1300s-1600s
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Put plainly, thin and tall girls menstruate later than their heavier, stronger counterparts. This remains true regardless of which time period you look at, but perhaps especially during the Renaissance, when class disparities were stark. One anecdote from Tuscany during this time explained that girls were allowed to marry at age 12, “provided they were pubere,” which implied that marriage was not to precede menarche.
This would also seem to indicate that the better-fed upperclass women would start families much sooner than their lower-class counterparts, perhaps having their first child before a similar-aged girl of a lower socioeconomic status would have even begun to menstruate.
Victorian/Edwardian Era
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It was around this time that the average menarche age began to fall — a trend that would continue through the 20th century to the present. Wealthy women coming of age in the Victorian era were mostly kept delicate — think corsets and sedentary, indoor lifestyles — while lower class women endured backbreaking factory or service work.
The American Gynecological Association reports that the age differences for menarche during this era were profoundly classist: indeed, there was at least a year’s difference in menarche between upper and lower class girls (13.5 for upper, 14.5 for lower) which would imply that nutrition still played a significant role in menarche age.
The Victorian era was difficult for women in general, let alone menstruating women. Periods were pathologized to the point where “hysteria” became a legitimate diagnosis for a myriad of women’s troubles, both physical and psychological.
Medical literature — largely produced by men — obsessed over women’s bodies during this time, particularly the vulgarity of menstruation. One such physician, William Buchan, relegated women’s health entirely to domestic matters, suggesting that it wasn’t a legitimate health discipline. This thinking perhaps helps explain why it wasn’t uncommon for the man of the house to monitor a woman’s menses instead of a doctor.
