Women around the world are talking about feminism, gender equality, and social change – they are fighting to strip menstruation of its stigma. As natural as eating, drinking and sleeping, menstruation is a process that happens with women of every human race and, yet, most people feel uncomfortable at talking about it. When girls start their periods, they embark on a painful and bloody journey. Periods hurt. They cause backaches and cramps, not to mention the emotional instability that most women experience. And this goes on every month for 30 to 40 years. However, even being considered as a natural process, in public, people discuss about periods as often as they discuss about diarrhea. Women hide their tampons or pads inside their bags or under their clothes on their way to the bathroom so no one knows they …show more content…
At least 500 million girls and women globally lack adequate facilities for managing their periods, according to a 2015 report from UNICEF and the World Health Organization (WHO). In rural India, one in five girls abandon/give up/ left school after they start menstruations, and of the 355 million menstruating girls and women in the country, just 12 percent use sanitary napkins. Furthermore, the situation for prison inmates and homeless women is alarming. In her book “Presos que mestruam”, the journalist Nana Queiroz reveals the horror of women’s prisons in Brazil. The writer says that women inmates use bread crumbs as tampons, since they receive only one or two packs a month, insufficient for women with more intense menstrual flow. In western Nepal women leave their beds to sleep among their family’s cows. The shed where they sleep is dark, dirty, and full of hay, insects and dung. Sofalta, 16 says. “I feel horrible here – the cow dung smells and the animals step on us. The dirt and hay get stuck all over my body. I wish that I didn’t have a