Impure
Gagandeep Kaur in Delhi tells us more about those huts where women are isolated because they’re menstruating.
Poornima Javardhan, 25, felt dread and trepidation as she got ready to spend five days in a gaokor – a hut outside her village where girls and women are banished during menstruation.
“During the rainy season, it is all the more difficult to stay in a gaokor because water comes inside and sometimes the roof leaks,” says Javardhan, who lives in Sitatola, a village in central India’s Maharashtra state. Each month, custom dictates that she must stay in the thatched hut on the edge of a forest, sometimes on her own, or, if she’s lucky, with another woman.
There are no kitchens, because bleeding women aren’t allowed to cook. A thick sheet on the ground is the only bed; during the day it’s folded to serve as a chair. The huts are isolated, so forest animals pay visits; there are reports of women dying from snakebites.
The practice of banishing women and girls is most prevalent among the Gond and Madiya ethnic groups. The Gonds are the largest indigenous group in central India and hail from the states of Maharashtra, Chhattisgarh, Andhra Pradesh and Orissa.
Girls miss school while they are in the huts. An estimated 23% of girls in India drop out of school when they start menstruating. “Many times a menstruating girl is unable to take her exams because of this practice. It means that few girls from this region study beyond matriculation [high school],” says Barsagade.
They have to stay there for five days.
There are two gaokors in Sitatola, home to about 20 families. Although there have been incidents of harassment, women are generally left alone because they are considered impure while they have their periods. There have been moves to improve the conditions of the gaokors, but not to end the practice.
It’s very important not to rape a woman when she’s impure. Keep that for when she’s not bleeding.
So in order to pass high school, you just need enough luck to never have a vital exam coincide with a period, or else you fail it and possibly the year. Not to mention the burden of study when about 20% of every month is spent in purgatory.
niddah in Judaism – “menstruating woman”; literally, “one who is excluded” or “expelled”
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/judaica/ejud_0002_0015_0_14825.html
Hopefully in Judaism not “put apart” in such physically dangerous circumstances.
Lots of stipulations in Judaism about avoiding a menstruating woman, not handling objects she has touched, because she is unclean. So in your workplace with women collaborators just how would this work? Janice and I are working on tight schedule and I need her results but … This does not compute.
*Why* isn’t there a movement to stop the custom? Surely about 50% of people have noticed from direct observation how senseless this is. (Although, while it’s terribly limiting, I imagine for some women, it’s a few days of peace and quiet where they aren’t expected to wait on others.)
This reminds me of the novel “The Red Tent”. Except that in it the women enjoyed their “time off” and the tent was a comfortable place to be.
This is the reality of that pretty little fantasy that “menstrual retreats” in history provided women with a comfortable place of relaxation and sisterhood while they underwent the discomfort of menstruation. I’ve read that nice idea several times in feminist revisionist histories.
I assume the women are either a) socialised to believe they deserve no better or b) denied the resources (including time and knowledge) to improve the huts themselves.
This is something that outside aid could do to improve women’s lives immediately: build warm, safe menstrual huts. It wouldn’t even be that expensive. Obviously the ideal is for the practice to end but it takes a while to effect cultural change at that level and maybe women could be dry and comfortable while social change takes its time.
Steamshovelmama: I concur. Triage is often necessary when dealing with massive social injustice–improving on an inherent injustice, even if it makes it somehow more acceptable to the masses, is occasionally necessary.