What did women use in the past instead of pads or tampons?
My mother and ma-in-law only had rags sewn into a pad shape when they were young, and loved disposable pads when they came in. In earlier times women in the West attached the rag pads to their underskirts as panties didn’t come in until quite recently in history. As one of the others said, women had far fewer periods, and much lighter ones, due to diet, pregnancy and breast-feeding. In aboriginal societies, living much as the Stone Age people did (as hunter-gatherers) they will probably only have 20-30 periods in an adult life-time (which includes much earlier death). A Nigerian friend of mine said that when she was young they used to collect material off plants similar to cotton to insert.
