You are 13 years old. Your family is poor. Each month you have to take a week off school. In a few months you are so behind in your school work that you drop out for ever. You live in an African country, in India, in the Australian outback...in Leeds.
You are 14 years old, and you live in a village in Nepal. Each month you are shut up in a hut for a week and left to yourself. It is cold. You light a fire and die of smoke asphyxiation.
You are a British teenager thrilled to be at Glastonbury. Your period comes on early. Your only pair of trousers is stained with the blood which is running down your legs. You wade through the mud to queue in the rain outside a toilet block. The vending machine is jammed with a counterfeit coin.
The evil eye
Throughout history menstruation has been regarded with suspicion. Bread made by menstruating women won’t rise, crops will shrivel, men will be defiled by the evil eye. Prejudice is institutionalised. Menstruating women are feared and are sequestered from social and religious activities and from the marital bed till they are ‘clean’ again.
Sanpro
Since sanitary pads were introduced after the first World War, ‘sanpro’ has grown into an industry worth billions of dollars: a disposable product with a massive potential market. It could make life easier for half the world’s population for 3000 weeks of their existence. But poor women cannot afford it; only 10% of Indian women use sanitary protection. Worldwide, millions of women rely on rags or leaves or ashes or newspaper. These are ineffective, uncomfortable, they fall out, and they promote infections.
Dignity
Decent sanitary protection provides dignity. It liberates women to complete their education, to work and socialise in confidence. But only if their society, their menfolk, permit them access to information. A BBC reporter, being patted down on entry to Egypt, was found to have a strange object in her jeans pocket. What was it? Egyptian Arabic doesn’t have the vocabulary to explain what a tampon is. Eventually, after all the tampons in the box in her luggage had been scanned, she was permitted to enter Egypt, and the security woman asked in a whisper whether these items were available in Cairo. Yes, in a few places, the reporter replied, and gave her the instruction leaflet. A small victory for liberation.
Programmes for donating sanitary products to schools, prisons, food banks (where they are more in demand than baked beans) and to the poor and homeless the world over are admirable, but they don’t address all the problems and they aren’t a sustainable solution. Also required are adequate water supplies, soap, privacy, disposal facilities and understanding. If you are transgender, unisex toilets may be helpful, but they make managing periods more difficult for another, much larger, section of society. And commercial products are made with plastic, and with cotton which requires huge quantities of water to grow. They take centuries to break down in landfill. They contain potentially irritant chemicals. They have to be distributed over long distances.
What is the answer? Reusable pads and silicone cups are catching on because women are spreading the word, but they can still be costly and they require cleaning and drying. In a close-knit society, who is going to hang out their pads to dry in the public gaze?
Global entrepreneurs
There are inspiring examples of locally made answers. Saathi, a woman-led company in Gujarat, makes disposable pads from banana fibres, a fully environmental and sustainable process. In Malawi, Trinitas Mhango Kunashe founded a social enterprise which makes reusable pads. In Tamil Nadu, Jayaashree Industries is the result of a five-year struggle by an uneducated villager to produce affordable sanitary protection. His wife, mother and society disowned him out of shame, but he finally invented a simple machine to make pads from local materia...
