Menstrual Hygiene Management

Menstruation has long been framed as a private and biological event, often reduced to a matter of hygiene and cleanliness. Yet, when seen through the lived experiences of Ethiopian women, menstruation is revealed not as an individual issue but as a deeply social and political one. The way women and girls manage their periods is shaped not only by the availability of pads or toilets but by a complex entanglement of social expectations, embodied survival strategies, and structural neglect. Within this reality, menstrual hygiene management becomes a site of both struggle and resistance, where dignity is often deferred and silence is inherited.

In many contexts, menstruation is surrounded by shame. The absence of doors and locks on school toilets, the lack of water or disposal facilities, and the cultural silencing of menstruation combine to create an environment where girls are forced to improvise. A cloth tucked under a skirt, a friend guarding the toilet stall, or the act of staying home from school altogether becomes a strategy of survival. The testimonies of Ethiopian women reflect this tension: holding urine and blood for hours, skipping meals to minimize flow, masking cramps with silence, or washing rags in secrecy at night. What should be a natural rhythm of the body is transformed into a battleground of stigma, restriction, and fear.

These lived realities gave rise to theoretical insights that help us understand menstruation as part of the broader politics of sanitation. Concepts such as Toilet Socialization, Generational Omission, Cumulative Invisibility, and Deferred Dignity illuminate how menstruation is managed under systems of inequity. Girls are socialized into silence, taught from early adolescence that privacy is never guaranteed. Mothers, themselves shaped by shame and absence, often omit conversations about menstruation, passing trauma across generations. Each instance of stigma and exclusion accumulates, erasing girls from classrooms and public spaces. Over time, women learn to delay their bodily needs, postponing pad changes or withholding water intake, as a strategy for survival. These concepts show that menstrual hygiene management is not simply about material supplies but about social power, gendered structures, and inherited silence.

Policy and advocacy responses must therefore move beyond the distribution of pads. To address menstruation as an issue of justice requires designing for dignity rather than delivery. Toilets in schools and workplaces must guarantee privacy, disposal, and water, not as add-ons, but as baseline standards. Girls and women should be invited into menstrual ethnography labs where they can map their experiences and reimagine solutions. Laws and policies must explicitly enshrine menstrual dignity, making disposal bins, washing stations, and locks requirements rather than luxuries. Equally important, indices must be developed that capture the weight of stigma, emotional burden, and cultural silence alongside infrastructure counts, for it is not enough to measure toilets without measuring the shame that surrounds their use.

Menstruation, when situated in unjust systems, is not neutral. It becomes a structure of exclusion that can determine whether a girl stays in school, whether a woman participates fully in society, and whether dignity is upheld as a human right. Whoever controls access to menstrual dignity controls access to opportunity. By listening to the lived menstrual experiences of Ethiopian women, Feminist Sanitation Justice reframes menstruation not as a matter of charity but as an urgent question of equity and power. Naming what has long been silenced blood, pain, and shame is not merely an act of research, but an act of resistance. To center menstruation as a feminist issue is to affirm that dignity must never be deferred and that justice must begin with the body.