With stained pants, senator fights menstruation taboo
The sight of a red bloodstain on Kenyan Senator Gloria Orwoba’s white pantsuit was so startling that a female security guard rushed over to hide it.
It was an accident, Orwoba said. Just before walking into parliament, she looked down to discover that she had been caught unprepared by her monthly period.
For a moment, she considered retreat. But then she thought about how the stigma around menstruation affects Kenyan women and girls and strode into the building. To those who noticed the stain, she explained she was making a statement.
It didn’t last long. Within minutes, colleagues in the senate became so uncomfortable that another female lawmaker petitioned the speaker to ask Orwoba to leave and change her clothes. Male colleagues agreed, calling the issue “taboo and private,” and Orwoba walked out.
Women make up less than a third of Kenya’s senators: 21 of 67.
A male colleague accused her of faking her accident in parliament, to which she replied in a local media interview
that “everyone would rather think it’s a prank, because if it is a prank then it’s acting and that way it doesn’t exist in the real world. Yet our girls are suffering.”
Whether or not Orwoba’s menstrual stain was an accident or a stunt, the controversy it has elicited shows the considerable stigma that surrounds women’s periods in Kenya and in many African countries.
Orwoba hasn’t been silenced. The incident last month has inspired considerable debate in Kenya about “period shaming” of women and the problem of the lack of access to sanitary pads for schoolgirls and others in many African countries.