Period. End of Sentence.

A New Chapter in the Fight for Menstrual Justice

Anita Diamant

• Publisher: Scribner
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781982144289
• eBook ISBN: 9781982144302
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

From beloved New York Times bestselling author and award-winning journalist Anita Diamant comes a timely collection of essays to help inspire period positive activism around the globe. When Period. End of Sentence. won an Oscar in 2019, the film's coproducer and executive director of The Pad Project, Melissa Berton, told the audience: "A period should end a sentence, not a girl's education." Continuing in that revolutionary spirit and building on the momentum of the acclaimed documentary, this book outlines the challenges facing those who menstruate worldwide and the solutions championed by a new generation of body positive activists, innovators and public figures. Including interviews from people on the frontlines—parents, teachers, medical professionals, and social-justice warriors— Period. End of Sentence. illuminates the many ways that menstrual injustice can limit opportunities, erode self-esteem, and even threaten lives. This powerful examination of the far-ranging and quickly evolving movement for menstrual justice introduces today's leaders and shows us how we can be part of the change. Fearless, revolutionary, and fascinating, Period. End of Sentence. is an essential read for anyone interested in empowering women, girls, and others around the world. To learn more about The Pad Project, go to ThePadProject.org.

PART ONE

The Curse

Hansa, Northern Ethiopia: “In my community, they refer to women during menstruation as ‘cursed.’ No one talks about it. During my period, I refrain from normal activities like going to work or to the market because I feel ashamed and I want to hide myself.”

What’s in a name? At any given moment, there are 800 million people menstruating on Planet Earth—and as many as five thousand euphemisms for menstruation in use: folksy (Aunt Flo), descriptive (on the rag), sweet (Germany’s strawberry week), alarming (Finland’s mad cow disease), historical (from France, the English have landed), familial (Little sister, in China), and anecdotal (South Africa’s, Granny’s stuck in traffic).

“Period” is the most common euphemism, used around the world and by people who speak Amharic, German, Russian, Spanish, and Xhosa, among others. And even though “period” refers only to an interval of time and doesn’t hint at blood or bodies, people still drop their voices when the word comes up in conversation.

Then there is “the curse.”

Menstruation has been defined and described as a curse from ancient times to the present: stamped as truth by scholars, enforced by religious leaders, and passed down—a miserable legacy—through generations of women. As a result, for millions of people, “cursed” is an accurate description of how it feels to live in a body that bleeds.

A curse is a magical formula or potion that does harm: the death of the firstborn, princes into frogs, red hair. An illness or generational misfortune is sometimes called a curse.

The curse is one and only one bloody thing. It identifies a necessary part of human reproduction as a malediction, and by extension, anyone who menstruates as a threat.

From early on, Western civilization considered menstruation a threat. In first-century Rome, the scholar Pliny the Elder wrote that contact with menstrual blood “turns new wine sour, crops touched by it become barren, grafts die, seeds in gardens are dried up, the fruit of trees fall off, the edge of steel and the gleam of ivory are dulled, hives of bees die, even bronze and iron are at once seized by rust, and a horrible smell fills the air; to taste it drives dogs mad and infects their bites with an incurable poison.”

If that sounds laughably outdated, in the 1920s, The Lancet, an esteemed medical journal, reported that the touch of menstruating women caused cut flowers to wilt, and in 1974 doubled down with an article asserting that a permanent wave would not “take” in the hair of menstruating women.

The world’s major religions have treated menstruation as a pollutant, a punishment, or, at the least, a problem. Jewish law and practice are based on passages from Leviticus, including this one: “When a woman has a discharge, her discharge being blood from her body, she shall remain in her impurity seven days; whoever touches her shall be unclean until evening. Anything that she lies on during her impurity shall be unclean, and anything that she sits on shall be unclean.” In the Middle Ages, Nachmanides, a leading rabbi, scholar, and physician, maintained that “if a menstruating woman stares at a mirror of polished iron, drops of blood will appear on it.”

In Jewish practice, the problem of impurity was solved by mandating set times and terms of separation in the rubric of “family purity” (taharat hamishpacha). After menstruation, women are to immerse in water, specifically in a ritual bath called a mikveh before they can be sexually available to their husbands. Observance of the menstrual laws has varied among Jewish communities and changed over time; it continues among Orthodox/observant women and has been reinterpreted and adopted by some liberal/feminist Jews (see page 50–51).

“The curse of Eve” is a common Christian characterization of the punishment meted out to the first woman and all subsequent women: “Unto the woman He said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children.” Blood is part of the “sorrow” of bringing forth children. The Catholic Church’s rule against the ordination of women was, to some extent, based on their “ritual uncleanness.” Most Christian denominations do not follow specific rituals or laws regarding menstruation, though most reflect the local culture’s attitudes. Some Orthodox Christian traditions discourage or even forbid menstruating women from attending church or receiving communion.

For Hindus, menstrual restrictions are based on a sin committed by Lord Indra (King of the Gods) for killing a Brahmin named Vishwaroopacharya. To rid himself of guilt for the murder, Indra divided his sin into three parts and distributed one third to the land, one third to the trees, and one third to women, who from then on began to menstruate and bear children. Indra’s sin is the reason that menstruating women are denied entry to some Hindu holy sites, and why women are barred from handling food for or sleeping under the same roof as their families. Mohandas Gandhi, who was a spiritual as well as political leader, said menstruation was a “distortion of women’s soul because of their sexuality.”

In 2011, Pravin Nikam was a young engineering student visiting Assam when he met a young girl. “She was weaving a sari on a hand loom,” he said. “I asked what school did she go to? She said, ‘I don’t go to school. I am cursed by God.’

“I asked the same question of her father, who said, ‘In our community, when girls start to menstruate, we do not send them to the school because they are cursed.’ ”

Like Judaism, Islam considers menstruating women unclean and prohibits husbands from touching their wives during their periods; it also excuses—or restricts—menstruating women from reciting the five daily prayers, entering mosques, touching the Quran, and fasting during Ramadan. While the Prophet Muhammad classified menstruation as originating from Satan, the Quran lists it with other ordinary bodily functions such as yawning in prayer and sneezing.

According to Buddhist teaching, menstruation is nothing more than a “natural physical exertion,” but local practices and contact with Hindu culture subsumed that belief. Japanese Buddhists prohibit menstruating women from approaching some sacred sites, and among Tibetan Buddhists, menstruating women are considered a danger to themselves and others because of the belief that ghosts feed on blood.

Periods can be uncomfortable, inconvenient, embarrassing, and all kinds of painful, from mild cramps to ones that keep you in bed for days. Periods are expensive, messy, and unpredictable. Comedian Michelle Wolf, the doyenne of period jokes, compares menstruation to an outdoor cat. “You know it’s coming back. You just don’t know when.”

Menstruation is also a mark of maturity and a measure of health. Metaphorically and spiritually, it signals the continuity of human life.

Stigma and powerlessness can make it feel like punishment. But menstruation is not the curse.

The curse is shame.

Shame

Lupita Nyong’o was in the audience the night that Period. End of Sentence. won an Academy Award for best short documentary. The actress stood up and applauded when the prize was announced. After she watched the film, she realized, “I was not free of the shame that comes with bleeding every month, and how much ignorance there is about what a period is.”

“Shaming the cycle of a woman leads to a cycle of shame,” said Nyong’o. “When a woman is not permitted to accept her body, how can we expect her to stand up for her body when it’s being abused?”

Menstrual shame keeps women from seeking medical help for pain. It’s why girls who can’t afford pads or tampons stay home from school rather than risk bleeding through their clothes—something that happens in Germany as well as Sierra Leone. It’s what keeps teachers from teaching their students about periods.

Nobody is born with an innate sense of shame about menstruation: it must be taught. And the message doesn’t have to be as explicit as “you are cursed.” Unspoken scorn, institutional exclusion, and the example of the women around you sends the message, loud and clear.

The harm is not equally distributed. And while privilege and education can mitigate the harm, virtually everybody who menstruates knows how it feels to be ashamed of your body, ashamed of yourself.

According to a 2018 survey of attitudes toward menstruation in New Zealand and Australia, more than half of thirteen-to-seventeen-year-old girls interviewed said they would rather fail a school test than have their classmates know they’re on their period.

Amanda in South Africa wrote: “One fateful day at school, I was writing my math exam. I remember I was on question 6 when I started to feel wet on my skirt. I had to stand up to get another sheet of paper to finish my exam, but with bloodstains on my skirt, I couldn’t. At the end of the test, my teacher asked why I didn’t hand it to him. He was a man so I couldn’t tell him. I just kept quiet and gave what I had finished to him when he was near me.

“I cried and ran out without anybody’s permission. I went home and stayed in my room. After three days I gathered some courage and went back, but I found I was behind with my schoolwork. Not finishing the exam resulted in me not getting my full marks. This day always comes back to my mind and it really hurts.… Being on periods can make someone get left behind on many things, trust me.”

In some cultures, menstruating women are banished and survive in misery. In Nepal, menstrual sequestration is called chhaupadi—a word that means impure—and it is dangerous. In this ancient Hindu custom, which is practiced in a few rural parts of the country, menstruating women are barred from sleeping under the same roof as their families because of the belief that their presence will sicken others. Women, who often take their young children with them, spend nights in crude shelters: huts, lean-tos, caves, even stables.

In January 2019, Partabi Bogati died of smoke inhalation while trying to keep warm in the tiny shed where she slept during her period. A month earlier, Amba Bohara and her two young children also died of suffocation. Six months before that, it was Gauri Kumari Bayak, who had been leading birth control classes and telling women to stand up for themselves; even she could not bring herself to resist community norms.

In the small town of Sitatoli in central India, women on their periods are sent to an eight-foot-square windowless mud hut known as a kurma ghar. A place without electricity or running water, where women sleep on the floor and get drenched when it rains. Between 2011 and 2018, at least eight women died in the kurma ghar of another town in the Gadchiroli district, mostly from pneumonia or snake bites.

Anyone who refused to go to the kurma ghar was called up in front of the village and ordered to buy liquor and cook a meal of chicken for the whole community—a steep price. One woman said, “It’s better to obey.”

Menstrual Shame

Menstrual shame is a brew of silence, lack of knowledge, and stigma. Each poses a threat to health and happiness; in combination they can be toxic, even deadly.

Silence

Silence starts at home. A little boy finds a box of his mother’s pads hidden under a bed. He asks her what they’re for: she slaps him and warns him to never talk about such things again. Period. End of conversation.

A girl tells her mother that she’s bleeding for the first time and she is told, “You’re a woman now. Don’t tell your father. Don’t tell anyone.” Period. End of conversation.

“Don’t tell” becomes a reflex. Comedian Michelle Wolf imagines the scene over a backyard fence where a woman—worried about a symptom—begins to ask her neighbor, “Have you ever…”

She stops mid-sentence and says, “No. Never mind. I’d rather die than have this conversation.”

Silence about menstruation casts a cloak of invisibility—and worse, of unknowing—over the evidence of our senses. A man who grew up in a middle-class home in Mumbai barely noticed that his mother stayed out of the kitchen for a few days every month, and somehow he knew not to ask about it. “It wasn’t until years later that I understood.”

Some parents assume that their children will learn about menstruation in school, if not in science class then certainly in a health or sex education session, but that isn’t likely. Information about menstruation is often passed over. In a 2019 poll of a thousand American teens, 76 percent said they were taught more about the biology of frogs than about the biology of the female human body. In a similar study from Quetta...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Foreword
• A Word, First
• Introduction
• Part One
• Part Two
• Part Three
• Part Four
• Part Five
• Afterword
• Acknowledgments
• Reading Group Guide
• About the Author
• Glossary
• Notes
• Index
• Copyright