Author’s note: This article uses the binary terms of men/women and male/female when describing gender identity. This is not necessarily a reflection of how gender was experienced or lived by Chinese people in this period, nor does it reflect the fluidity of gender as we understand it today. However,most contemporary Chinese and Western sources used in my research refer to gender in the binary as male/female, men/women. To attempt to rephrase, re-translate, and refit language whilst discussing gendered social control in the 1920s and 1930s would be inappropriate. In applying this analysis to today’s society, in amongst continued sexist, homophobic, and transphobic rhetoric, it must be understood that not all women menstruate, and not everyone who menstruates identifies as a woman.

“The qi of heaven flows in communication with [the menses], so they flow once a month. If [the body] is in a state of harmony, the proper cycle continues, and for this reason we refer to it as the menstrual period or the “monthly water.”
- Qi Zhongfu, in “100 Questions on Gynaecology and Obstetrics” (nü ke bai wen), 1220 CE.

Traditional Chinese medicine derives from ancient understandings of balancing energies in one’s body, and menstruation is no exception. In the “Inner Canon of the Yellow Emperor” (Huangdi Neijing), first referenced in 111 CE in the “Book of Han” (Hanshu), the yin and yang balance is described as one of the most fundamental to human existence. Yin is the active, masculine element, and yang is the receptive, feminine side. This belief in active, positive masculinity and receptive, negative femininity underpinned a great deal of Chinese social norms under Confucianism, including medicine. Menstruation was treated holistically, part of the natural inferior experience of women. 

Yet in 2015, the $7.6 billion Chinese sanitary product market couches menstruation as something one can control completely by buying the right products. Tampons are stocked on supermarket shelves and adverts mirror western tampon ads. Western sanitary products first began to arrive in Shanghai in the 1920s. Rooted in larger changes in the political and social landscape in China in the 1920s, and Shanghai specifically, the turning point in the dialogue surrounding menstruation—to a medical reality, treatable with specific products—became a part of advertisements and the commodification of women’s hygiene.

Established during the Han Dynasty (206BCE - 220CE), Confucianism (rujia) has underpinned Chinese social guidelines for thousands of years. Confucianism puts filial piety (xiao) at the centre of social organization and behavior. Filial piety dictates family hierarchy, with elders and men superior to juniors and women. It also dictates the best way to organize a society. Within this, women are expected to be implicitly obedient (qu cong), fitting into a public persona designed and controlled by men. 

As society can be balanced by following the moral teachings of Confucianism, so can the human body by following Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM). TCM is still practiced today in the form of herbal and dietary treatments, but its origins are intricately linked with cosmology and Confucianism. The body consists of a network of channels through which qi energy travels. Pain and sickness are experienced when the body is deemed out of balance. Yin and yang need to be balanced to ensure one’s health. Following TCM, menstruation, known as “the monthly water,” is a means through which women’s bodies cleanse themselves from unhealthy imbalance. 

Blood is powerful, potentially life-giving and life-ending. According to TCM, the blood that gives life (blood shared by a pregnant mother and her unborn child) was understood to be positive and innately feminine. Blood that flows from the body (menstrual blood) is still feminine but also impure and, therefore, should be kept private. Because menstruation operates in this unclean and feminine dichotomy, the female body was “a symbol of filth” during menstruation. As women naturally have an excess of yang in their bodies, which interferes with blood flow, menstrual pain was seen to be caused by a failure of an individual to balance their body. Menstruation, evidence of imbalance, was very much a private matter that women were expected to deal with discretely through achieving a better balance in their own bodies.

In the 1920s, China went through a period of rapid, extreme modernization. Chen Duxiu was one of the founders of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in 1921 and a major revolutionary figure in the 1920s. He called on Chinese people to move away from old-fashioned “superstitions” of yin and yang. Instead, he looked to the West, championing “Mr. Science” (sai xiansheng) and "Mr. Democracy" (de xiansheng), proclaiming that China could not become a modern country without accepting Western science. 

By the 1930s, Shanghai was at the forefront of China’s new Republican identity as a hub for new intellectuals, new money, and new science. Among the social changes was the emerging independent, sexually liberated “modern woman.” This modern woman had her own economic buying power; she drank, wore makeup, bought new clothes, and provided a new target market for advertisements. 

In 1928, one of the first advertisements for sanitary pads in China appeared in Shanghai magazine “The Ladies’ Journal” (Funü zazhi). A Chinese woman dressed in a traditional qipao dress, but with a modern, western-style cropped haircut kneels by a suitcase. She holds a box of Kotex brand sanitary pads. The headline of the advert proclaims that “safety matters the most,” (anquan wei di yi). The suitcase and hairstyle present this woman as a well-travelled and modern woman, and her traditional dress shows she is still proudly Chinese. 

This advert illustrates two points: Modernism and Chineseness could exist hand in hand and menstruation should be treated as a matter of hygiene and medical safety. The message was clear; modern women required a “modern” way to deal with menstruation. This meant buying disposable products and adopting the “science of hygiene” (weisheng zhixue). Adopting new science meant forgetting old superstitions. Gone were the folk-remedies of old China and in came a new era of medical understanding. 

Through this new market for sanitary products, discourse about menstruation changed. To make their products seem desirable, advertisements for sanitary pads borrowed heavily from other marketing campaigns. Women in sanitary pad adverts are dressed in the same form-fitting clothes as women in Shanghai’s Calendar Posters (yuefenpai). Yuefenpai girls were used to sell not just the products on the posters but the very concept of a commodity-driven culture. They were desirable because of their femininity and modern appearances, and the popularity of Calendar Posters changed how women were portrayed in Chinese media. 

Although menstruation was still an innately feminine and largely private matter, public opinion began to change. The new narrative of weisheng zhixue countered traditional Confucian narratives of women’s bodies being inherently inferior. Modern women (as in advertisements) were active participants in society rather than passive Confucian wives and daughters. By using sanitary pads, women could continue to participate in society even during menstruation, negating the need to rest away from public view. 

How menstruation was seen transitioned from the Confucian spiritual concept of balancing the body to a (bloodier) normalization of women's bodies as physically distinct but not necessarily inferior from men's. However, the break from traditional gender control with access to modern sanitary products is evidence of a new, imported, patriarchy. And this one came with added colonialism. 

Through marketing products to women, entrepreneurial business owners in newly industrializing Chinese cities brought Chinese women into a new, different system of social control. Chinese women were told they needed to look younger, dress better, eat this, drink that, all to contribute to China’s growth. Women’s bodies became a new commodity and advertisement in themselves, with the Shanghai modern woman being something of a sexual goddess, bought, sold, and admired by men with money. “New” women had new access to gynecological medicine and sanitary products, but this came with increased eroticization and commodification of their bodies.

The political and social change that grew in Shanghai during the 1920s and 1930s gave women newfound freedoms and a new medical conceptualization of their “monthly waters.” Menstruation was increasingly viewed as a biological or medical phenomenon. Traditional Confucian patriarchal hierarchies in Chinese society, women’s bodies and bodily functions were challenged with the influx of new social ideas and technologies. Women’s bodies, however, quickly became adopted into the new methods of control. Disposable sanitary towels allowed women to participate more actively in society, but women were increasingly commodified and sexualized through advertisements. Despite the rapid changes in Chinese society, women’s bodies, menstruating or not, continue to struggle against the forces that attempt to buy, sell, or control them.

Further Reading

C. Furth, “A Flourishing Yin. Gender in China's Medical History, 960-1665” (1999) 

J. Weiss-Wolf, “Periods Gone Public: Taking a Stand for Menstrual Equity” (2017)

Lin, Shing‐ting. "‘Scientific’ Menstruation: The Popularisation and Commodification of   Female Hygiene in Republican China, 1910s–1930s." Gender & History 25, no. 2 (2013): 294-316. 

Image credit: Shanghai, 1930 (Wikimedia Commons | Public Domain)