![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Menstruation and communism
Feb. 15th, 2025 07:55 amNot sure if I need content notes - it is what it says on the tin.
I watched The Six Triple Eight a couple of days ago, a drama about the first US black women battalion participating in WWII. I liked it because I am predictably sentimental but this post is not a film review. I was blown away by a tiny detail about daily lives:
During training orientation, the major in charge tells cadets about army expectations. It includes access to tampons and an expectation to use them. I haven't looked it up so I am assuming here that this point was not a mistake and is not controversial. Tampons. Mid 1940s. Racism. Segregation. War. And they had a reliable supply of tampons!
Do you know when Soviet women got tampons? In the 1990s. First menstrual pads? 1980s. Horribly designed, you had to stick them to underwear with safety pins. And that's IF you could even get them.
Svetlana Alexievich in her oral history of Soviet women in the Great War paints a particularly painful picture, because even rags were a deficit, needed for wound care. But even through the later decades of stability, women* in the great land of victorious communism, the land that was first to send a man to space, were using rags, and if lucky - etamine and cotton wool.
[*I don't know if transgender history of these times exists. Realistically, knowing how Soviet Union treated anything it saw as a deviation from social norms, most people probably never transitioned.]
I am an early Millennial. I had my first period sometime AFTER the Soviet Union broke down. I lived in Moscow, but as was common practice, I was spending summers with my grandparents in a very rural area. Decent period products became available in cities in the early 90s - but not yet in rural areas. Those first couple of months, I had to stuff my underwear with etamine and cotton wool, and wash it all out by hand. Oh, because the village did not have running water either. I had to walk to the well with buckets every day. And it was the kind of wooden well you find in historical illustrations these days - with a chain that you had to manually lower down and up.
Whenever people on the left wax poetic about communism, I am grateful to see others jump in with more accurate historical facts. But I am realizing very few people know about this aspect of it. How communism was literally fucking bloody in its treatment of what is considered basic essential dignity.
Haven't read this article because it's quite long, but a glance, it appears to be a great in-depth anthropological account:
Vasilyev, P. & Konovalova, A., (2023) “Changing Menstrual Habits in Late 20th- and Early 21st-Century Russia”, Open Library of Humanities 9(1).
doi: https://doi.org/10.16995/olh.6352
https://olh.openlibhums.org/article/id/6352
P.S. I originally wrote cotton pads but it was actually cotton wool, sold in kind of large rolls. Cotton pads also arrived in the 90s.
I watched The Six Triple Eight a couple of days ago, a drama about the first US black women battalion participating in WWII. I liked it because I am predictably sentimental but this post is not a film review. I was blown away by a tiny detail about daily lives:
During training orientation, the major in charge tells cadets about army expectations. It includes access to tampons and an expectation to use them. I haven't looked it up so I am assuming here that this point was not a mistake and is not controversial. Tampons. Mid 1940s. Racism. Segregation. War. And they had a reliable supply of tampons!
Do you know when Soviet women got tampons? In the 1990s. First menstrual pads? 1980s. Horribly designed, you had to stick them to underwear with safety pins. And that's IF you could even get them.
Svetlana Alexievich in her oral history of Soviet women in the Great War paints a particularly painful picture, because even rags were a deficit, needed for wound care. But even through the later decades of stability, women* in the great land of victorious communism, the land that was first to send a man to space, were using rags, and if lucky - etamine and cotton wool.
[*I don't know if transgender history of these times exists. Realistically, knowing how Soviet Union treated anything it saw as a deviation from social norms, most people probably never transitioned.]
I am an early Millennial. I had my first period sometime AFTER the Soviet Union broke down. I lived in Moscow, but as was common practice, I was spending summers with my grandparents in a very rural area. Decent period products became available in cities in the early 90s - but not yet in rural areas. Those first couple of months, I had to stuff my underwear with etamine and cotton wool, and wash it all out by hand. Oh, because the village did not have running water either. I had to walk to the well with buckets every day. And it was the kind of wooden well you find in historical illustrations these days - with a chain that you had to manually lower down and up.
Whenever people on the left wax poetic about communism, I am grateful to see others jump in with more accurate historical facts. But I am realizing very few people know about this aspect of it. How communism was literally fucking bloody in its treatment of what is considered basic essential dignity.
Haven't read this article because it's quite long, but a glance, it appears to be a great in-depth anthropological account:
Vasilyev, P. & Konovalova, A., (2023) “Changing Menstrual Habits in Late 20th- and Early 21st-Century Russia”, Open Library of Humanities 9(1).
doi: https://doi.org/10.16995/olh.6352
https://olh.openlibhums.org/article/id/6352
P.S. I originally wrote cotton pads but it was actually cotton wool, sold in kind of large rolls. Cotton pads also arrived in the 90s.
