The Tampon Taboo

Sign in Indonesia, Source: Flikr Creative Commons

For girls everywhere menstruation is a rite of passage. Menstruation is a healthy, normal bodily function that affects half of our population -- the overwhelming majority of our women, at some point in time. But for too many girls worldwide this shared experience is a source of shame, restriction and if badly managed -- illness. Menstruation is an age-old phenomenon and across the developed world we’ve built awareness, products and systems to manage menstrual hygiene to enable women to live their lives seamlessly. Even with such support we can still argue that menstruation is something we’d rather not talk about in the developed world  -- but in the developing world, the stigma around menstruation has led to an invisibility around it that can really hold our girls and women back.

According to the Geneva-based Water Supply & Sanitation Collaborative Council (WSSCC), even sectors such as water and sanitation which “routinely deal with unmentionables such as excreta, ignore girl’s and women’s need for safe spaces to manage menstrual hygiene and mechanisms for safe disposal of materials used to absorb menstrual blood.” As we all know, ignoring a problem -- or menstruation -- does not make it go away. NGO Plan International and A C Nielsen conducted a study and estimated that there are 355 million menstruating women in India -- but only 12% of them use sanitary napkins. The study even found that 23% of Indian girls drop out of school after reaching puberty, with irreversible effects on their health, well-being and participation in society. Millions of girls and women instead rely on old rags, dried leaves and grass, ash, sand or newspaper to manage their monthly menstrual flows -- shrouded by shame and disgust on a vital bodily function.

Columbia University,  Millennium Promise and the social enterprise, Be Girl also hosted pilots for menstrual hygiene products and one of their participants, Patience, a 15-year-old girl from Ruhiira, Uganda told them “you suffer a lot; in case you stamp [stain] the boys can make fun of you which causes you to lose your self-esteem […] it’s embarrassing when you are washing your soiled clothes. It makes you not even want to go to school.” The washing of stained rags or clothing can also bring shame, especially in areas of water scarcity. Be Girl reports that in rural Africa, 40% of school girls miss up to 5 school days a month, or 30% of the school year. WaterAid found that 82% of their surveyed girls in Malawi did now know about menstruation before it started; girls across their surveyed countries were found to be excluded from water sources during menstruation, and even prohibited from washing and bathing in some communities making what is often a difficult week even more difficult to bear.

Source: WaterAid

Given the success of feminine hygiene and menstruation products, and the important role it has played in women's empowerment history, it would appear that the private sector could have significant market opportunity if they can break this taboo for women and girls -- who are expected to require the products for more tham 50 years. Sanitary products must be designed to be affordable; disposable tampons and sanitary towels are often priced out of reach of low- and even middle-income families if supply is scarce. Euromonitor International found that women in India, with average earnings of US $750 per annum earns below the $1,000 per annum deemed necessary to easily purchase disposable menstruation products. Moreover, systems to support menstrual hygiene are necessary, products alone aren’t the solution: appropriately designed and managed community spaces and importantly education on female reproductive health.

To make this happen, WSSCC believes that breaking the silence around the taboo of menstruation is a crucial first step. Girls should be informed and encouraged to talk and discuss menstruation in an informed and positive manner to prepare them emotionally and physically for the onset of menstruation and their monthly menstrual periods. Families need the education to support their girls and women. WaterAid has also compiled a phenomenal guide, Menstrual Hygiene Matters, with nine modules and tool kits -- an essential resource -- to improve menstrual hygienic for women and girls in lower and middle-income countries.

WaterAid found that well designed and appropriate water, sanitation and hygiene facilities that address menstrual hygiene can make a significant difference to the schooling experience of adolescent girls
(Photo: WaterAid/ASM Shafiqur Rahman) 

As WSSCC spokesperson, Archana Patkar,  powerfully argues: “Women are the progenitors of the human race […] Menstruation is therefore something of which they can and should be proud, so each and every one of us should work to improve the lives and life chances for women who do not have access to clean materials, water and safe disposal facilities; who cannot talk about their experiences; or are never asked if they can help define a solution.”

A Year of "Shoveling"

The Museum of Contemporary Art of Chicago

Recently, I visited the Museum of Contemporary Art of Chicago for an exhibit, The Way of Shovel: Art as Archaeology. The show offers various artists’ creative takes and appropriations on subject of archaeology. The exhibit peaks my interest because of the concept of crossover of art, archaeology, and educational inquiry. It includes audio recordings of our own curator at the Oriental Institute, where I currently work, discussing interpretations of the “real” archaeologist on the selected topics brought up in the exhibit. What was most fascinating to me is how contemporary artists have taken archaeology as a metaphor and method of inquiry on issues relating to philosophy, politics, and activism. At the beginning of 2014, I want to use this exhibit to reflect upon what I have learned from the field of archaeology as a museum educator in the past year.

The earlier stages of the archeological process involve pre-field investigation, survey, and excavation. In The Way of Shovel exhibit, one of the artists, Derek Brunen, created a three-part installation, Plot (Tombstone 2013), which was presented in video, showing the artist digging his own grave in a cemetery located in his hometown. The artist uses the tool – the shovel – as a metaphor in engaging greater philosophical questions about the meaning of life, death, labor, fate, and the relationship between self and the world. When seeing the video of the artist’s performative, repetitive, and meditative movements of digging, I thought of it as a manifestation of life as a perpetual process of learning and making connection with our world. We learn through questioning, doing,  and digging deeper, then repeating this.

Michael Rakowitz, The Invisible Enemy Should Not Exist, 2013.
The Museum of Contemporary Art.

 

In the other room, Michael Rakowitz’s The Invisible Enemy Should Not Exist is a collection of re-created sculptural statues made of Middle Eastern product packaging materials. These objects represent the lost artifacts due to the US-Iraq war in 2003. The artist’s work delivers ironies through the idea of opposites – through the playfulness of the images of the materials used, it reinforces the seriousness of the political-diplomatic issues that were being dealt with; and through the use of modern packaging materials on the objects, it also reminded me of the vulnerability of the world ancient cultural heritage in light of warfare.

In 2013, I had written two posts relating my exploration of archaeology: From Art to Archaeology and  Encountering a Mover-Shaker: Gertrude Bell. In this new year, I look forward to sharing more on my journey exploring the archaeology – perhaps like the archaeologists exploring and excavating their field, and maybe like the artists “shoveling” our history. As a museum educator, our museum collection will be my fieldwork where I can discover ways to engage our audience such as families, students, teachers, and the public, and help facilitate your inquiries about our history.

Why Women Still Want Children

Image credit: familiesfromwithin.wordpress.com

Most scholars claim that an increase in education lowers the number of desired children and the actual number of children that a woman will have in her reproductive life. I completely concur with this argument but what worries me is that research in the area of fertility trends mainly focuses on the reasons why fertility declines and neglects the factors driving the need to have children. While it is crucial that a family focuses on the quality rather than the quantity of children in the modern day, I still still think it highly important to discuss why educated women want to have children.

The factors that drove the need to have children in the past differ significantly from the factors that drive women to want children now. The family’s need for children as a form of labor was predominant in communities that relied on subsistence agriculture for sustenance. This meant that a family would have a large number of children who would help with chores at the farm. Instrumental value of children was highly regarded in such cases. More children meant more labor on the farm hence higher productivity. The need for gender division of labor within the farm household also drove families to have more children so that they could divide chores between sons and daughters.  

Flow of wealth was assumed to move from the children to the parents in the past. Children were viewed as a "pension scheme" that would provide support and security for the parents in old age. As a result of this conception, parents had more children so that they could maximize on their returns in old age. There were uncertainties on how each child would turn out in the success ladder and this made parents cast their investment nets wider by having more children so that the weaknesses exhibited by the children who failed could be covered up by the children who turned out successful.

High fertility was also triggered by societal expectations. The belief that there was a standard age at which women were expected to marry lowered the age at first marriage for most women. This implied that the amount of time that women would be exposed to reproduction increased significantly and with limited or no contraception at all, fertility rates increased.

Cultural beliefs that placed more value on sons compared to daughters also played a role in increasing fertility rates. In some societies, sons were valued for inheritance and for carrying forward the clan name. This meant that if a woman was to have five daughters, she would continue to bear children until she got a son, thereby raising the fertility levels.

Availability of fewer contraceptive methods meant a heavy reliance on natural fertility regulation methods. These methods relied solely on postpartum infecundability, length of breast-feeding, and the use of the withdrawal method for postponing conception and pregnancy. At that time, abortion and contraception were not yet adopted as contraceptive methods. This meant that fertility increased unchecked.

High fertility rates were also fueled by some religious practices that did not allow contraception. As a result of a huge devotion to religion, some individuals had many children, which also implies increases in fertility rates.

Most women got married at younger ages in the past because they did not have an education and a career to pursue. Marriage was seen as a necessary life event and society expected the couple to start having children soon after marriage. This increased the time that a woman would be exposed to a sexual life in which her chances to bear children were higher and it increased fertility rates.

Image credit: missescargotpudding.tumblr.com

Most of the reasons that made women have many children in the past no longer apply today because of westernization, modernity, new and improved contraceptive methods, and high levels of education but most women still desire to have children in their lives. It is almost every educated woman's dream to get married and have children one day.

I think that for a woman who is highly educated and who has a well developed career, the desire to have children can be described as a yearning to reach a self-actualization stage. I say this because increasingly most educated women have a fulfilling career and they wish to have children so that they can leave behind their offspring. I have interacted with some women who vow to have a child even outside wedlock as opposed to their values because they just want to have children of their own.

Marriage: Which Voice Should a Woman Listen to?

As a woman, one is always told that they should be able to multitask. I must say that I know many women who have been able to carry out this order with no hustle. Sometimes though, there are many voices that keep on talking to women at different stages of life that they cannot seem to balance at the same time. The voices all speak to them in different tones all at once and they never give them peace. Culture, education, and religion all speak to women and give them advice about marriage and sexual reproductive health, but women don’t know which voice to listen to anymore. They are just weary of all these voices.

Image credit: ewehoo.blogspot.com

As young girls, perhaps they were told to be submissive to their husbands. Their aunts and all their female relatives who took on the role of advising them sang the same song to them. Growing up in societies that followed cultural beliefs closely, the girls were trained to be good wives. This was a normal custom in such societies and all girls had to embrace these beliefs and some pre-marriage rituals.

These rituals involved pulling the clitoris to elongate them so that they could satisfy their husbands when they came of marriage age. They were told that a woman’s ability to satisfy her husband in bed would assure her a long and gratifying marriage. Looking back, I think this seems like some absurd custom that young girls were exposed to. How could a tiny part of the woman’s body that the man could not even see when he asked her hand in marriage be the determining factor for a marriage to work? At this age the girls had no right to question their elder’s orders, they just had to obey and wait patiently to reap the results of their obedience in marriage.

Contrary to the lessons of culture, education tells women that they are equal to their male counterparts. They are now enlightened to ask questions like: If I pull my clitoris and elongate them to satisfy my husband in bed, what will my husband do that will change him physically to satisfy me in bed as well. No one from the cultural realm seems to know the answer to this question as they keep on hushing the girl’s questions with the gospel of submission.

Then, there are girls who have been educated that love is shared between two people without the need to change who you are. They have read textbooks and novels all with literature in which women from all walks of life got married and lived happily ever after despite their physical appearance. They have read of the ill effects of female genital mutilation as they have come to know the cultural practices that they were subjected to. They only wish they had not listened to the culture voice as it advised them on marriage.

Education has unshackled these women from the chains of culture and told them to be autonomous. They have gained financial independence that makes them equal partners in marriage. Their husbands are scared of such achievements that they never dreamt to occur to their life partners. When the husbands were boys they were told to take pride in protecting, providing, and professing their love to their wives. One way to profess this love was to beat their wives. Women were also told to take pride in being beaten because they were misled to believe that a beating meant that your husband loved you. The love lay in the fact that he could come back and comfort you after the beating.

Being emancipated by education, some women no longer take any beating as a sign of love. It is an absolute sign of abuse. Most women will not allow any beating to start at all. If ever a beating sees light in a marriage, most women now know legal recourse to take against these marital matters that a husband would have thought to be mightier than a discussion to warrant a beating. Where is the line drawn then between culture and education that will make a woman maintain her marriage?

Virginity, Teen Pregnancy, and Scholarship

School girls in Sierra Leone

Bo, Sierra Leone's second largest city has started a new scholarship program to keep girls in school. The only catch...they must remain virgins through their educational career to keep the scholarship. City councilman Mathew Margao said the scholarship will ensure that “80 percent of school going girls keep their virginity until they finish their educational life”. Margao added that, “the council will hire female medical personnel who would prove the authenticity of the girls virginity”. The council started the scholarship in response to a reported rise in teenage pregnancy from the Ministry of Gender and Social Welfare. There were 500 reported secondary school pregnancies in Kailahun a town to the east of Bo.

Pregnant teens in Sierra Leone face greater risks at childbirth. They accounted for 40 percent of all maternal deaths in 2008. Family planning experts say that sex education and contraceptive use do more to reduce unplanned pregnancies amongst teens. But in Sierra Leone where 70 percent of pregnant teens are already married one might argue that these pregnancies are planned. Even the youngest teens in Sierra Leone sometimes look forward to becoming mothers. They are unaware of the risks they might face during childbirth or the possible neonatal affects on the baby. Those teenage moms who do survive the ordeal of losing a baby are sometimes eager to try again. Our culture tells us that losing a baby at birth is either God’s will or caused by witchcraft.

Many parents sometimes encourage older, wealthier suitors for their teenage daughters. This is not to say that young girls don’t date boys their own age. But many young women , especially from low income single parent households are encouraged to find men who will provide for them financially.

While the idea that the government in Bo believes it lawful to violate the bodies of young women with its virgin scholarship is problematic, the real question of how to effectively combat teen pregnancy in Sierra Leone still remains.

When the powers that be conceived 'free healthcare for expecting mothers and children under 5', it was simply to fight the nation's discouraging maternal mortality rates. It was not a holistic women’s reproductive health policy to address all aspects of women’s health. Sierra Leone’s private and public health systems have yet to adequately address the issue of teenage pregnancy so politicians in places like Bo have to find their own solutions.

The most ostentatious efforts to target teenage pregnancy by NGOs or the Ministry of Health are limited to outdated bill boards warning girls to refrain from getting pregnant least they become drop outs with no opportunities. The health NGOs and the public health system refuse to acknowledge that teenage girls in Sierra Leone will discover  and experiment with their sexuality much like girls all over the world. Teenage girls in Sierra Leone will have sex with boys their age and with men much older than they are. Some will do so of their own free will while others will be seduced by wealth, status, etc.

Teenagers need to be properly educated and counseled about the consequences of being sexually active in a modern world. They need to have access to contraceptives. I once interviewed a young woman in Freetown who said she didn’t use condoms because she was afraid it would get stuck in her stomach. Who is going to teach her otherwise? Politicians like councilman Margao?

Voice in Higher Education: The Struggle is Far From Over

Miss Chicago and the California Girls poster produced by the Feminist Art Program at Fresno State College, 1970-71

For centuries, women have overcome great adversity to enter institutions of higher learning. They have also broadened the scope of discussions held within, and changed the landscape of the university system.

I have been reading with delight an account of Judy Chicago’s groundbreaking Feminist Art Program founded at Fresno State College in 1970. “In 1970 [Chicago] accepted a teaching position at Fresno State College (now California State University, Fresno) with the proviso that she be allowed to develop a women’s program in the art department…Chicago chose Fresno State College because of its isolation from the art world. It served as an experimental ground where she could try to answer the question of what women students needed in order to become artists.”