine about our origins that it seems very easy to dismiss. Yet in a country where 45% of the people believe God created the world in seven days, made the first man out of dust, and the first woman out of one of his ribs, why is Grahn's version - based on the physically possible - so difficult to consider? Much of what Grahn writes is speculation, a delving into the possible. The stories of women have been, throughout history, suppressed, stolen, and destroyed. We cannot totally recreate this lost history, but we can try on other ideas and take from them the value that they hold. For women to consider that their lives and their bodies were integral to the creation of human culture is no more absurd than the completely unsubstantiated idea (which 45% of Americans believe) that ONLY the lives and bodies of men were necessary to human culture - that a male god spoke the whole kit and caboodle into being in seven days, and women were just an afterthought. So Judy, you go, girl. And please do write a book on menopause.

I highly recomend this book. It is a cultural history to beat all other cultural histories! Grahn has taken humanity back to the very earliest days and suggests that it was menstruation that caused us to develop into humans. I am hoping that Grahn will "complete the cycle" by writing about menopause, because it also had a profound effect on the development of humanity. No more cavemen stereotypes, please!