Breaking down menstrual taboos

“There’s a joy from having poured your energies into something and feel that it’s borne fruit,” says Kathy. “It’s been super exciting and satisfying to be part of something that has actually created a shift on the scale that it has.”

The context and early days

When Kathy and Jessamijn started Eco Femme, their original goal was to provide an income-generating opportunity to village women, through Auroville Village Action Group (AVAG). Cloth pads seemed a good idea, given that AVAG had trained women in tailoring, and the stitching work could be given to them. The environmental benefit of pads also held appeal to them, as they wanted to counter the growing trend towards disposable (often plastic) pads that were becoming increasingly popular in India.

Kathy and Jessamijn confidently assumed that commercial sales to affluent women would be possible with good marketing, but they were less sure that cloth pads would be accepted by women in rural areas. Wanting to know more about rural menstruation beliefs and practices, they undertook a survey in the local region to get a sense of how menstruation was understood in the culture, and what products women were using. Early prototypes of Eco Femme cloth pads were well-received, giving Kathy and Jessamijn hope that the traditional practice of folded cloth could be revitalised through a more functional and practical cloth product. The unit thereafter launched itself as a hybrid model social enterprise that delivers free or subsidised cloth pads and education to women and girls from low income backgrounds, financed through commercial sales of cloth pads in India and internationally.

At that time, the topic of menstruation was largely ignored by most NGOs in India, and it was still something of a conversational taboo in homes and schools, shaped by beliefs that menstruation was considered something ‘dirty’ or to be ashamed of, even though a girl’s first period is celebrated in a very public way in Tamil Nadu. This public-private dichotomy is underlined by Kalvi, an educational trainer with Eco Femme, who points to the increasingly large events held to mark the occasion: “Some families put a banner of the girl on the road, to gain status in the village. People bring gold and sarees for the girl, and she gets pampered.” This can be contrasted with daily life, where cultural taboos around menstruation mean that girls are not enabled to talk about periods and are expected to keep menstrual practices ‘private’. “This is rooted in the bigger story of how we relate to women’s bodies, especially in India,” says Kathy, an understanding that guides Eco Femme’s more normalising and positive approach to menstrual practices.

The few NGOs in India working on this topic ten years ago were primarily concerned with the hygiene aspect. Due to a sense of shame around menstruation, many women in India washed and dried their menstrual cloths under a bed or behind bushes. Kalvi points out the practice of drying menstrual cloth in hidden places was also shaped in Tamil Nadu by a suspicion that if blood or a menstrual product is seen by an eagle or snake, that women will become infertile. However, when cloth is not dried properly in the sun, sometimes infections can result – and this influenced the hygiene focus of most NGOs, which encouraged women to shift to disposable napkins, because they were considered a cleaner and more hygienic option.

Government initiatives were also starting at that time to provide girls with free disposable sanitary napkins so that they would not drop out of school because of infections or lack of products. “It was a very unsophisticated and superficial analysis of the problem,” says Jessamijn. “I think they also thought it would create work for women who could make those disposable napkins.”

The government and NGO emphasis on hygiene also ignored the environmental aspects of pads, particularly the problem of disposal and incineration. An average disposable pad contains five carrier bags worth of plastic, as well as chemicals. It takes 500-800 years to break down into microparticles in a landfill. This aspect was generally “left out of the larger conversation,” says Kathy. 

These experiences shaped Eco Femme’s decision to contribute to the landscape of menstrual health in a more comprehensive way, viewing cloth pads as “an entry point into a rich and interesting transformational opportunity” that entwined aspects of education, environment, health, economics and women’s empowerment. And the name Eco Femme aimed to capture these feminist and ecological elements, as well as the initiative’s holistic approach.

The main focus of Eco Femme’s outreach strategy is education sessions that target girls in government schools or women from low income backgrounds across India. Kalvi, who hails from Edyanchavadi and has been an educational trainer with Eco Femme for five years, points to the need for young women to have access to good factual information about menstruation, which she says is lacking in traditional Tamil culture. “My grandmother didn’t tell my mother anything, and same with my mother and me,” recounts Kalvi. “When I started menstruating, it was my aunt who gave me a piece of cloth and told me how to use it. And I wasn’t comfortable to ask her questions. This is a typical scenario.”

In an effort to overcome women’s discomfort and knowledge gap, Kalvi provides “factual knowledge” in the education sessions and encourages conversation. “Once young women are given a chance to discuss menstruation, they are full of questions, and are eager to shift their understanding,” she says.

As part of the education sessions, the Eco Femme facilitator invites participants to do a critical product analysis, by presenting all the products on the market – traditional cloth, sanitary napkins, cloth pads, tampons, cups, period panties. They consider parameters such as the ingredients, usage, care required, lifespan of the product, disposal methods, the impact on health, impact on the environment, and cost. “We’re conditioned to think of the ease of disposables: you just throw it away,” says Jessamijn. “But for a lot of women, it’s a fraught matter, especially in crowded small houses. Where do you put it? Who is picking it up? Do you keep it separate? Do you burn it, or put it in the soil? Some women were washing disposable pads before they disposed of them.”

The team also emphasises the potential health issues that can arise from the ingredients in disposable napkins. “They’re potentially carcinogenic,” says Kathy. “When we give the information about the ingredients, women say, ‘Oh, that’s why I get this itching and rashes and all. ’And when they make the switch to cloth pads, women report back that they are surprised that they are free from rashes and allergy.”

The Eco Femme educational approach encourages women to consider safe and unsafe practices, without suggesting that there are right or wrong practices. “We make them think, how does it feel for you?” says Kalvi. “How is it affecting your health? If it’s affecting your health, then maybe that’s not the right way to go. If it’s not affecting your health, then you decide what to use.”

Each menstrual product has its own demerits and merits, as Kalvi points out. While cloth pads are a good alternative to disposable products, some women hesitate to handle their own menstrual blood while washing, or have concerns about the pads being visible while drying or worry about staining. “For some women, it’s a shock to see an internal product [such as a cup or tampon], and it’s not conceivable for them to use these,” says Kalvi. By the end of the product analysis, most women are ready to use cloth pads, according to the Eco Femme team, because they now understand the multiple benefits – the cost savings, product safety and waste reduction.

At the end of the education sessions, girls are offered a free kit of Eco Femme washable cloth pads. The cost of these pads is sponsored through the organisation’s Pad for Pad programme, where every pad bought internationally funds a pad given to a girl in low-income settings in India. To date, the Pad for Pad programme has distributed 175,000 pads to 44,000 girls in India. And the team does follow up research to determine the long-term impact of menstrual education. “While young women might right now be under the influence of their mother,” says Kalvi, “we realised that by educating a daughter, she will create impact in future for her daughter."

The team initially received some pushback from women who believed Eco Femme’s approach would set back the progress they felt they had achieved with disposable products. “Some women perceived disposable napkins as having set them free from the drudgery of cumbersome cloth,” recounts Kathy about one early presentation in Chennai. “We were perceived as arrogant foreigners who wanted Indian women to ‘go back’ to using cloth. But slowly, other Indian women started advocating for Eco Femme’s washable pads, and more Indian women joined the Eco Femme team. “So it happened gracefully that we didn’t have to defend what we were doing,” she says.

Ambassadors and alliances

Since Eco-Femme began its work ten years ago, the wider menstrual health terrain has massively expanded, with an influx of NGOs and freelancers working on this topic. It is now more of a widespread movement that goes beyond pads. 

As a consequence of the groundswell of interest, Eco Femme has formed a number of alliances which enable its work to be scaled up. Eco Femme now has about 200 partners and ambassadors, 120 of whom are in India. These partners voluntarily promote the idea of sustainable menstruation in their local communities. Eco Femme supports them in their work, by tailoring advice on how to educate or introduce women to cloth pads according to the partner’s setting (i.e., country, urban or rural, commercial or grass roots), and encouraging organisations to conduct exploratory research in their communities to avoid assumptions about local practices. 

Along with its partner organisations, Eco Femme continues to collect a lot of data and has seen indications that some health symptoms such as rashes actually resolve when women switch to using cloth pads. Along with the steady increase in sales across all market segments, there is growing evidence that cloth pads are gaining rapid acceptance. “There are now at least 15 companies manufacturing cloth pads in India, some of whom started as Eco Femme partners or customers,” says Kathy.”It’s a clear indicator that the concept has taken root.” 

Reflecting on ten years

With so many players now operating in the menstrual health field, how has this changed Eco Femme’s role? Jessamijn highlights the way in which Eco Femme is continually prodded to keep considering how to remain relevant. “That asks us to innovate and change approaches – that’s something I really like.” In this vein, Eco Femme is launching a range of cloth diapers this month. 

Both Jessamijn and Kathy emphasise the benefits of EcoFemme’s collaborative approach, which doesn’t fit with business models that argue that organisations should protect their collateral, in order to progress. “Aiming for collaboration instead of competition may sound counterintuitive,” says Kathy, “but our organisation has expanded hugely due to our approach. We discovered that when you share and support others without counting the cost, it actually has its own reward. The mission grows and is bigger than the brand. That was a happy discovery! They don’t teach that in business school!”

Jessamijn draws attention to the benefits of partnering with people and organisations who inject energy, which creates mutual stimulation. “We’ll continue to empower others to do similar work, through collaboration and support. That feels like more fun than just increasing quantity, because quantity always comes at the cost of quality.”

Auroville

Given that Eco Femme was born and bred in Auroville and its bioregion, how has Auroville shaped the organisation’s trajectory? “Eco Femme is an offspring of the way in which I learnt to look at life and think about things as a result of being Aurovilian,” says Kathy. “I consider that living in Auroville deeply shaped my thinking about global issues, interconnection and integral thinking, and this in turn influenced my thinking about how Eco Femme could evolve. Nearly half our team is Aurovilian. It’s intangible, but Auroville’s value base is underpinning everything we’re doing in Eco Femme.”

The enabling environment of Auroville is also a factor emphasised by the founders. This includes: the advice provided in early days through Auroville start-up incubator Unlimited Tamil Nadu and other mentoring programmes; interest-free loans provided by supporters; and the many volunteers who have come for long periods. “We get so many interesting people who come to Auroville, who put in their skills and creativity where the values resonate for them,” says Jessamijn. “They believe in the idea. This would have been very different if we’d been outside Auroville.” The bioregion context also provided a “laboratory” to test and tweak ideas (aided by AVAG), before exporting to them other parts of India. “It’s such a rich range of options that one can explore here,” Kathy says.  

Future plans

Eco Femme currently employs 21 people in its office, and 24 tailors working from nearby tailoring units do stitching for piece rates. The team is preparing to build a new workspace as they have outgrown the space in the Saracon campus where they are currently located. 

While the team sets annual targets (for example: commercial sales targets; number of educational sessions conducted; number of pads given for free etc.), they also aim to create impact beyond the measurables. “We’ve come to see that the impact of our work is bigger than cloth pads,” says Kathy. “The work we do on menstruation can lead to a deeper worldview shift that impacts how women relate to their bodies and to the body of the earth. Cloth pads and education can make that connection more visible, and women and girls can end up feeling much more connected to themselves and nature as a result.”

The team aims to continue nurturing ambassadors: empowering them with confidence, knowledge and skills, so they can speak on behalf of big issues and create impact. “Kalvi’s been saying how transformational it is for girls – they’re connecting with a different story about who they are as embodied women,” says Kathy. “There are so many collateral benefits of the work we’re doing.”

By decentralising production (through mentoring other organisations to produce cloth pads), Eco Femme has been able to quickly achieve a scale of work that has become a major contribution to the global movement towards sustainable menstruation, which has grown exponentially over the last ten years to create a “massive shift in awareness”. “I think it’s special to be in a field that’s changing so fast,” says Jessamijn. “I was working in organic agriculture before, and nothing seemed to change!” Kathy underlines the sense of satisfaction that comes from having created a large-scale shift in practices and thinking: “I feel really touched that so much has been possible. This has happened because of everyone’s contribution – but there’s still plenty to do.”