A Clockwork Red Part 1: The Art of Bleeding

On the morning of January 23rd 2026, I began menstruating. On January 24th 2026, on the second and heaviest day of my period, I signed this painting in my own blood; in honor of the blood that has been spilled throughout the diaspora before me and may have long since been forgotten.

A Note from the Author

I began working on this piece intending to trace the origins of Period Fashion. But there was something unsettling about calling any of this Fashion because what emerged instead was not at all a whimsical story of style, creativity, or choice.

Garments, methods, and practices were responses to environmental constraints that offered little to no room for error and zero tolerance for the Black Woman’s vulnerability.

I learned of a history shaped by danger, deprivation, and more dark truth behind colonial social order. Period fashion was never glamorous. It was born of conditions where the body had to be managed carefully to avoid punishment, loss of livelihood, or harm.

Enter, Aunt Flow

Long before Kotex swooped in and saved white women from the perils of menstrual convenience and before menstruation was regulated by “medicine”, shaped by policy, or managed by industry, it was governed only through lived experience and collected knowledge.

Across precolonial African societies, menstruation was understood as a bodily process that communicated timing, fertility status, physical readiness, and recovery. This understanding developed and was sustained over time through observation, repetition, and shared experience.

Girls learned about menstruation through proximity to women in their communities. Knowledge moved through daily life, shared labor, and conversation. Cycles were tracked through memory, seasonal awareness, and lunar patterns. Regularity and change were recognized as meaningful indicators of bodily state.

Menstrual bleeding confirmed fertility without pregnancy and guided decisions related to exertion, physical intimacy, planning and spacing around child birth, and feminine care. It functioned as one expression of bodily rhythm within a broader understanding of cyclical processes used to govern land use, agriculture, new life, illness, and recovery treatment. Blood appeared in multiple aspects of life and was not isolated as deviant.

In some societies, temporary withdrawal from certain forms of labor occurred during bleeding. This reflected recognition of physical depletion rather than punishment. Accommodations varied body to body, through social adaptation such as temporary reassignment of physically demanding labor during, communal sharing of domestic tasks, allowance for altered pacing rather than full withdrawal. As well as spatial adjustments that enabled women to rest without the loss of status or contribution.

Governing the Black Woman’s Body

It’s important to note that menstrual knowledge did not emerge in response to oppression, it preceded it. To understand the conditions black women throughout the diaspora later faced, we must first recognize that before authority was imposed, the body governed itself. Autonomy was not absent, it was stolen.

Across the diaspora women quietly cared for their bodies using menstrual cloth made from what was close at hand, breathable, and kind to the skin. Cotton and linen, softened by wear and repeated washing, were most common, folded and refolded with care, washed, dried in the sun, and reused as an act of both necessity and knowledge. In warmer climates, these fabrics offered relief through airflow and absorbency, while in rural settings women sometimes turned to natural fibers when cloth was scarce. Across the African continent and throughout the Caribbean and the Americas, these practices were shared between mothers, daughters, and sisters, passed down not as hardship, but as lived wisdom. Modern reusable pads, made from cotton, bamboo blends, flannel, and waterproof backings, do not represent a departure from the past, but a continuation of it. They echo an ancestral understanding that menstrual care should be affordable, gentle, sustainable, and in harmony with the body and the climate it lives in.

Artist - MICKALENE THOMAS Origin of the Universe

Colonial expansion transformed menstruation from a bodily process into an administrative concern, filtered through classism and control. As European rule spread across Africa, the Caribbean, and the Americas during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, systems of governance prioritized extraction of native values and practices, replacing them with uniformity, surveillance, and respectability politics. As menstruation became subject to external authority, bodily knowledge was displaced by control under the guise of social progress.

Under these systems, menstruation was required to coexist with uninterrupted labor. Bleeding would no longer justify a pause in work or periods of rest. Privacy, water access, and time would be controlled and restricted. Menstrual handling became a matter of visibility and discipline. A stain, a scent, or a slowed pace would invite punishment or scrutiny.

A Brief History of Autonomy Theft Against Black Women

1854 to 1865, Senegal and French West Africa

Colonial governance under Louis Faidherbe aggressively pursued assimilation through enforced “sameness”.

Cleanliness, apparel, and bodily order were recast as proof of social belonging, while access to the means of compliance was tightly controlled. Indigenous menstrual practices were now considered failures to modernize, even as women were denied water, materials, and privacy. Menstrual leakage, fatigue, or altered pace could be cited as proof of disorder; justifying punishment, exclusion from employment, or removal from communal roles altogether.

1864 to 1866, Jamaica

Governance under Edward Eyre relied on “respectability” as the mechanism of control. Black women were expected to meet standards of cleanliness and composure without land ownership, wages, or privacy. Cloth-based menstrual care was labeled “unclean” because it existed outside of colonial commerce, which actively and intentionally excluded black women. Even survival itself was re-coded as “deficiency.” Living was for the privileged, but was still highly expected of the unprivileged.

1866, Trinidad

Administration under Arthur Hamilton Gordon linked sanitation and apparel to moral worth. Black women’s bodies became visible markers of “obedience” and social acceptability. Traditional menstrual handling was stripped of context and deemed “inadequate”, with discipline imposed for conditions women did not create. Girls were removed from schools or publicly reprimanded for appearing unclean regardless of restricted access to sanitary resources.

In labor settings, menstruation that interrupted pace or visibility of blood could result in punishment by way of dismissal, withholding of wages, or reassignment to harsher work. Health inspections and mission oversight treated menstrual leakage as evidence of negligence to justify their surveillance of women’s homes and bodies.

1875 to 1876, Barbados

Governance under John Pope-Hennessy used “respectability” as a method of reclassification. Cleanliness and apparel were used to sort women into moral categories. Afro-Barbadian practices were sidelined as “unsophisticated” and replaced with imported ideals of “civility” that remained inaccessible to most of the native population. The threat to everyday life was sustained. Black women employed as domestic workers or market vendors faced loss of income if they failed to present a controlled appearance. Visible menstrual leakage or fatigue was cited as evidence of moral laxity rather than bodily reality, and could result in dismissal, wage withholding, or public shame and reprimand. Women seeking work in colonial households were evaluated on their ability to embody an idealized composure that ignored menstruation altogether rather than their skill.

Schools and churches reinforced these standards and girls were disciplined for appearing unclean, removed from lessons, or subjected to “corrective instruction” when bodily signs disrupted expected presentation. Menstrual care practices passed down through generations of women in families were reframed as signs of “poor upbringing”, and used to justify intervention by missionaries and social reformers.

Kara Walker, Cypher of the Old Republick, 2025

1897 to 1901, South Africa

Colonial administration under Alfred Milner subjected Black women’s domestic lives to surveillance. Inspections became routine, with homes entered and judged according to foreign standards that ignored overcrowding, limited water access, and relentless labor demands. European ideals of hygiene were enforced while housing, sanitation infrastructure, and income stability were deliberately withheld.

Preexisting African systems of bodily care were relabeled “unhygienic” through administrative displacement. Cloth used for menstrual care was cited as evidence of unsanitary living, not because it failed to protect health, but because it did not conform to imported medical norms. In mining compounds and labor settlements, menstruation had to be managed invisibly to avoid discipline. Women could be reprimanded, reported, or marked as “negligent” while not being provided soap, additional water rations, or private washing facilities.

1879 to 1904, United States of America

Assimilationist principles associated with Richard Henry Pratt shaped broader racial governance. Cleanliness, apparel, and domestic order were reframed as measures of moral fitness. Black women’s inherited menstrual practices were dismissed as “negligent” because they operated outside white, middle-class norms. Black women whose menstrual care was deemed “improper” risked loss of employment in domestic service, expulsion from schools, public shaming during health inspections, and institutional punishment. In prisons, labor camps, and asylums, menstruating women who bled through their clothing were denied adequate supplies and privacy while still expected to maintain composure and productivity. Bodily leakage or visible fatigue would be used to justify confinement, forced labor, or “medical intervention.”

In medical institutions, Black women’s bodies were over-examined, restrained, or subjected to experimentation under the assumption that they felt less pain or required less care. Menstruation became a site where bodily vulnerability was used to justify further or ongoing experimentation, discipline, and dispossession.

1900 to 1906, Nigeria

Colonial administration under Frederick Lugard codified European standards of cleanliness and respectability into governance. Indigenous practices became known as “primitive”, while infrastructure necessary for compliance was made inaccessible. Women were blamed for failing to meet imposed standards. Enforcement carried consequence. Women whose homes or bodies failed inspections could be fined, publicly reprimanded, or reported to local authorities for neglect. In market towns and labor zones, women risked exclusion from trade spaces or loss of income if they were deemed unclean or disorderly. “Mission” schools and colonial health campaigns reinforced these judgments making girls susceptible to discipline or removal from instruction for appearing unkempt during menstruation, while their families were blamed for improper upbringing.

1883 to1907, Egypt

Governance under Evelyn Baring transformed hygiene and apparel into moral measurements tied to women’s worth and “readiness for modern life.” Colonial administrators, physicians, and reform officials dismissed Indigenous bodily practices, including menstrual care rooted in cloth use, as “evidence of backwardness” rather than adaptation. These judgments were imposed even as women were denied economic freedom, reliable income, and access to materials required to meet European standards.

Women whose bodies or clothing were deemed unclean during inspections risked public reprimand, exclusion from employment, or intensified monitoring by health authorities. In domestic service and textile labor, visible fatigue or menstrual leakage could result in dismissal or wage loss. “Mission” schools and educational reform institutions reinforced these standards among students. Girls were disciplined, removed from lessons, or subjected to “corrective measures” when natural bodily signs failed to meet presentation standards. Menstrual practices taught within families were labeled improper and used to justify intervention by colonial educators and physicians.

1903 to 1909, Brazil

Public health reforms led by Oswaldo Cruz linked cleanliness to citizenship. Sanitation raids and domestic policing targeted predominantly Black neighborhoods, particularly in Rio de Janeiro. During raids, women could be fined, displaced, or forcibly removed from their homes. Homes were entered without consent, belongings were destroyed, and women were subjected to routine inspection. Despite widespread poverty, overcrowding, and lack of access to clean water or waste infrastructure, Afro-Brazilian women’s ancestral practices were treated as threats to national progress. Visible cloth or blood was treated as “evidence of disorder” rather than as a consequence of intended deprivation. Medical solutions promoted by the state remained largely withheld and inaccessible to the women being policed. The Afro-Brazilian woman’s body was positioned as a site of risk to the nation, allowing and encouraging coercive public health measures to override bodily autonomy.

Positive Fragmentation: Wangechi Mutu on the Black Body Tumors in the female body re-imagined:

Lest We Forget

Evidently, across the diaspora, the effect was cumulative. Menstruation could no longer be handled solely through knowledge and material adaptation. It had to be managed in anticipation of judgment. Clothing absorbed risk and discretion became essential to survival.

Still, women refined rather than abandoned their practices. They adapted their techniques and shifted their materials. Hybrid systems emerged as commercial products entered the market. Menstrual cloth lived on in private spaces while disposable options appeared in public ones.

What colonial systems dismissed as “primitive” was precise, responsive, and sustainable. Period fashion during this era functioned as survival under constraint rather than decoration.

Once external authority reshaped how menstruation was managed, respectability ensured they functioned as a social code that required Black women to appear composed, clean, and unaffected under all circumstances. The body was expected to remain seamless.

Across the diaspora, black women were expected to meet standards modeled after white womanhood that offered no support or provision, while being denied privacy, sanitation, livable wages, and safety. The standard was never adjusted or addressed. It shifted according to class, location, and proximity to power. Even compliance did not guarantee protection. And still, failure invited punishment. The female body would continue to be treated as something that should not reveal its processes.

Girls learned early that menstrual management carried reputational risk. Knowledge that had once been shared openly, narrowed. Silence became a learned form of protection. Clothing absorbed this pressure. Darker fabrics, additional layers, aprons, and conservative silhouettes continued to serve practical purposes, but they also became tools of social insulation. Apparel was used to prevent scrutiny. Menstrual care shifted further into concealment due to the real consequences of being seen.

Black women navigated this terrain with precision. They adapted dress codes. They shared knowledge discreetly. They learned how to move through public space while managing private realities. By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Black women reformers in North America began challenging the logic that bodily conformity equaled moral worth.

Figures such as Mary Church Terrell and Ida B. Wells disrupted the idea that Black women’s

bodies required constant discipline to deserve dignity. While their work did not center menstruation explicitly, it did dismantle the conditions that demanded erasure of menstrual self care.

Later Black feminism would name what respectability politics attempted to obscure which was that the body was never the problem. The problem was always the demand for the body’s invisibility.

We Adapted, We Advocated, Unapologetically

Adaptation was the first form of advocacy available to Black women. Across the diaspora, care did not disappear under restriction, it was refined. When materials were scarce, methods evolved. When visibility brought risk, discretion became a form of protection. When institutions offered no accommodation, Black women created solutions within the small spaces left to them. Menstrual care endured because the body still needed tending, whether or not the world acknowledged it.

Hybrid practices emerged quietly and stayed. Cloth remained central in private spaces where women controlled washing, time, and storage, while commercial products, when available, were used selectively in public settings shaped by scrutiny and cost. These choices reflected awareness, not uncertainty.

Innovation lived in the details. Cloth was folded to stay secure through long days of work and movement. Garments were adjusted for better fit, comfort, and discretion. Washing routines adapted to limited privacy and water. Knowledge passed through watching rather than instruction, as Black girls learned by observing Black women continue their lives of labor and professional care with steadiness and care.

When language finally caught up in the early to mid-twentieth century, these practices were named as bodily autonomy and reproductive justice. What followed was not a beginning, but a continuation. Advocacy grew from generations of quiet adaptation, carried forward once visibility and collective demand became possible.

Black Women, Unsilenced

Charlotte Maxeke (South Africa, active 1900s–1930s)

An early anti-apartheid activist and founder of the Bantu Women’s League, Maxeke organized against pass laws and labor exploitation that directly affected women’s bodily autonomy, movement and health. Her work addressed how surveillance and restriction shaped women’s daily bodily experiences, including care, rest, and visibility leading to collective resistance. Her activism laid the groundwork for future women-led anti-apartheid movements by asserting that bodily autonomy, mobility, and dignity were central to political freedom rather than secondary concerns.

Adelaide Casely-Hayford (Sierra Leone, active 1910s–1930s)

Adelaide Casely-Hayford founded the Girls’ Vocational School in Freetown, where African bodily knowledge, hygiene, and womanhood were taught while challenging the assumption that hygiene and womanhood required European correction, affirming body autonomy and dignity as a foundation for intellectual and social development. Her work helped legitimize African-centered education for girls, producing generations of women who understood their bodies through cultural knowledge rather than colonial shame

Amy Ashwood Garvey (Jamaica, active 1910s–1930s)

As a co-founder of the Universal Negro Improvement Association, Amy Ashwood Garvey centered Black women’s dignity, labor conditions, and bodily sovereignty within Pan-African politics. Operating independently of male leadership across international networks in Jamaica, London, and West Africa, she rejected Victorian morality imposed on Black women by affirming self-determination in education, labor, and intimate life.

Her work challenged the belief that women’s worth depended on sexual modesty or social restraint, helping sever the link between bodily discipline and racial progress. This ideological shift influenced later Pan-African and feminist movements that treated bodily autonomy, women’s health, and labor conditions as inseparable from political freedom.

Una Marson (Jamaica, active 1920s–1940s)

Marson confronted the silence surrounding women’s bodies, labor, and emotional life through her work as a poet, playwright, editor, and broadcaster. Writing openly about Black women’s internal worlds, she challenged colonial modesty standards that framed women’s bodily experience as shameful, forcing Black womanhood into silence. As one of the first Black women producers at the BBC, Marson used radio to amplify women’s voices and normalize conversations about work, health, and emotional strain, particularly among working-class women.

Marson’s work created a cultural shift in what could be spoken aloud. Her legacy helped expand the social space for Black women to articulate bodily experience unapologetically, laying groundwork for later feminist, labor, and health movements that treated women’s physical lives as worthy of public recognition rather than private shame.

Mary Beatrice Davidson Kenner (United States, active 1920s–1950s)

Davidson Kenner exemplifies how Black women translated embodied knowledge into formal design throughout the twentieth century. She developed an adjustable sanitary belt with a moisture-resistant pocket intended to secure absorbent material and prevent leakage during movement. The design addressed containment, mobility, and dignity, practical realities ignored by existing products and later rebranded as modern innovation. Her work functioned as sustained advocacy through engineering, challenging the expectation that women should quietly endure bodily discomfort, and that Black women in particular should never come to expect accommodation.

Kenner spent decades refining her design and seeking recognition before it was finally patented in 1957. Commercial interest died once her race became known, reflecting a broader pattern in which Black women’s viable solutions were dismissed or erased. Although her design was never widely manufactured, its principles anticipated later menstrual products promoted as breakthroughs.

Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti (Nigeria, active 1930s–1950s)

Ransome-Kuti was a central figure in women’s rights in colonial Nigeria, fighting for women’s political inclusion, access to education, and freedom from exploitative taxation. She explicitly linked women’s bodily autonomy to economic justice, challenging colonial governance that treated women’s bodies and labor as administrative burdens rather than lived realities. Ransome-Kuti’s organizing would lead to the abolition of unfair taxation on women in parts of southwestern Nigeria and helped establish women’s unions as legitimate civic forces, forcing colonial authorities to formally recognize women as political actors rather than subjects of control.

Maude Callen (United States, active 1930s–1960s)

Maude Callen devoted her life to caring for Black women across the rural American South at a time when formal medical systems routinely turned them away. Beginning in the early 1930s, she traveled long distances, often on foot, to reach women who had little to no access to doctors, hospitals, or reliable health information. Her work centered reproductive and menstrual health education, teaching hygiene, bodily awareness, and care in communities shaped by segregation, poverty, and isolation.

Despite the depth of her training and the essential nature of her work, Callen was paid as little as $7.50 per month in her early years, receiving compensation that barely sustained her while her labor sustained entire communities. Even as her reputation grew and her impact became undeniable, her work remained unevenly supported and chronically underpaid, dependent on small stipends and inconsistent funding. Her story reflects a broader pattern in which Black women’s healing labor was carried with devotion and skill, yet continually framed as charitable service rather than recognized as the professional care it truly was.

Lélia Gonzalez (Brazil, active 1960s–1980s, though other philosophies link her to earlier struggles)

Lélia Gonzalez wrote from inside the reality Black women were navigating rather than about it from a distance. She spoke plainly about how race, gender, and class shaped what happened to Black women’s bodies in Brazil, especially under public health campaigns and moral standards that claimed neutrality while targeting Afro-Brazilian women for discipline. Her work named what black women already knew in their bones: that cleanliness, civility, and citizenship were being used to police their bodies rather than protect them.

By putting words to experiences that had been normalized or ignored, Gonzalez made it harder for institutions to pretend these patterns did not exist. Her writing shifted feminist and anti-racist conversations in Brazil toward Black women’s actual lives, including health, labor, and bodily autonomy, rather than abstract ideals of equality. She helped shape Black feminist organizing that treated reproductive health, working conditions, and state violence as connected pressures rather than separate issues. In doing so, she helped move Black women’s bodily experiences from something privately endured into something publicly named and challenged.

Menstruation Art Piece by Jasmine Alicia Carter

She does not veil her sex with a shy hand.

She listens — to the fierce song of her desires.

She does not hide her belly with a soft hand.

She listens — to the deep, wild pulse of her womb.

Jasmine Alicia Carter

Sticking to The Rivers and the Lakes We Were Used To

Modern conversations around sustainability, reusable products, and body literacy often present these ideas as recent discoveries. In reality, they reflect practices Black women refined over centuries, during prolonged periods of deprivation, surveillance, and withheld support. What is now framed as innovation is inherited knowledge rooted in the value of autonomy.

Adaptation in this history is not a secondary response to oppression. It is the continuous assertion of bodily authority under conditions that sought, and for a time succeeded, in denying it. Black women did not wait for awareness campaigns to validate their needs. They built systems of care because survival demanded it. Advocacy followed because endurance alone was never the goal.

Menstruation became complex when women were forced to manage their bodies within systems designed to strip, destroy, and deny autonomy. Before products, policy, or respectability, menstrual care was shaped through lived experience. That knowledge did not disappear when power intervened. It was constrained, disciplined, and driven inward. What emerged was not ignorance, but intentional adaptation under pressure.

In time, Black women named menstrual equity, bodily autonomy, and reproductive justice, giving language to practices already in motion. What is now described as sustainable, empowering, or progressive reflects a lineage formed under restriction and deliberate deprivation, not ease.

This history matters because erasure continues to repackage the past without context or accountability, allowing oppressive systems to decide whose knowledge is credited, whose labor is dismissed, and whose resilience is romanticized. To advocate for menstrual dignity today requires honesty about where that dignity was first denied and recognition that Black women have always been managing, designing around, and defending their bodies in hostile conditions.

What is called progress today was built on what Black women were forced to survive without.