Menarche

Menarche, or a girl’s first menstruation, marks a decisive change in the account of puberty in The Second Sex. The book describes it as both a physical event and a socially interpreted one: the body’s new cycle becomes, for many girls, an announcement that adulthood has arrived in a form already burdened by limits and stigma. Its significance lies not in biology alone, but in the way the girl is taught to understand what her body means.

The event and its preparation

Before menstruation begins, some girls greet the approach of puberty with curiosity or pride. They may look forward to developing breasts, even padding their blouses with handkerchiefs, without yet understanding the changes taking place. The first period alters that anticipation by giving it a meaning the child may not have been helped to understand. The book says that whether or not a girl has been warned, the event often appears repugnant and humiliating to her; when shame was already present, the experience can intensify it.

Preparation is frequently inadequate. Mothers may explain pregnancy, childbirth, or sexual relations more readily than menstruation, leaving a daughter to interpret unfamiliar stains as evidence of diarrhea, a dangerous hemorrhage, or disease. In a survey cited from 1896, 36 of 125 American high-school students knew nothing about menstruation when their first period arrived, while another 39 had only vague ideas. The book notes that Helene Deutsch found little change by 1946. These figures frame confusion not as an unusual individual failing, but as a consequence of widespread silence.

Fear, secrecy, and the body’s meaning

The uncertainty can bring intense anxiety. The book recounts an instance of a girl who jumped into the Seine at Saint-Ouen because she believed she had contracted an unknown disease, and another, related by Wilhelm Stekel, who tried to kill herself because she took menstrual bleeding as punishment for spiritual impurity. Even when a girl is spared such extreme fear through explanation, she may still feel dirty and ashamed, try to wash herself, or hide stained underwear. The event thus reaches beyond physical change: it affects how she moves through ordinary life and whether she can speak openly about what is happening.

A narrative by Colette Audry gives this experience a particular sequence. The first episode did not frighten the girl, who hoped it would disappear; when it happened again, she tried to conceal her underwear. Her mother then came to explain, but the presence of her younger sister at the bedroom door made the girl angry and exposed. The account recalls earlier hints—the doctor who said she was growing up and the towels her mother had set aside—whose significance the girl had not understood at the time.

After the next episode, the girl could no longer treat the change as temporary. She resented her sister for not yet sharing it, men for being exempt from it, and women for seeming to accept it calmly. She felt that the world had taken her by surprise. When the experience returned a month later, she had to accept that it would recur; memory divided into a before and an after. Menarche becomes a lasting marker in this account because the body’s cycle transforms an anticipated possibility into an enduring condition.

Puberty and the gendered future

The book distinguishes the ages at which boys and girls typically reach puberty in its account: boys at about fifteen or sixteen, girls at thirteen or fourteen. But it locates the essential difference not in that timing or in physiology alone, but in what puberty is understood to announce. The boy’s developing body is associated with virility and entry into adult male status; the girl’s menstruation is made to signify femininity in a culture that treats femininity as inferior and other.

That social meaning changes the girl’s relation to the future. Menstruation can seem to confirm a fate that had previously been vague or imposed from outside: womanhood now appears lodged in her body, and escape seems impossible. A girl who has already accepted the role may greet the event as recognition that she is becoming an adult. One account of a girl who had been waiting for the onset of menstruation associates it with the prospect of becoming a mother and being a lady. For a girl who has resisted that role, the same event may instead bring disgust and fear. The book emphasizes this ambivalence: the physical event is not experienced identically by all girls, because its meaning depends in part on the position they have already been made to occupy.

In the book’s analysis, a more sexually egalitarian society would allow menstruation to be understood as one bodily route into adult life, rather than proof of a damaged or subordinate category. The shame surrounding it is therefore not an inevitable result of the body. It is intensified by a social order that attaches inferior status to femininity and makes the menstrual sign appear to confirm that judgment.

Consequences and the argument about freedom

The book connects the first period to a broader crisis of adolescence. A girl who learns to associate womanhood with illness, suffering, and a predetermined future may approach adulthood feeling wounded, ashamed, worried, and guilty. Inadequate explanation compounds the physical change with anxiety about what else may happen and what it implies about her place among others. The crisis is thus not merely a private reaction: it shows how social assumptions can be lived through the body.

This account belongs to a larger argument that biological facts are essential to understanding women’s situation but cannot, by themselves, explain women’s subordination or fix their destiny. The body is experienced within consciousness, action, custom, and society; the question is not simply what menstruation does physiologically, but what people and institutions make it mean. Menarche reveals how a bodily process can be turned into a sign of inferiority, while the book’s framework leaves open the possibility that girls may preserve self-respect and pursue projects beyond the limits assigned to them. The episode is therefore both a threshold in physical development and a test of whether womanhood will be treated as a destiny or understood as a situation shaped by history and social values.