Periods in sociobiology: the status of women and sanitary protection

I read about a tribe where women walk bandy-legged because of the scratching from the grasses they use as sanitary protection during menstrual periods.

The status of women depends not only upon education, but also on what is available for what is euphemistically called feminine hygiene.  Until recently, this was not a topic for polite discussion, and women have suffered because of this. As a non-medical person, I have never read anything about its social significance except in anthropological writing.  It is a sociobiological issue, similar to how Chadwick’s pioneering of clean water supplies has had more to do with eradicating cholera and typhoid than anything medical science could do. There may not be a simple answer of tampons for everyone, however.

When human females’ menstrual cycles began to differ from the oestrus patterns in other mammals, there were significant effects in making possible the development of human mating and family behaviour. But humans also developed another characteristic - thinking about what they observed.

Early humans could not understand the biology of female menstruation, and different societies developed different ways of trying to socialise the phenomenon so to speak - commonly but not always by fear, revulsion, isolation and adding it to the fact of male superior physical strength as a further reason for lower status for women.  Even in modern times, it has been known for celibate priests to be advised to think about female menstruation to help resist the temptations of the flesh.

For pre-pubertal children, this aspect of the ‘facts of life’ in public sex education can be counter-productive in the formation of attitudes to women. Adolescents can be ambivalent about how much this messenger of adulthood is welcome.  Coping with the monthly flow has never been easy until recent times. Many traditional patterns of behaviour, especially seclusion and reduced mobility for women, derived from earlier lack of suitable sanitary protection, and continued long after more adequate materials were available.  The segregation and the cleansing rituals could be continued and justified by accreted religious sanctions, so that nobody remembered the original stimulus - as has often happened with religious tenets.

In some places, women have had to resort to walnut shells, grass tufts and other inconveniences that kept them less than able for a week per month. Serial pregnancies reduce that problem, but at the cost of another.

Wools and furs were a softer improvement. The invention of weaving was more dramatic still, because rags and woven grasses could be used, although these were still not pleasant to use, wash or dispose of.  When Isaiah condemned God’s People because ‘all our righteousness is as filthy menstrual clouts’, there was no stronger language he could use. (Isaiah 64.6.  English translations usually euphemise this as ‘filthy rags’.)

Imagination boggles at how women coped with their periods as civilisations developed long and cumbersome clothing that kept aristocratic women, particularly, in a disabled status. Thick layers of petticoats.  Crinolines? What did they do in the absurd courts of Versailles and the other eighteenth century royal theatricals? One might suspect a cover-up job that was pretty revolting.

However, with affluence come the possibilities of better laundering and the affordability of disposal.  The invention of the safety pin must have been of huge benefit in allowing women to continue to be physically active, less encumbered and more secure. But even in my own adolescence, there were material reasons why we could not swim or do acrobatics during the flow of periods.

Complete freedom has come with tampons and pills. Neither is yet the perfect solution for all women. Users of tampons must be able to have clean hands during insertion; there must be protection from risks of cervical or other infections or abrasions.  However, without tampons and the increasing sophistication of external pads, it would be difficult for women to be able to claim entry into every occupation there is, including space, in war, and in gruelling Olympic sports.

Small things are easily overlooked, as if size was the measure for importance or triviality. Schumacher observed that Small is Beautiful.  Small can also be critical, like the flutter of the butterfly’s stamping, that Kipling rather mocked, but chaos theory respects. In promoting education for women as the most effective way to both raise their status and limit disastrous population growth, availability of convenient sanitary protection is a must.

There are continuing problems. The three greatest are poverty, water and population growth.

The poverty of most of the world will lap also at the West if resources are wasted into near extinction.  How much of the status of women of the West has been made possible by being able to waste disposable products - throwing away mountains of soiled stuff, unrecyclable, land-fill burdening.  Further inventions needed include cost reduction, feasible home manufacture from cheap materials, cleansing without water, and quick biodegradability into fertiliser.

There is a link with the problems of population growth. The larger the world populations, the greater will be the shortage of water as the world’s greatest crisis - unexpected developments excepted.

The larger the female population and the more that family planning reduces continual pregnancies, the greater the problem of materials and water for feminine hygiene.

And the greater the risk for the status of women.

So on the macro scale, limitation of population growth is part of a solution to ensure that women have the chance of freedom of status.  On a micro scale, which also affects the macro, remains the matter of freedom for women during that one week in the month. New inventions are needed - and also, awareness of what possibilities may already exist.

The West with all its technology and science has still much to learn from the less ‘developed’ countries, where down to-earth strategies have had to be used for centuries for everyday matters. Yet how little affluent Westerners know of other methods for toilet-training, or of getting babies to sleep, or of making do with 7 litres of water a day - and of managing the monthlies.  Like the medicines waiting to be found in the forests, known by the disappearing tribes, there may still be simple low-tech solutions that the superior- feeling whitey may have never bothered to observe, or may have written up only in anthropological literature that the public have not read. Look first for these possible secrets among peoples where women have most freedom. Then Western technology may be able to come at even more convenient, practical, healthy, minimum cost and environmentally friendly solutions than we have now with drugs and not-completely-disposable disposables.

What human genetics may next turn to may be in the present realm of science fantasy, in ways perhaps to produce humans less involved in reproduction, or with less recurring inconvenience in doing so.

Meanwhile, there are a couple of billion poor women who just need their lives made that critical little bit easier, and an additional ecological problem to avoid if we share our own improvident solutions disposable solutions for ‘feminine hygiene’ on any larger scale.