http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-26260978
It is absolutely amazing to me that this man, Arunachalam
Muruganantham, conquered all the odds--financial, cultural, familial,
educational--and revolutionized how women feel about and experience their
menstrual cycles.
A man playing such a critical role in all of this. Unheard of in a country whose culture thrives on maintaining a profound separation between all things female and all things male; where women cannot possibly hope to openly discuss their periods or feel comfortable confronting issues of reproductive health.
As the article describes, while on their periods women are essentially treated as "Untouchables"--the lowest status a person can achieve in India's outlawed but historically rooted hierarchical caste system. Being banned from the kitchen, being unable to practice their religion (particularly in Hindu households), and even having to sleep separately from their husbands in another room to maintain the purity of their marital beds.
Why is such disgrace and impurity associated with a perfectly natural bodily process, which is the very reason women are capable of producing children and is in fact celebrated in western cultures as it marks a woman's coming of age? For a country that rejoices in the birth of children so much so that its population growth rates are skyrocketing, this is highly hypocritical.
From a clinical standpoint, poor quality sanitation pads--essentially dirty rags that the protagonist of this amazing real life story states he "wouldn't even use to clean his scooter"--have resulted in numerous reproductive diseases that many poor and/or rural women cannot afford to treat, and many of which aren't even curable. All of these issues have such an easy solution: use disposable sanitary napkins that are actually sanitary.
But there are several more problems with this: pads are difficult to access in rural areas, they are sold by male vendors which is quite the deterrent for women to purchase them, and they are expensive.
So what did Muruganantham do that was so revolutionary? He dedicated years to research and understand how pads are made and work, and came up with the idea of inventing machines that uneducated women could easily use to create their own sanitation pads. In traveling to the poorest and most illiterate reaches of India, Muruganantham not only employed around a million women, but he used the already available market of women needing cheap but quality pads that are sold by other women in nearby locations to his advantage. And he made every woman's life better not only through employment and better reproductive health and comfort, but also by providing hope. Muruganantham faced the hardships of family abandonment, societal gossip, and accusations of pervertedness--all to improve the lives of reproductive age women across the entire developing world.
Thank you, from women everywhere, for being human enough to understand how difficult it is to be a woman, and caring enough to do something about it.
A man playing such a critical role in all of this. Unheard of in a country whose culture thrives on maintaining a profound separation between all things female and all things male; where women cannot possibly hope to openly discuss their periods or feel comfortable confronting issues of reproductive health.
As the article describes, while on their periods women are essentially treated as "Untouchables"--the lowest status a person can achieve in India's outlawed but historically rooted hierarchical caste system. Being banned from the kitchen, being unable to practice their religion (particularly in Hindu households), and even having to sleep separately from their husbands in another room to maintain the purity of their marital beds.
Why is such disgrace and impurity associated with a perfectly natural bodily process, which is the very reason women are capable of producing children and is in fact celebrated in western cultures as it marks a woman's coming of age? For a country that rejoices in the birth of children so much so that its population growth rates are skyrocketing, this is highly hypocritical.
From a clinical standpoint, poor quality sanitation pads--essentially dirty rags that the protagonist of this amazing real life story states he "wouldn't even use to clean his scooter"--have resulted in numerous reproductive diseases that many poor and/or rural women cannot afford to treat, and many of which aren't even curable. All of these issues have such an easy solution: use disposable sanitary napkins that are actually sanitary.
But there are several more problems with this: pads are difficult to access in rural areas, they are sold by male vendors which is quite the deterrent for women to purchase them, and they are expensive.
So what did Muruganantham do that was so revolutionary? He dedicated years to research and understand how pads are made and work, and came up with the idea of inventing machines that uneducated women could easily use to create their own sanitation pads. In traveling to the poorest and most illiterate reaches of India, Muruganantham not only employed around a million women, but he used the already available market of women needing cheap but quality pads that are sold by other women in nearby locations to his advantage. And he made every woman's life better not only through employment and better reproductive health and comfort, but also by providing hope. Muruganantham faced the hardships of family abandonment, societal gossip, and accusations of pervertedness--all to improve the lives of reproductive age women across the entire developing world.
Thank you, from women everywhere, for being human enough to understand how difficult it is to be a woman, and caring enough to do something about it.
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