Mao And Menstruation: How Discarding Tradition For Uniformity Brought Suffering Upon Chinese Women

‘Taboos’ surrounding menstruation in natural religions and cultures are considered ‘patriarchal anti-women superstitions’ arising from an oppressive ought-to-be liberated system. While these religions and cultures did develop concepts of pollution, purity, and isolation based on menstrual cycles, they also celebrated the cycle.

Many societies did have patriarchal tendencies in which menstruation was considered as polluting and as a kind of a divine sign of the inferiority of women. Yet the non-Western cultures also developed a system that gave women the needed physical and psychological rest through the customs they developed.

As society entered the era of modernity, these taboos naturally gave way to the removal of stigma associated with bleeding. So, the transition, though gradual, has been organic and peaceful.

A case in point is how orthodox Jewish women have transformed (or discovered the true meaning of) the ritual immersion necessitated by their sacred law, mitweh, by making it a celebration and renewal of life—though it can be argued as being anti-women. In this way, Jews and Hindus at large show how religious practices associated with menstrual cycles can be transformed and adapted as a celebration of life and make the other genders respect this feminine mystery of life. Today one can find many mitveh pool centres across many Western nations, including the United States. Feminists do not campaign to abolish them except if they are infected by the anti-Semitic virus. While one may hear a lot of rhetoric about the pollution and stigma of menstruation in medieval and even some ancient Jewish traditions, Judaism has adapted the healthy and spiritual significance of the practices while, at the same time, jettisoning the rhetoric of ‘pollution’.

One sees the same trends in Hinduism, though some Hindu-phobic feminists muddle the situation with support from virulently anti-Hindu media—ranging from the New York Times to the tabloid that has earned the nickname ‘Mount Road Mao’.

But then, proselytising monocultures from the West, both colonial missionaries and Marxists, seldom cared to understand these customs and saw them all as superstitions. They aimed to label them as oppressive obscurantist practices and uprooted them, wherever possible, violently. This resulted in great human loss and suffering, particularly for women. The Marxist Reich of Mao, for instance, brought misery and death to countless Chinese women by forcibly abolishing age-old menstruation-related civilisational taboos.

Professor and historian Frank Dikötter, whose book Mao’s Great Famine (2010) is considered one of the best books describing the famine faced by China in the period 1958-62, is among the few historians who were given access to original archive materials, significantly enhancing the authenticity of his work. Here is how he describes what the Chinese women faced, with the imposed uniformity of the Maoist and Marxist kinds:

Reading between the lines, one can note that what Dikötter terms “menstrual taboos of popular religion, which feared the polluting potential of women” actually gave women the needed rest and a psychological rejuvenation. These “taboos” could have been adapted to understand the psychological and physical aspects of the periods of menstruation while removing the notions of pollution and purity. But Mao and his party did not desire that. Filled with hatred for their culture, they imposed uniformity, subjecting women to suffering. The results were devastating. More on the horror of Mao Reich by the historian:

And who came to the rescue of women? The age-old ‘superstitious’ and ‘obscurantist’ traditions that had developed a medical system to care for the women.

So, Mao waged war not only against Taoists, Buddhists, and sparrows but also against the womb. After all, he had declared that if half of his population were annihilated, then the other half could be nurtured well—a Marxist Han equivalent of Hitlerian Aryan dream. Is there any wonder, then, that the intellectuals and the party who committed the monstrous and genocidal Mao, try to indulge in similar games in India—from the Jawaharlal Nehru University to Sabarimala? If they had not yet subjected the women of Kerala to the same humiliating murderous uniformity imposed by Mao, surely it is not because they lack the intention but because traditions like Sabarimala show them their limits in this last standing pagan Hindu nation.