![]() ![]() ![]() How long did it take you to write The Red Tent? They may have had a purely “magical” function, or they may have helped laboring mothers keep their footing while squatting to deliver babies. There is some debate about what they were used for. Midwife’s bricks, which I found mentioned in various historic sources, were probably flat and certainly large enough to stand on. Whatever they were exactly, these bricks are nothing like the building materials we know today. The rendering of what happened inside the tent in the novel is entirely my own creation. However, menstrual tents and huts are a common feature in pre-modern cultures around the world, from native Americans, to Africans. I did not find any evidence that women in this period of history in what is now Iraq and Israel used a menstrual tent. ![]() Was there really a red tent in ancient times? ![]() As a visiting scholar of the Brandeis Hadassah Institute, I also had access to the Brandeis library system. I was the recipient of a library fellowship at Radcliffe College at the Schlesinger Library on the History of American Women, which permitted me access to the entire Harvard Library system. I consulted rabbinic sources very little and concentrated instead on the food, clothing, social organization, architecture, and medicine of the era –ca. My research focused on the everyday life of women in the ancient Near East. ![]()
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