Female trouble: menstrual hygiene, shame and socialism

ABSTRACT

Drawing on semi-structured interviews, and an analysis of advertisements for menstrual hygiene products in socialist Slovenia and wider Yugoslavia, this article seeks to contribute to the scholarship on menstruation. There are tensions in the public language of the socialist system, how women perceive menstruation and the messages conveyed through these advertisements. The choices made by women in relation to their views of these products assist in evaluating the emancipatory potential they are imagined to have, as well as the shame still widely associated with menstruation itself.

KEYWORDS:

• Menstrual pads and tampons
• menstruation
• hygiene products
• shame
• socialism

Acknowledgement

The author has made reasonable effort to trace and contact the Rights Holders for Figures 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5, but regrettably has elicited no response. If readers are cognizant that such Rights Holders are extant, the author requests readers contact Polona Sitar email: [email protected] so that a Corrigendum can be published in the journal.

Notes

1. For a critique see Fehérváry (2009), Vidmar-Horvat (2010) and Thelen (2011).

2. Interviews were carried out between 2013 and 2015 in the framework of wider fieldwork for a doctoral dissertation.

3. ‘Patriarchy’ can denote the legal powers of a husband/father over his wife, children, and other dependents. ‘Patriarchy’ broadly draws on feminist critiques of male power (Bennett, 2006, p. 55). Rich Adrienne (in Cooper, 1984, p. 306) defines patriarchy as:

familial-social, ideological, political system in which men – by force, direct pressure, or through ritual, tradition, law, and language, customs, etiquette, education, and the division of labor, determine what part women shall or shall not play, and in which the female is everywhere subsumed under the male.