Adventures in Menstruating and Chart Your Cycle
This is the work of super innovative menstrual activist, Chella Quint (aided and abetted by her wife Sarah Thomasin) Quint publishes a truly fabulous zine (Adventures in Menstruation), runs a happenin’ blog and performs outrageous and politically devious sketch comedy. Not. To. Be. Missed.
Canadian Women’s Health Network
The definitive feminist voice on Canadian’s women’s health that anyone can learn from--- regardless of their geographic location.
Justisse Healthworks for Women: Fertility Awareness, Education, Natural Birth Control, and Holistic Reproductive Health
Run by Geraldine Matus and supported by an amazing staff of whipsmart health advocates, this group promotes the responsible and informed use of the Fertility Awareness Method (which is NOT, dear reader, the ‘rhythm method’). Justisee teaches body literacy and helps women take charge of their bodies and their health.
MOLT: The Museum of the Menovulatory Lifetime
MOLT’s founder Geneva Kachman, is a brilliant poet and artist and the brains behind Menstrual Monday (this year: May 3rd), a day designated to “create a sense of fun around menstruation.” Check out her line of fun favors for the big day (and any day).
Moon Magic Workshop on Puberty (free curriculum available for download)
Keval makes her alternative pubertal education curriculum available for free here. Alternative to what? Product Access and Consumption 101-- the industry-sponsored and promoting curriculum that dominates middle school health classes today.
Museum of Menstruation and Women’s Health
Want to know the history of the tampon or the menstrual cup? A compendium of menstrual humor? The various and sundry names for menstruation across time and space? Harry Finley’s online resource is a gold mine!
National Women’s Health Network
Since 1975, an independent critical voice on women’s health care access, options and innovations. Emerging women’s health care issue? Find out what the NWHN has to say!
Our Bodies Ourselves/The Boston Women’s Health Book Collective
Over the last 4 decades, this pioneering book has been adapted and/or translated 29 times reaching women in Nepal, Serbia, and Israel and more. And the BWHBC publishes topic-specific books on menopause and pregnancy and childbirth, too. But the BWHBC brings us more than books, it is a global women’s health movement that has been setting the high bar for feminist health education since the 1970s and just gets better and better!
Red Tent Temple Movement
Alisa Starkweather, women’s empowerment educator and visionary whose compassion and insight is bottomless. She has seeded the spread of Red Tents—community-created and sustained sacred spaces for women to honor themselves and each other. Her website lists Red Tents happening all over the US, Australia and Canada. ALisa also is the creator of the Belly and Womb Conference designed to get women back in touch with their bodies on a deep personal level.
Red Web Foundation
Originally inspired by the cutting edge work of Tamara Slayton who developed positive menarche education and ritual for girls, the Red Web is a network of people “dedicated to supporting a positive societal view of girls' and women's bodies and menstrual cycles, from first menstruation called menarche.” The range of activities of Red Webbers is stunning and inspiring and demonstrates just how interconnected the menstrual cycle is to so much else.
Scarleteen: Sex Ed for the Real World
The smartest, most honest source of sex education for teens and young adults out there. Genius Heather Corinna and her team of international volunteers about the issues that matter in a voice that makes sense. If only all health and sexuality resources were so damn good……
Society for Menstrual Cycle Research
I am on the board of this one-of-kind scholarly and activist organization and contribute to the blog re:Cycling, so I am biased, admittedly. But I dare you to find a network of people anywhere who collectively know more about the complexities of the menstrual cycle from virtually every disciplinary perspective. Here, biomedical research meets pop cultural analyses and joins up with psychological assessments. Artists inform ethnographers, ritualists challenge nurses and so it goes. Check out SMCR’s position statements on hormone therapy and cycle-stopping contraception (menstrual suppression drugs like Lybrel and Seasonique) if you want to know what the research does and does NOT say from people who aren’t on corporate payrolls.
Student Environmental Action Coalition
Back in the day, SEAC ran a boldly inventive Tampaction campaign that spread menstrual politics across US college campuses. Can you find a Diva Cup in your campus bookstore or a box of organic all cotton tampons? You might need to thank your local SEAC group for that. The campaign is taking a rest now, but SEAC continues to work on related campaigns and train progressive, environmental justice activists. Keep your eye on them!
