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Rejecting Shame to Reclaim the Power of the Period
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When Radha Paudel was 7 years old, she started noticing something strange: Every few weeks, her mother had separate plates to eat off, separate clothes to wear, and a separate place to sleep. She wasn’t allowed to enter the kitchen and couldn’t participate in any social, religious, or cultural activities.
The little girl approached her mother, who told her that she was menstruating. She said menstrual blood was dirty, and that menstruation was a curse from God. Paudel was so traumatized by witnessing these restrictive monthly practices that she begged God to turn her into a boy. When that didn’t happen, at 9 years old, she attempted suicide, and survived.
When Paudel’s first menstruation arrived at age 14, rather than be forced to follow the restrictions surrounding the idea of menstruation being unclean, she ran away from home.
It was only when she started attending nursing college the next year that Paudel learned that menstrual blood is a natural part of the body. She realized that the menstrual discrimination that she, her mother, and her three sisters experienced was widespread in Nepal. It affected both rural and urban menstruators, rich or poor.
As Paudel later learned in her career as a nurse, activist, and writer, many of her educated friends and colleagues who lived in the capital, Kathmandu, still practiced menstrual restrictions because of the fear of elders, religion, culture, traditions, or societal pressures.
“Menstrual discrimination plays a huge role in constructing and reinforcing unequal power relations and patriarchy,” says Paudel, who has since pioneered the movement for dignified menstruation and founded the Global South Coalition for Dignified Menstruation.
Seclusion and Secrecy
Menstrual discrimination takes many different forms. In many South Asian countries, women are told they shouldn’t cook, visit sacred temples, or touch or go near plants. In Democratic Republic of Congo, menstruating women are told that if they work in the field the whole harvest will be destroyed. In some communities in Pakistan, women are told not to consume cold beverages, ice cream, fish, meat, milk, eggs, or pickles.
In addition to these restrictions, there are also widespread myths about menstruation that are harmful for the physical and mental health of those who menstruate.
When Pacifique Doriane-Sognonvi started bleeding for the first time at 14 years old, she saw the drops of blood slowly trickling down her thighs and thought that she must have hurt herself somehow. She had never heard the word “period” before and didn’t know what to do. Doriane-Sognonvi went to her older sister for advice, who informed their father, and together they cut up pieces of clothes and stuffed them in her underwear.
Then her father turned to her with a stern look on his face and proclaimed: “If you come close to a boy and touch him or if he touches you while you are bleeding, you will become pregnant.”
Puzzled and still feeling uncomfortable from the itching fabric, she accepted her father’s words as truth. It was only at 21 years old, when Doriane-Sognonvi left home and started university, that she learned that her father’s warning was untrue.
“When I found out that it was a lie, I was horrified and super angry,” says Doriane-Sognonvi, who now works as a peer educator for the nonprofit Afro Benin. She organizes workshops about menstrual hygiene and sexual and reproductive health for the LGBTQ community in Ivory Coast.
Without proper and accurate information, menstruators cannot make informed decisions about their bodies and lives, and they become susceptible to misinformation.
The problem often comes down to one simple fact: The period is considered dirty, and menstruating women are either forced to stay secluded or keep it a secret. This builds fear, stigma, and silence about menstruation—at home, at school, at work, and in public.
“In Ivory Coast, menstruation is viewed as a handicap or an illness,” Doriane-Sognonvi says.
The stigmatization and lack of awareness feeds into an ignorance of menstruation as an issue of public health importance. Globally, 500 million people lack access to menstrual products and adequate facilities for menstrual hygiene management.
“Many girls in rural areas have never seen a pad in their whole life,” says Crispine Ngena, a reproductive and climate justice activist from Democratic Republic of Congo, who is helping communities displaced after volcanic eruptions and military interventions in eastern Congo. “Access to period products just doesn’t exist here.”
Recognizing Discrimination
For a long time, Paudel didn’t think there was hope for menstruating people. All she could see was pain, trauma, and suffering. Despite isolation and even death threats, she has dedicated her life to changing the way societies see menstruation.
Paudel spearheaded a global movement for dignified menstruation, which she defines as “a state where menstruators of all identities are free from any forms of menstrual discrimination, including taboos, shyness, stigma, abuse, violence, restrictions, and deprivation from services and resources associated with menstruation throughout the life cycle of menstruators.”
The main goal of the Global South Coalition for Dignified Menstruation is to ensure that international organizations and countries recognize that menstrual discrimination plays a key role in constructing and shaping unequal power relations and patriarchy, starting in childhood.
“More than half of the population of this planet experiences menstrual discrimination in one way or another, but the United Nations has never recognized that,” Paudel says.
That’s why she has been pushing the United Nations to acknowledge menstrual discrimination as a barrier to gender equality and as a form of sexual and gender-based violence. She has presented her work to the Commission on the Status of Women four times and submitted a petition to the UN in 2019.
Menstrual discrimination violates individuals’ rights to dignity, freedom, and equality. It also denies (or severely complicates) their access to food and water, and can dramatically increase health risks due to the delay or denial of care.
Paudel has been consulting with governments to include dignified menstruation in national policies. Nepal has had a dignified menstruation policy since 2017. If anyone reports any form of menstrual discrimination, it is considered a social crime. By law, the perpetrator can be punished with up to three months in jail and/or a $30 bail. Paudel has been providing technical input to menstrual equity policies and research for other countries in the Global South.
Paudel has also been teaching about menstruation at universities and high schools worldwide, mentoring Ph.D. fellows internationally, and writing fiction and nonfiction books on dignified menstruation. For her, menstruation dignity is the way to achieve equality, dismantle patriarchy, achieve sustainable development goals, and reimagine feminism.
Paudel is often met with hostility, abuse, and blame from Nepalese and international organizations who accuse her of being anti-Hindu, negativist, and anti-tradition.
“I don’t mind,” Paudel says. “I will never give up. I will do this whether people support me or not, till my last breath.”
Conversations As a Gateway
But even without a war or a climate disaster, getting a pad or tampon can be an insurmountable task. In the United States, one in four students have struggled to afford period products. This so-called period poverty—in which low-income menstruators cannot afford menstrual products—can be a one-time experience or a permanent state.
After reading Period Power: A Manifesto for the Menstrual Movement by Nadya Okamoto, Aydan Garland-Miner realized that period poverty intersected with multiple issues of injustice that she was already passionate about. She launched a chapter of the menstrual equity nonprofit PERIOD at her university and distributed period products, advocated for menstrual equity legislation in Washington state, and hosted educational workshops for students.
Now she works as the global community engagement coordinator at PERIOD, which annually distributes millions of menstrual products to grassroots organizations who are serving their communities. PERIOD has 180 chapters in the United States and 34 internationally.
Talking about menstruation is not celebrated or popular, but Garland-Miner strongly believes it has to be done. “You don’t have to be giving a formal talk about menstruation, but you can talk to anyone and everyone about the fact that period poverty exists. The uncomfortable conversations are the ones that we should be having the most,” she says.
Considerable progress has been made in the past few years in the U.S. In 2023, there were more than 130 menstrual equity-related pieces of legislation introduced across the nation.
In 2021, Oregon passed the Menstrual Dignity Act, which expanded period health education in the school curriculum and provides free menstrual products for all menstruating students in public schools. Oregon is one of 10 states that both require and fund period supplies. Eleven states require period products in schools but don’t provide the funding for them. And seven states provide funding but don’t require period products in schools.
Advocates are also working on eliminating something called the “tampon tax,” which deems menstrual products to be luxury items. This tax is on the books in 21 U.S. states, making period products even more expensive and less accessible to low-income people.
“By removing the sales tax on menstrual products, we are recognizing that these items are essential items for health,” says Garland-Miner. “Eliminating the tax won’t end period poverty, but it does help identify the products as the medical necessities they are.”
Making Periods Safer
In the Democratic Republic of Congo, menstrual health doesn’t only mean period products but also access to water, which is a huge challenge in communities where Crispine Ngena works.
In the North Kivu province, access to water sources is limited. People mainly rely on rainwater, which, due to climate change, has become irregular. People have to buy 20-liter (5-gallon) jugs of water that cost U.S. $0.17—a major expense when the majority of Congolese live on less than $2.15 a day. With water being scarce and underwear a luxury item, menstruation is hard to manage and many bleeding people suffer from infections and rashes.
That is why Ngena’s nonprofit, Actions for the Conservation of Nature and Community Development (ACNDC), has been distributing reusable pads, water buckets, soaps, and underwear to different communities. They have been working with groups of girls who were displaced after the volcanic eruption of Mount Nyiragongo in 2021 and also with girls who had to move to camps due to the ongoing military conflict in Congo since 2023. For most of these girls in rural areas, it was the first time that they have seen a pad or worn underwear.
Ngena is a firm believer that access to period products should be easy and free for everyone. Without them, girls stay at home, do not go to school, and cannot work or go to religious ceremonies. She says introducing comprehensive sexual education courses at school would help break the stigma around menstruation.
“With proper education, girls would learn how to manage their menstruation safely,” says Ngena.
Gender-Responsive Disaster Relief
Educating people about menstrual health is also a priority for Ayesha Amin, a Pakistani women’s and climate justice activist. Amin’s nonprofit, Baithak: Challenging Taboos, has been conducting sessions to educate both women and men about different aspects of menstrual health.
Amin says the most common myth in Pakistan is that women should not bathe during their period because it will lead to infertility. To counter this and other misinformation, Amin and her peer educators speak about physiological, hormonal, physical, and emotional changes, as well as premenstrual syndrome, premenstrual dysphoric disorder, nutrition, managing stress and pain, hygiene, and sanitation. Over the past five years, they have reached 300,000 girls and women with sessions on menstrual health as well as family planning and gender-based violence across Pakistan.
In 2022, Pakistan was hit by one of the worst climate disasters in the country’s history. The floods affected 33 million people, of which 8 million were girls and women of reproductive age.
“We saw young girls and women having urinary infections because they didn’t have any menstrual products. They used leaves, ragged clothes, and were not able to change menstrual cloth for an entire day,” Amin says.
During this climate disaster, Baithak set up a flood response to provide menstrual kits to women and girls who were worst affected by the floods. Soon, they received requests from other parts of the country, so they expanded their program.
Together with the Pakistani government, the nonprofit is building the capacity of grassroots organizations so they can work with their local governments to ensure that climate crisis responses are gender responsive. They are also building the capacity of disaster management authorities in Pakistan to ensure that the needs of menstruating people are prioritized in case of climate emergencies.
While fundraising for menstrual products, Amin has received both positive and negative reactions. “There was a whole Twitter campaign saying that ‘If you are giving pads to women, also send shaving kits to men.’ This really struck me. Women don’t choose to menstruate during a climate disaster,” Amin says.
Making Menstruation Positive
Menstruation is a taboo in so many societies. But it doesn’t have to be. With the right education—at home, at school, and in the halls of government—menstruation can be seen as the natural part of life it is.
“If we want the menstrual cycle to have a place in all discussions—from being listed in the Declaration of Human Rights to pharmaceutical testing, from employment law and work practice to educational approach and exams—we need to ask the question, ‘How does this situation disadvantage cyclic women?’” says Miranda Gray, a British author of books on menstrual wisdom for modern women.
“For society to have a positive image of the menstrual cycle, and for it to be part of discussions, women themselves first need to have a positive view of their own cycle.”
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Veronika Perková
is an environmental journalist, author of the guidebook: Ask Great Questions, Get Great Answers, and host of the Nature Solutionaries podcast. In a recent episode, Veronika talked to Sara Inés Lara and Catriona Spaven-Donn about the importance of connecting the dots between conservation, family planning, and women’s empowerment. She is a member of SEJ and can be contacted through her website.
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