[Students and teachers are placing pads outside bathrooms as part of a grass-roots campaign to fight period poverty and to remove the stigma surrounding menstruation.]
By Tiffany May and Amy Chang Chien
Then
a plastic container with pads was attached to the walls of four bathrooms in a
university in Shanghai.
By
Monday, boxes and bags of individually wrapped pads had popped up outside
bathrooms in at least 338 schools and colleges across China.
Each
carried a version of the same instructions: “Take one, then put one back later.
Stop period shaming.”
The
pads were part of a broader effort to increase access to a product that not all
students can afford, and to strip away the shame surrounding a natural bodily
function that has long been stigmatized, according to organizers of a
grass-roots campaign called Stand by Her.
Founded
by Jiang Jinjing, a women’s rights advocate, the campaign aims to push the
subject of period poverty — what the United Nations describes as
the financial struggle low-income women and girls face to afford menstrual
products — to the forefront of the national conversation. Ms. Jiang, who gained
prominence in March after mobilizing deliveries of sanitary pads to hospitals
in Wuhan, China, during the coronavirus outbreak, began the campaign to fight
period poverty this year.
In
an interview published in September by the online Shanghai magazine Sixth Tone, Ms. Jiang said she used to believe that
menstrual products were inaccessible only in impoverished rural Chinese
provinces, but soon realized that the phenomenon was widespread.
“This
is so-called women’s poverty,” said Ms. Jiang, who is more widely known by her
pen name, Liang Yu. “When we talk about poverty, women’s needs become
automatically invisible.” She has declined a request for comment.
Her
group raised $126,000 in a crowdfunding campaign in October to send pads to
2,000 teenagers in rural areas and to provide information about periods and sex
education. A middle-school teacher took inspiration from Ms. Jiang’s efforts
and placed a box with free sanitary pads in her classroom, telling her students
to take one and replace it later.
Ms.
Jiang posted photographs sent by the unidentified teacher on Weibo, a Chinese
social media platform. She encouraged others to follow suit, and the campaign
surrounding what she called “mutual aid boxes” took off.
Boxes
with pads began appearing at the entrances of women’s bathrooms in schools and
colleges across the country. Students at the East China University of Political
Science and Law in Shanghai attached boxes outside four women’s bathrooms on
campus.
Fiona
Fei, a 23-year-old graduate student at Guangxi University in southern China,
was inspired to hang zippered bags with pads around campus bathrooms in
October.
She
said in a phone interview on Monday that patriarchal thinking and incomplete
biology lessons in schools had taught girls to view their bodily functions as
indecent.
“A
lot of people around me feel shame,” she said, “and so we want to break through
this shame together.”
The
inability to afford menstrual products is common in many countries, and that
inaccessibility is often compounded by social mores that view menstruation as a
taboo topic.
Women
and girls in Nepal have been banished from their homes to huts during their
period. At least one
or two women die in the huts each year from exposure, animal
bites or smoke inhalation after building fires to stay warm.
A study published in July by the Maple Women’s
Psychological Counseling Center in Beijing found that nearly 70 percent of
respondents said that they tried to hide the sanitary pads they carry around,
and more than 61 percent used euphemisms for their period.
Though
the Stand by Her campaign in China has received support on social media, it has
also been criticized and mocked. Some said the boxes with pads should be placed
inside bathrooms to give people more privacy. In one widely
reported incident, boxes seeking donations for tissue paper were placed
outside men’s bathrooms at China University of Political Science and Law in
Beijing with crude references to masturbation.
But
the campaign has also found male supporters.
Conor
Yu, a 22-year-old graduate student at Shanghai International Studies
University, said that he never learned about menstruation in school but was
influenced by feminist friends to pay attention. He set up boxes outside
women’s bathrooms on campus and asked permission to put up informational
posters in the library, but that request was denied.
The
subject of periods has become less taboo in China in recent years.
In
2016, the
Olympic swimmer Fu Yuanhui shattered barriers with a poolside
interview in which she revealed that she
had gotten her period before the race.
This
summer, period poverty came under renewed scrutiny in China because cheap, unbranded
pads that were not individually wrapped were put up for sale by an unidentified
seller on an e-commerce platform. Some people questioned why anyone might buy
such potentially unsanitary pads. Two online buyers suggested they had
purchased the supplies because they could not afford more expensive products.
In
August, a 17-year-old girl in Chengdu raised nearly $200,000 in
an online campaign to send pads to two high schools in Liangshan, a region in
the southwestern province of Sichuan that has one of the highest poverty rates
in the country.
Ms.
Jiang, the founder of Stand by Her, said in a post online: “The process of
having loud and frequent discussions will remove the stigma from menstruation.
This will liberate thousands of women who are ashamed of it.”
She
noted that “pads” and “periods,” once taboo words, were being more commonly
discussed in the country.
“This
already is a huge breakthrough and milestone,” she said.
Tiffany
May reported from Hong Kong, and Amy Chang Chien from Taipei, Taiwan. Elsie
Chen contributed reporting from Seoul, South Korea.
