Uniting the Nation through Transcending Menstrual Blood: The Period Products Act in Historical Perspective

The Free Provisions Act is the first national legislation of its kind to provide menstrual products at no cost to women and menstruators throughout Scotland. Yet, this did not happen by accident, and follows historical trends in technoscientific progress and social change. This essay tracks the relationship of women’s acceptance of menstrual technologies with prevailing social and political vectors in United States and Scotland. There are four significant historical moments marking technological change and adoption: the late-Victorian period and the first menstrual product commodities; the modern period marked by World War I through the 1930s that included broadly produced and advertised sanitary napkins; World War II to the mid-twentieth century and the acceptance of tampons; and the 1970s women’s rights movement including the emerging transition to menstrual cups. Within each are differing pressures exerted by both world events and internal societal changes that encourage women to adopt new products. But at moments when wage labor benefits the state, some institutions, heath providers, and educators exert pressure to disregard forms of menstrual stigma and use menstrual products instead. These shifts and movements, along with the prevailing visual culture of advertising and product branding, encompass the menstrualscape. These historical moments and the contemporary menstrualscape signal a current transition in the making, with the promotion of menstrual cups as an environmentally sustainable way to manage menstruation. This aligns with the Free Provisions Act, in which state-sponsored provision of menstrual products serve the needs of the economy, the environment, and concern for gender equity.

Section: Nation Buildingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Periods and the Menstrualscape: Menstrual Products and Menstrual Manifestations in Scotland, 1870–2020

Vostral

2022

“…The research cohort studied was a group of nine scholars (including myself) from humanities and social science disciplines, living and working in the UK, USA and Russia. This group of eight women and one man came together for a two-year project to research the history of menstrual activism, politics, education and culture, in order to better understand the international and local context of the Period Products (Free Provision) (Scotland) Act (2020), which enshrined in law the right of all residents in Scotland to access free menstrual products (McKay, 2021;Bildhauer, 2021;Vostral, 2022). The group members were all born and raised in the Global North, and two-thirds spoke English as their first language (including myself).…”

Section: Research Contextmentioning

confidence: 99%

Researching the Researchers: The Impact of Menstrual Stigma on the Study of Menstruation

Owen

2022

Menstruation has been historically stigmatised through a variety of strategies cross-culturally, including silencing and marginalisation. Such stigmatisation has affected the inclusion of menstruation as a topic of research across disciplines, reproducing stigma through a lack of research and new knowledge. I set out to discover more about the perceived nature and impact of such stigmatisation on the professional experience of menstrual researchers. The research cohort was a group of nine scholars from humanities and social science disciplines, living and working in the UK, USA and Russia, who came together in 2020 for a two year project to research menstrual history, activism, politics, education and culture in order to better understand the Scottish context of legislation to 'end period poverty'. I was also a member of this group and this paper is structured through an autoethnographic enquiry. My qualitative research was interview-based using online video meetings. My data shows that the perceived impact of menstrual stigma on academic research has altered, with older researchers experiencing more barriers in the early stages of their careers than younger ones do now. However, menstrual researchers still experience challenges they consider to be stigma-related in publishing menstrual research, in obtaining permanent positions centred on their specialisation, and in attracting long-term and large-scale funding. This research shows how entrenched stigma can lead to a feedback loop of victimisation that is difficult to escape from, and suggests that academics working on stigmatised topics may need specific types of institutional support in order to progress, publish and flourish.

“…84 Ibid., pp.30-32. On the issue of excluding blood from the public sphere, see Bettina Bildhauer (2021), 'Uniting the Nation through Transcending Menstrual Blood: The Period Products Act in Historical Perspective', in Bildhauer, Røstvik and Vostral (eds. ), Open Library of Humanities, 8(1).…”

Section: 'Bloodless' School Girls and The Perils Of Female Educationmentioning

confidence: 99%

‘A Crisis of Transition’: Menstruation and the Psychiatrisation of the Female Lifecycle in 19th-Century Edinburgh

Davis

Campbell

2022

Through a psychiatric case study, this article seeks tohighlight the historical resonance of two prominent features of the recentPeriod Products (Free Provision) (Scotland) bill debates: the enduring tensionbetween perceptions of menstruation as a normal or pathological process, andthe deleterious impact of menstruation upon female education and, by extension,women's status. By 1900, psychiatry had achieved professional status. Asylumswere recognized as the officially approved response to insanity, and massinstitutionalisation allowed the medical profession unparalleled opportunitiesto observe, classify and treat those deemed insane. As they consolidated their bodiesof knowledge, a distinct 'feminisation' of madness seemed apparent, the femalesex depicted as more vulnerable to insanity due particularly to the perceivedinstability of their reproductive system. This article will examine whatpsychiatry commonly depicted as the biological 'crises' of the female lifecycle,and the extent to which menstruation wasconceptualised as a pathological process, whether as cause or symptom ofinsanity. It will also reflect on the consequences of such a depiction.The prolific doctor, Thomas Clouston - physician-superintendent of the RoyalEdinburgh Asylum (1873-1908), Scotland's largest and most prestigious asylum - was an advocate of managing mental health in a holistic manner, and advisedsociety on the subject of healthy living through adherence to respectableVictorian standards. In his policing of social norms, he was to become aprominent spokesman for the prevention of female education in order to protect womenfrom their 'dangerous' transition from child to womanhood. 