Toward an Understanding of Women's Experience of Menstrual Cycle Symptoms

Menstruation has often been viewed as a “curse” to women (Delaney, Lupton, & Toth, 1976). The menstruating woman has been commonly thought of as unclean, impure, irrational, and even dangerous. Although much of women's suffering can be attributed to the stigma surrounding menstruation, women's claims of both unpleasant physical symptoms and psychological changes associated with the approach of menstruation have been documented by medical journals and in 1953 formally proposed as the premenstrual syndrome (Greene & Dalton, 1953).