The Emergence of Premenstrual Syndrome as a Social Problem

This paper focuses on published discourse as an element in the emergence of premenstrual syndrome (PMS) as a social problem in the early 1980s. A content analysis shows that PMS was defined in part as a social problem through the interaction of medical, popular, and feminist literature after the dramatic events of the British trials in which two women charged with manslaughter used PMS as a defense. The published discussions were shaped not only by these dramatic events but also by the cultural context in which women's roles and assumptions about the influence of women's biology were being redefined. The paper thus offers a way to understand social problems by tracing their emergence in the literature that shapes the definition of the problem and by identifying the influences of cultural context and dramatic events.