Possibly a bit of an odd one.
I read an article today about a woman who ran the London marathon this year using no sanitary protection. What started out as a concern of comfort became, for her, a demonstration of solidarity of with women with no access to feminine products.
It got me thinking, what did women in the 1800s do about this, and other aspects of personal care which women today have easy access to solutions for?
I've tried online and can't find much/much that seems trustworthy. I was wondering about things like
periods; how did they alleviate the symptoms (pain, bloating when wearing restrictive corsets etc), how did they keep themselves (and their clothes) clean? Victorian hygiene habits are not like ours, how did they adapt these during that time?
pregnancy; by extension of the above, before modern solutions were available how did they know when their babies would be due? What did they know of the process and such? I recall reading about an American woman's diary which was found and it had marks which basically indicated against the days she was intimate with her husband and when her periods were so she could track when she was pregnant and a rough idea of when conception took place. Did Victorian women do something similar?
contraception; I know larger families were common, but for those who no longer wanted to expand the family, what options were there, if any, beyond abstinence?
body hair maintenance/removal; I'm assuming they didn't have shaving products like men would have, did they practice sugar waxing like in egypt or a variant of it? Was it considered attractive or an expectation of a mans that your wife would have hair on her underarms/legs? Both are pretty taboo now, was this the case then?
Any further details gratefully appreciated of course, I'm just curious as to how the day to day lives of women in the 1800s would have been to now without the modern conveniences and technologies we have.
Edit: formatting
periods
19th century women used a system that was in place through the middle of the 20th century - that of a belt with suspenders in front and back to hold up a long, thin sanitary napkin. Ruth Goodman describes extant napkins as washable "slim cotton bags" that held disposable rags or padding. The belt was necessary due not only to the lack of adhesives but the shape of women's drawers, which were sometimes separate legs sewn to a waistband, and even "closed drawers" with a crotch seam were baggy and not able to hold a napkin in place.
There's not much information on what Victorian women did for cramps; some may not have wanted to admit that they had them, due to late Victorian medical beliefs about menstrual problems (one surgeon believed girls with cramps should be removed from school for six months; there were still superstitions about menstruating women being unclean). A woman with some amount of leisure could easily say, "I'm ill, I need to stay in bed today," and avoid having to get dressed. Many regular corseters today report that wearing a corset helps their cramps, however - but unfortunately, no scientific studies have been done on the subject.
pregnancy
Dr. Pye Chavasse gave a list of pregnancy symptoms in the middle of the 19th century, with the number of weeks/months when each phase would occur, so if you suddenly started having morning sickness you could be aware that you were a few weeks in, and so on. He reported that healthy married women could and did perform their "calculations" just based on their periods stopping, and come out as expected. (You can read the 1880 edition of Wife and Mother online.) Many modern sources critique this method as imprecise and say that a woman would have had to wait five months, until she started showing, to be certain, but that seems to be taking a pretty dim view of the women involved, who would have female relatives and friends who'd been through it and generally had multiple pregnancies themselves. There were better methods involving close examinations of the genitalia, but they were suppressed for decades as being too indelicate - even listening to the fetal heartbeat (discovered in 1822) was considered indecent.
contraception
Abortions were more common than many today like to think. They were regarded as infanticide legally and very dangerous, but there's evidence that many women visited abortionists or used home remedies. Estimates of the number of abortions and even the rate of change in those numbers (that is, that they increased as the century went on) are sometimes criticized, but it's generally taken that abortion was more common than infanticide. Pulling out was another method of family planning that was widespread, and there's evidence of women using douches or prolonging breastfeeding in order to put off pregnancy.
body hair
This one's not as well documented. The standard answer is that women didn't start to shave under the arms until 1915, when the earliest known ad for a woman's razor came out, and their legs until the 1940s, but I'm not satisfied with the evidence. This answer is more about the 20th century, but as I point out there - painted and photographed nudes were generally shaved, so it's difficult to say how much that penetrated into general consciousness.