Menstrual Hygiene Day: Theme, History, Quotes and Messages

The initiative of celebrating Menstrual Hygiene Day was taken in 2014 to advocate the importance of good menstrual hygiene management. 28th May signifies the day of menstrual hygiene. Not-for-profit organizations, government agencies, private sector organizations and media play a significant role in breaking the silence and raise awareness about the negative social norms around menstruation and its management.

Significance of 28th May

The date chosen to observe Menstrual Hygiene Day, that is 28th May, is in itself a special date. 28 signifies the ‘cycle of 28 days’ that is considered the standard menstrual cycle for any girl or woman. Further, May, the 5th month of the year signifies the 5 days of the periods.

How Important is 28-day Cycle and 5-day Menstruation

It is important to discuss here that the 28-day cycle and 5-days of menstruation is only a standard or average calculation. Not every menstruating girl or woman has a 28-day cycle and 5 days of menstruation. A deviation from these standards does not automatically mean that the girl or the woman has some kind of problem or they are not perfectly healthy. In fact, a recent study has revealed that only 13% of women have a 28-day cycle.

The Vision and Mission of Menstrual Hygiene Day

The vision behind observing Menstrual Hygiene Day is to create a world where every girl and woman manages her menstrual hygiene without an iota of shame. Every girl and woman can confidently talk about her menstrual health and hygiene. And that her menstruation does not become a barrier in her life.

The aim behind the initiative is to break the silence and raise awareness about menstrual hygiene. Menstruation should no more be a taboo. Government and decision-makers at national and local levels should have menstrual hygiene management and related action as their political priority.

What is Menstrual Hygiene Management?

Menstrual Hygiene Management means that every adolescent girl and woman should have access to clean menstrual hygiene management materials like sanitary pads, tampons, menstrual cups, reusable napkins and the dignified privacy to change them as frequently as needed. She must have the access to facilities for safely dumping the used menstrual hygiene management materials. Availability of soap and water to wash her body is also considered a very important part of the menstrual hygiene management.

It is estimated that over 500 million girls and women around the world lack basic menstrual hygiene management facilities. Making adolescent girls aware of menstruation, its importance and proper management of their menstrual hygiene is also part of the drive. Recent studies have revealed that only 1 in 2 girls have some knowledge about menstruation before getting her first period. Moreover, the primary source of the information is mother and the instructions are laden with negative social norms around the period.

The culture of silence around menstruation needs to be broken in order to make girls comfortable and confident while talking about a natural phenomenon like menstruation.

Menstrual Hygiene Day Quotes

Menstruation is not a problem, poor menstrual hygiene is.

Women complain about premenstrual syndrome, but I think of it as the only time of the month that I can be myself.j j ― Roseanne Barr

A woman must wait for her ovaries to die before she can get her rightful personality back. Post-menstrual is the same as pre-menstrual; I am once again what I was before the age of twelve: a female human being who knows that a month has thirty-days, not twenty-five, and who can spend every one of them free of the shackles of that defect of body and mind known as femininity.

I bleed twelve weeks a year, so I know a thing or two about bloodstains.

Gradually, my whole concept of time changed until I thought of a month as having twenty-five days of humanness and five others when I might just as well have been an animal in a steel trap.

Poor menstrual hygiene is a problem as big as polio.

Menstrual blood is the only source of blood that is not automatically induced. Yet in modern society, this is the most hidden blood, the one so rarely spoken of and almost never seen, except privately by women.

I have periods now, like normal girls; I too am among the knowing, I too can sit out volleyball games and go to the nurse’s for aspirin and waddle along the halls with a pad like a flattened rabbit tail wadded between my legs, sopping with liver-coloured blood.

While women shed the blood of life each moon at mensuration, man can only shed the blood of death through warfare and killing.