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Anna Dahlqvist’s It’s Only Blood (Wits Press) shatters enduring taboos about menstruation

Across the world, two billion people experience menstruation, yet menstruation is seen as a mark of shame. We are told not to discuss it in public, that tampons and sanitary pads should be hidden away; the blood rendered invisible. In many parts of the world, poverty, culture and religion collide, causing the taboo about menstruation to have grave consequences.

Younger people who menstruate are deterred from going to school, adults from work. Infections are left untreated. The shame is universal and the silence a global rule.

In It’s Only Blood, Dahlqvist, above, tells the shocking but moving stories of why and how people from Sweden to Bangladesh, from the US to Uganda, are fighting back against the shame.

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