Gender & History ISSN 0953-5233
Shing-ting Lin, ‘‘Scientific’ Menstruation: The Popularisation and Commodification of Female Hygiene in Republican China, 1910s–1930s’
Gender & History, Vol.25 No.2 August 2013, pp. 294–316.
‘Scientific’ Menstruation: The Popularisation
and Commodification of Female Hygiene in
Republican China, 1910s–1930s
Shing-ting Lin
An advertisement for Kotex sanitary napkins (Figure 1) appeared in the May 1928
issue of the popular Shanghai magazine Ladies’ Journal (Funü zazhi, 1915–31). It
announced: ‘Women should follow doctors’ advice in matters of hygiene’ and attacked
the use of home-made menstrual cloths, describing them as ‘unhygienic rags’ that
imperilled women’s health. If they heeded their doctors, women would switch to the
Kotex sanitary belt, ‘born out of scientific advances and tested by medical professionals’. Fashioned from soft, comfortable, well-tailored and absorbent fabric, the product
was ‘undetectable’ and ‘disposable’, invented to ‘soothe and calm your mind’ while
eliminating odour. The advertisement ended by urging readers to ‘buy it immediately –
Kotex is now available in drugstores and department stores’.1
By 1928 such advertisements had become fairly common in popular women’s
magazines. Similar language was used to advertise products such as Modess, Tampax and a brand called ‘Comfort Sanitary Napkin and Belt’ (kangfu weishengmian
weishengdai).2 In tandem, an unprecedented number of articles about menstruation
appeared in the same magazines, all damning traditional Chinese menstrual care as
unhygienic. The writers advocated a combination of sterilised menstrual pads and
new ‘principles of menstrual management’ (yuejing baoyang zhi fa) that encompassed
diverse daily regimens of exercise, rest, bathing and handling of menstrual bleeding.
Under the newly introduced rubric ‘science of hygiene’ (weisheng zhi xue), such advice
wove management of women’s health into the fabric of everyday life. Women were
called upon to take care of their own bodies and take responsibility for their own health
as individual consumers.3
The eruption of this new discourse provoked instant reactions. In letters to the
editor, readers, both male and female, offered their take on menstruation and its ‘management’. Major women’s periodicals created advice columns on health and hygiene,
inviting readers to send in questions, especially about reproductive matters. Commentators and the general public were now describing bleeding, cramps, sex and sanitary
napkins with all the frankness long devoted to digestion and respiration. The confluence of events associated with modernity permitted laypersons to discuss the correct
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Figure 1: Ladies’ Journal (Funü zazhi) 14 (May and August 1928).
management of menstrual blood as an essential matter of female know-how. Such discussion relied on a mixture of terminologies and views from western sanitary science,
traditional Chinese medicine and indigenous customs. Multiple discourses emerged
and solidified, as words, ideas, practices and people from different traditions met on
the pages of popular magazines. All worked to define a new, fluid and contested realm:
‘female hygiene’ (funü weisheng).
This article examines the gendered implications of this public discourse on female
hygiene in Republican China. Through a close reading of articles and advertisements
from Ladies’ Journal and Women’s Eastern Times (Funü shibao, 1911–17), I shall
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analyse the passage of menstrual practices from ‘regulation’ (tiaojing) controlled by
physicians to the lively public discussion that normalised women’s bodies, shifting the
focus to their corporeal sensations and practical choices about the best product to absorb
menstrual discharges. What I find are multiple, hybrid discourses that precipitated a
confusion of boundaries between western sanitary science and Chinese medicine.
A language shared by biomedical writers and Kotex merchants emerged during the
Republican period, a way of thinking about the menstruating body that felt scientific
but failed to conform to the discourse of a single tradition. That language in-the-making
invited an outpouring of talk about menstruation into the popular press. Since Chinese
formulations of western medicine relied on terms and concepts drawn from the eastern
tradition, the discursive multiplicity was not based on the tension between ‘western
medicine’ and ‘Chinese tradition’ as two monolithic categories; rather, the two were in
a process of dynamic definition. In sum, the modern discourse of female hygiene was
neither Chinese nor western – a new understanding of health practice was emerging.4
Analysing the multiple meanings associated with the term ‘female hygiene’, I
have grounded my study in four broad concerns. First, I trace the history of public
menstrual discourse in Chinese medicine. There was considerable overlap between
traditional medicine and modern hygiene in matters of menstruation and menstrual
care. Instead of beginning in a discursive vacuum, Republican commentators built
on an existing vocabulary of female health. The similarities also call into question
any rigid separation between western sanitary science and Chinese medicine. At a
time when the biomedical understanding of anatomical gender had not yet become
hegemonic, female hygiene was a problematic category that found hybrid expressions
in the public media.
Second, my research is informed by, and in turn contributes to, studies of medicine
and hygiene in colonial settings. The China historian Ruth Rogaski has spoken of
‘hygienic modernity’, a time marked by a growing hegemony of biomedicine and
imperialist intervention in the public health of colonised peoples. The term weisheng,
in Rogaski’s analysis, demonstrated the reconfiguration of Chinese health practice
from ‘individual hygiene’ to ‘public health’ where the individual body became a part
of the national body in resistance to western imperialism.5 Subsequent studies have
subsumed the public discussion of menstruation under the logic of ‘strengthening the
nation’.6 The frameworks of imperialism and nationalism, as salutary as they are, end
up obscuring the female embodied experience as a legitimate subject of history. As this
article will show, ‘female hygiene’ stood for a rather fluid discursive space in which
individuals contributed to a pluralistic understanding of health and reproduction. To
be sure, the very existence of writings on hygiene attested to a widespread belief that
women were indispensable to Han Chinese racial continuity, and all agreed that the
state depended on the scientific observation and cultivation of the female reproductive
body. But by the 1920s, the popular discourse had shifted its focus from national
survival to individual behaviour, especially to the consumption of menstrual products.
Female hygiene had very little to do with the bureaucracy or national polity: hygienic
menstruation was exclusively directed at individual health practices in daily life.
My third goal is therefore to explore the interplay between female hygiene and
urban consumer culture. While the distribution of women’s journals like Ladies’ Journal reached as far as certain rural areas, the modern discourse of menstruation was
no doubt an urban phenomenon.7 As new ideas about menstrual health appeared,
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advertisers seized the moment to bridge three seemingly separate realms: the scientific
description of a physiological phenomenon (what is menstruation?), female corporeal
experience (what does menstruation feel like?) and consumer desire (what products can
help manage menstruation?). The spread of hygienic commodities permitted people –
mostly urban and literate women – to manage aspects of their own healthcare and suggested that medical care was more a service to be consumed than an obligation the state
had to its citizens. In other words, ‘female hygiene’ was less about state intervention
than a change in personal behaviour.
Finally, the early twentieth century saw significant shifts in ideas of and approaches to menstruation around the globe. Historian Lara Freidenfelds has illustrated
how the values of scientific and technological progress affected American women’s
behaviour and thinking.8 Ascendant consumerism also influenced bodily practice and
hygiene in the United States – and in colonial Africa too.9 But the reception of biomedical hygiene in China involved a different dynamic because of its particular historical,
material and cultural settings as well as the ways it drew on different epistemological
traditions. This article, therefore, relates the nascent discourse of female hygiene to
evolving Chinese medical thinking and its accommodation with global science and
markets in the twentieth century.
The argument that follows is divided into five sections. I begin by examining how
menstrual care was understood in earlier periods. Yin-yang cosmology informed the
medical writings of late imperial scholars, who prized ‘menstrual regularity’; a healthy
body was defined primarily in terms of the abundance and flow of bodily fluids, conceived as ‘vitalities’. The second section considers the introduction of new menstrual
knowledge in the Republican era. I show the multiplicity of discourses by highlighting
the debates among medical professionals. When advocates of western sanitary science
encountered practitioners of traditional Chinese medicine in the pages of women’s
popular magazines, there was little agreement on the nature of menstruation or how to
manage it. The third and fourth sections consider female hygiene as a form of ‘contested knowledge’ that foregrounded the role of individual sensory experiences. Those
who returned consistently to the ideal of ‘female hygiene’ devoted considerable effort
to maintaining a balance between mind and body: for them, the menstruating woman’s
subjective experience took precedence over other concerns. In the fifth section, I bring
advertising to centre stage, showing how appeals to consumers emerged along with the
popularisation of menstrual knowledge. In China, the birth of a discourse of ‘female
hygiene’ belongs to a larger history of gendered modernities, characterised by individual knowledge, bodily sensibility, consumption habits and the multiple, problematic
meanings that ‘public’ and ‘science’ have in any discussion of women’s private bodies.
Regulating yin and yang: menstrual care in late imperial China (1368–1911)
Few pre-modern documents say anything about how women dealt with menstrual
flow.10 Some medical authors suggested ways to dispose of the placenta and manage
birthing pollution, and pharmacologists did take an interest in the medicinal use of
menstrual blood and menstrual pads.11 Many ‘popular’ handbooks published in the
Qing period (1644–1911) correlated the appearance, colour and smell of menstrual
discharges with underlying disharmonies, but very few remarked on how one should
manage the menstrual fluids when they exited from the woman’s body.12 If publications
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from the 1910s and 1930s can be used to hazard a guess, it may be that rags torn into
strips or rough scraps of paper were used to collect menses.13 Many women probably
used nothing at all. A late Qing reformer named Wen Shilin (1870–1934) wrote,
‘During the autumn harvest, women also worked on the farm. The sight of their pants
with bloodstained crotches offended the eye’.14 But a modern bias coloured such
accounts, many of which appeared in medical journals, popular medical manuals and
women’s magazines, and we may never have an accurate picture of practices in the
late imperial period (1368–1911).
Yet menstruation was not invisible in imperial China; it was a symbol of female
distinctiveness, a marker of the overall economy of female bodily vitality. Chinese
medicine associated it with the cosmological dynamics of yin and yang, Blood (xie)
and qi (vital energy).15 The terms yin and yang stand respectively for negative and
positive, moon and sun, dark and light, cold and hot, water and fire, the feminine
and the masculine. As the overarching principle governing the pattern of changes in
phenomenal things, yin and yang regulate the growth and decline of the human body,
manifested as the paired primary body vitalities Blood and qi. Although everyone has
both a yin and a yang aspect, women have a preponderance of yin vital energy (yin
qi), materialised in Blood. The key to the female body was thus the flow of female
Blood, manifested as menstrual fluid, breast milk, the food passed to the foetus in the
womb and even as congealed abdominal menses. Menstrual blood was generally called
‘monthly water’ (yueshui), associated with the moon and the tides. The culmination
of yin and water, menstruation underlay reproductive functions, signifying the special
affinity between Blood and femaleness.16
As one of the most important and most easily observed manifestations of Blood,
menstruation served as an indispensable index of female health. Physicians of fuke
(gynaecology or ‘medicine for women’) from the fifth to thirteenth centuries had
explained menstrual disorder as a sign of an underlying dysfunction of Blood and
qi. For example, irregular menstrual flows might signal illness in the organs that
produce and regulate Blood. Scanty menstruation could result from Blood depletion
or congestion. Menstrual pain was closely related to stagnation of Blood, which, if
untreated, would lead to a potentially fatal blockage.17 Similarly, damage to any one
of these underlying functions might destabilise menses.
As historian Charlotte Furth has shown, the principle that ‘women are governed by
Blood’ was established by Song dynasty (960–1279) medical practitioners.18 Although
this trend was modified after the thirteenth century, the idea that menstruation was the
cornerstone of women’s health remained salient. Gynaecological texts conventionally
began with an essay on menstrual regularity. In his Complete Ancient and Modern
Medical Compendium (Gujin yitong daquan, 1556), for example, Xu Chunfu pointed
to menstrual regularity as the index of a woman’s general health: ‘If the menses are
not regulated then all kinds of disorders will succeed each other, becoming so severe
that they cannot be cured’.19
Such associations ensured that ‘menstrual regulation’ (tiaojing) assumed a central
role in male physicians’ treatment of their female patients.20 The herbal compounds
used to correct menstrual irregularities were presented prominently in medical texts
such as the influential Comprehensive Compendium of Good Formulas for Women
(Furen daquan liangfang, 1237), which stated: ‘In treating illness in women, one must
first regulate the menses’.21 Learned physicians offered individually crafted formulas
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for the treatment of irregular timing, consistency, colour or volume rather than for the
immediate treatment of pain, which tended to be seen as a by-product of functional
imbalances.22 They used medicinal teas and pills to ‘vivify’ (huo), ‘activate’ (tong) and
occasionally ‘disperse’ (san) the Blood. Efforts to ‘regulate the menses’ were applied
as preventive medicine, ensuring fertility and general good health.
The same texts that offered suggestions on menstrual regulation also advised
against exposure to cold, anger, stress or overwork during one’s period. The Imperially
Compiled Golden Mirror of Medical Learning (Yuzuan yizong jinjian, 1742) ascribed a
range of female disorders to invasions of pathogenic ‘cold wind’ (feng leng). Coldness
in the form of wind attack was assumed to enter via the womb or mouth, causing
stagnation as menstrual blood moved through the body. Women were warned against
contact with cold water and ‘cold foods’ – those cold in temperature (leng) as well
as those cold in their essential nature (liang xing) – such as ice, melons and certain
vegetables.23 In addition to their susceptibility to external forces, women were portrayed as prone to emotional instability that could cause menstrual disorders from the
inside out. For example, the seclusion that upper-class women endured could induce
pent-up feelings and excessive anger, impairing the regulation of menstrual Blood,
which in turn triggered illnesses.
In sum, the imperative to ‘regulate menses’ did not concentrate just on the menstrual flow itself but tackled a woman’s physical and emotional well-being during
the period of time surrounding menses.24 At a more fundamental level, female health
depended on the easy circulation, reliable periodicity and free flow of Blood vitality,
grounded in the balance of yin and yang. In a healthy woman, menstruation should
cause no bodily distress. But in a sickly woman, menses might imply a potentially
dangerous condition where the healthy balance was upset: a very strong yin influence
flowed in her body. A physician was expected to ‘observe meticulously the etiology [of
menstrual disorders]’ (xi shen qi yin) and ‘adjust his treatment to different symptoms’
(an zheng tiao zhi).25 Far from being a limited ‘technique’, the principles for regulating
menses constituted an entire topic of scholarly study.26
The menstrual discourse of the late imperial era did not simply vanish with the
advent of western biomedicine in the early twentieth century. As I shall show, the measures advocated by Ming and Qing physicians concerning irregular menstrual cycles
closely resembled some of the regimens proposed by their Republican counterparts,
and what ambiguity suffused the Republican discussion of menstruation had much to
do with the enduring use of yin-yang terminology. But attitudes did change. As discussed above, the fuke texts did not address the routine disposal of normal menstrual
fluids. Several anthropologists have ascribed this silence to the taboo against blood
pollution.27 Also, medical literature aimed at describing how to deal with aberrations
and routine maintenance may have been viewed as too trivial to record. The manipulations that female healers and midwives, accustomed to close physical involvement
with their patients, employed during childbirth, had long been criticised by fuke writers,
who denigrated manual methods.28 Unconcerned with how to manage menstrual fluids,
these men did not consider the state of menstrual pads a factor in women’s health.
To be sure, adjusting menstrual flow may have been considered a very different
matter from using a cloth to absorb normal menses, and one would expect a doctor’s
advice on the former. The use of menstrual pads treated as one important aspect of
female health was never self-evident; nor does the present study set out to argue that
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Republican-era doctors were fated to make up for the absence of hands-on technique
in fuke texts. What I would like to suggest, instead, is that the idea of routine health
practices, once dispersed through the private, practical realm, moved into public forums
in the twentieth century. In fact, one important aspect of the emergent discourse
on female hygiene was the incorporation of the practical management of menstrual
fluids into a broader discussion of female health. In taking menstrual care public,
the representatives of western science created a hybrid discourse, jumbling together
highly divergent images of the female body. The result, a multicultural Janus, stands
as a striking metaphor for China’s colonial modernity.
Modern menstruation
During the 1910s and 1930s, a discussion of women’s health saturated China’s public
media to an unprecedented degree. From treatises on pregnancy to pamphlets on birth
control, hundreds of gynaecological publications were printed over two decades. The
vigorous circulation network that sent newspapers and magazines into the majority
of literate households provided women with articles on menstruation written for lay
readers. Contributing to this phenomenon were the rise of publishing houses that
relied on modern technology, the construction of a modern education system after
the abolition of the imperial examination system in 1905 and the general increase in
functional literacy.29
Among the popular periodicals of the day aimed at female readers, the Ladies’
Journal and Women’s Eastern Times stood out.30 They provided a forum in which
representatives of western science promoted a modern understanding of women’s
reproductive health. In 1911, Women’s Eastern Times published its first series of
articles on this subject. The author was Qu Jun (1888–1960, courtesy name Shaoheng),
a physician who had graduated from Osaka Prefectural Medical School (later Osaka
University) in 1910.31 As a specialist in gynaecology and obstetrics, he had a fine
understanding of menstruation and believed in the paramount importance of ‘female
hygiene’ (furen weisheng).32 Articles on this topic appeared in Ladies’ Journal in
1915.33 The first specialist article came out seven years later, when a doctor of medicine
(yixueshi) named Hu Dingan wrote an article about female ailments, urging his readers
to maintain the highest standard of genital hygiene.34
Qu Jun’s article appeared at the moment when the popular understanding of
health and the human body was undergoing a drastic reconfiguration. The arrival of
biomedical knowledge from Europe and Japan permitted Qu to describe menstruation
as the excretion of useless waste from the reproductive economy; he wrote, ‘There is no
need for our Chinese women to feel ashamed of their unclean state . . . Menstruation
should not be considered filthy; it is a human physiological function [shengli de
zuoyong]’.35 According to Qu, menstrual bleeding was closely associated with the
coordination of the ovaries, fallopian tubes and uterus: ‘The ovum emerges from the
ovary and passes through the fallopian tube to the uterus . . . Blood suffuses the
mucous membrane of the uterus, rupturing its minute blood vessels’.36 His description
matched many others that appeared at the time in specialist and popular contexts. A
contributor to the Ladies’ Journal, for example, wrote that menstruation was ‘caused
by the maturation of the egg-pearl [luanzhu], which precipitates an accumulation of
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blood in the uterus. Menstrual fluid is released when the uterus’s internal and external
orifices [neiwaikou] grow congested and rupture’.37 Still another writer commented,
‘Menstruation is the phenomenon of uterine bleeding; it is also a sign that an egg cell
[luan xibao] has matured’.38
Talk not only of cells (unknown to traditional Chinese medicine) but of the
specific mechanics of the female sexual organs lent the new scientific discourse a
remarkable power.39 As western scientists had done in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries, Chinese popularisers of the new discourse cast the ovary and the uterus as
the female body’s two major organs, tracing the production of menses to them. The
use of such synonyms as ‘egg-pearl’ (luanzhu), ‘ovum’ (luanzi) and ‘egg cells’ (luan
xibao) suggests a close relationship between menstruation and the cyclical activities
of the ovum, a microscopic human egg. All suggested a more anatomical approach
to women’s reproductive health – menstruation resulted from the activity of specific
female genitalia – with no obvious connection to the yin-yang economy of the holistic
body.
But the advent of a new model did not eliminate all traces of China’s indigenous
medical tradition. As the debate between Chinese and western medicine was reaching
its climax, representatives of the former camp presented their opinions on menstruation
in the popular press.40 Wang Shenxuan, a well-known practitioner of Chinese medicine,
specialising in fuke, established the Journal for Women’s Medicine (Funü yixue zazhi)
in 1927.41 With most of its contents produced by the doctors and students of the Suzhou
Medical Society for Women’s Medicine (Suzhou nüke yishe), the journal addressed such
topics as the theory of ‘medicine for women’, the clinical treatment of gynaecological
maladies and the propagation of hygienic knowledge for women.
A female student of Chinese medicine wrote an article for the journal in 1928,
comparing the different perspectives on menstruation of western biomedicine and
China’s indigenous tradition. Referring to a passage from the ancient Chinese medical
classic Inner Canon of the Yellow Emperor (Huangdi neijing), she argued that ‘prenatal vitalities’ (tiangui) and menses (yuejing) should be considered different things.42
Another writer similarly suggested that menses were only ‘the excreta of the uterus’,
something quite different from the phrase ‘prenatal vitalities’ in the canonical texts.43
Still another writer used biomedical terms to explain why menses was not ‘prenatal
vitalities’, for the latter were equated with the ‘egg-pearl’ produced by the ‘ovary’
(luanchao).44
In addition to the original articles written by Chinese physicians, another important source of information came from the translation of western health pamphlets.
‘Sex Knowledge for Women’ (Nüzi zhi xing de zhishi) was serialised in the Ladies’
Journal from March to September 1923. This was a translation of an American popular health manual, William Robinson’s Sex Knowledge for Women and Girls: What
Every Woman and Girl Should Know (1917), and it laid out the basics of women’s
reproductive physiology, addressing such topics as menstrual disorders, conception,
pregnancy, childbirth and the care of newborns.45 Selected anatomical illustrations
(some differed from those in the American original) helped readers understand the
relationships between menstruation, ovulation and pregnancy.46 The other significant
work, translated from a British health manual, appeared in Ladies’ Journal in twelve
instalments in 1924. ‘A New Discussion of Female Hygiene’ (Funü weisheng xinlun)
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presented ‘female hygiene’ as a set of newly created principles of menstrual care,
prenatal care and parenting. These two works provoked an enthusiastic response from
readers, which I shall discuss in some detail below. The articles’ reception convinced
the magazines’ publishers to issue them as individual pamphlets.47
As the traces of a debate surfaced in the pages of magazines and more academic
journals, clarifying the differences between different viewpoints, all parties seemed to
agree that menstruation should be considered in terms of its material aspects. Westerntrained medical professionals and practitioners of Chinese medicine who were now
addressing a large audience took up a new lexicon to describe the cycle of physiological
changes. As the terminology of scientific knowledge met and mingled with familiar
Chinese idioms, Chinese translators and writers pasted old labels onto new bottles.
In ‘Sex Knowledge for Women’, for example, the translator Wei Xin employed
such Chinese terms as yueshi (‘monthlies’), yuexin (‘monthly messages’), tiangui
(‘prenatal vitalities’) and xinshui (‘water of the [monthly] messages’) to translate the
word ‘menstruation’.48 In an attempt to explain what menstrual irregularity (yuejing
bushun) was, biomedical writer Jing Ren used the terms ‘quarterly’ (jujing), ‘seasonal’
(anji) and ‘yearly’ (binian), taken from the Compendium of Materia Medica (Bencao
gangmu), an influential pharmaceutical classic completed in 1578.49 Those familiar
with traditional Chinese medicine would have encountered these terms in the late
imperial fuke texts. In regard to variations in menstrual frequency, for example, the
eighteenth-century Imperially Compiled Golden Mirror of Medical Learning stated,
‘Women who menstruate monthly are normal [chang] . . . but those who menstruate
every two months [are also normal]; this is called “bimonthly” [bingyue]. Women who
menstruate every three months are called “quarterly”. Those who menstruate every
year are called “yearly”’.50
It is clear that in traditional Chinese medicine such terms as yueshi, xinshui and
the like defined menstruation in terms of its temporality, as something that happened
on a monthly basis (as the English term ‘menstruation’ derived from a Latin root for
‘monthly’). By contrast, the biomedical writers intended to reconfigure the meaning
of menstruation in terms of its material aspects, as something discharged from the
woman’s reproductive organs. While it is beyond the scope of this article to explore how
Wei Xin and Jing Ren responded to these old terms, we can assume that Republicanera science writers occasionally dipped into a distinctly old-fashioned lexicon. The
terminological diversity suggests that there was no single ‘western medicine’ that was
different from and dominant over ‘Chinese medicine’, and no single view of traditional
practices as unhygienic and unfit. What we find when we look closely at the articles
appearing in the Chinese press in the 1910s and 1930s is an oscillation between
references to ‘organs’ and ‘cells’ and the language of yin-yang theory.
Whatever the extent of the influence of traditional fuke on the reception of modern
science, the dominant theme for the latter is menstrual normality. ‘Sex Knowledge for
Women’ described the length of each cycle as twenty-eight days and the length of
active menstruation as three to five days, two to five days and even two to seven days.
The quantity of fluid excreted during each period was also estimated.51 Writers rendered menstruation observable, measurable and quantifiable as a normal physiological
process confined to the specific functions inherent in individual organs and cells. At
the same time, however, dividing up the menstrual cycle into different stages highlighted a discursive multiplicity shaped by various medical traditions. As practitioners
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of Chinese medicine insisted that women’s periods offered unique indexes of latent
reproductive diseases, Qu Jun and other advocates of biomedicine wanted a detailed
atlas of the bodily condition specific to the menstruating woman, and they encouraged
their readers to meticulously observe their feelings and emotions over the course of
their cycle. The menstruating woman’s experiences, including her bodily and mental
states, were viewed as the keys to preventing menstrual disorders. As a result, ‘female
hygiene’, as the preventive measures came to be called, embraced a long-standing
preoccupation with menstruation as the linchpin of women’s health, elaborating upon
its variability as an essential aspect of human individuality.
Contesting female hygiene in the menstruating body
Advocates of western sanitary science shared with late imperial fuke specialists a
view of the menstruating body as essentially variable and vulnerable. In his 1911
article, Qu Jun remarked, ‘Menstrual cycles vary considerably in length and volume
among women with different physiques’.52 He scrupulously described the process of
menstruation, including the ranges in cycle length, volume of fluid lost and days of
bleeding. He pointed out that some menstruating women suffered from menorrhagia
(excessive blood loss) and anaemia, and some experienced abdominal pain, headaches
and neural disturbances.
The same attitude appeared in ‘Sex Knowledge for Women’:
In many girls and women, menstruation is a perfectly normal physiological process. They suffer
no discomfort whatever from it. They suffer no pains, no headache, no irritability; they have no
awareness of its onset until they feel the blood oozing or trickling out. But, unfortunately, this is
true only of a small percentage – the majority of women have some unpleasant symptoms. Some
have a headache for a day or two; some complain of frustration; some are irritable, feel depressed
or hopeless; some have no appetite, no ambition, no desire to work or see company; and some girls
have such severe pain and cramping that they are obliged to go to bed for a day or two and call in
medical aid.53
Details such as ‘a slight pain or at least a feeling of discomfort is present in most cases
of menstruation’ (my emphases) contribute to an ‘integrated’ model that combined
physical and psychological components in one explanatory framework.
Employing the same rhetoric, Qu Jun cautioned, ‘The female menstruating body
is easily irritated’.54 Several bodily syndromes and emotional states were enumerated: tenderness of the breast, toothache, backache, sentimentality, irritability and a
proneness to catching cold. In what sounded like echoes of days gone by, advocates
of western sanitary science stated, ‘Most female maladies arise due to negligence at
the onset of menstruation, during parturition and throughout the postpartum period’.55
They went to great lengths to warn readers that ‘you cannot be too careful, as your body
is keenly sensitive during menstruation’.56 The concern with vigilance and carefulness
reveals that although menstruation was declared again and again a natural physiological function, vulnerability remained very much on the minds of the writers. Like
traditional medical texts, the modern scientific discourse denied that menstruation was
a disease while warning that a failure to take appropriate measures every month could
lead to deviations that in turn might trigger incurable diseases.57
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Public advocates prescribed a range of measures to protect women’s health. The
key principle was ‘bodily care and nourishment’ (baoyang, literally ‘maintenance
and cultivation’). This meant an emphasis on physical and mental protection during
monthly cycles. Rest and cleanliness were the watchwords, although they could mean
a variety of things. Anjing, literally ‘quieting down’, could entail moderate exercise
and rest, a special diet or clothing, avoidance of cold and reduction of anxiety.
Most advice columnists drew up long lists of ‘don’ts’. For example, advocates of
western sanitary science generally insisted on rest during the first two or three days of
menstruation. A woman’s body, they argued, needed time to become accustomed to a
new experience. Physical tasks had, at the very least, to be rendered as light as possible,
‘Everything in the way of physical and mental exertion should be avoided’.58 But lying
down in bed all day was also considered harmful to health. Qu Jun cautioned women
against sedentary lifestyles that might result in torpid circulation.59 The translation
of an American health handbook for the Ladies’ Journal invoked feminism as part
of an argument that women usually did not need to rest during their periods.60 ‘A
New Discussion of Female Hygiene’ cautioned against extreme exercise but did not
recommend complete rest or abstinence from normal work and recreation. The author
concluded, ‘A woman in perfect health should feel no need to deviate from her ordinary
duties, and no additional rest need be taken during the first few days of menstruation’.61
A number of writers ostensibly committed to modern western hygiene adopted
elements of the older discourse of menstrual vulnerability, particularly the concern with
‘catching wind and cold’ (shou fenghan). Quite a few partisans of western sanitary
science discussed the threat of ‘wind’ and ‘cold’, but the ways they used the terms and
the meanings they assigned to them were diverse. The first camp retained the archaic
terms from the medical classics. For example, Qu Jun noted that menstruating women
were ‘susceptible to catching the wind damage’ (yiyu shangfeng), advising them to
wear more clothes than usual.62 In another article, he wrote that a girl at her menarche
should avoid ‘catching pathogenic cold’ (shou han).63 Zhen He warned women against
the ‘wind and cold damages’ (fenghan) because ‘low resistance to disease during
menstruation makes them vulnerable to being afflicted by “cold” [ganmao], a main
cause of various diseases’.64
While the authors of western hygiene literature generally worried about menstruating women being exposed to ‘chills’ or ‘catching cold’ that supposedly precipitated
or worsened cramps and could halt the flow prematurely, such terms as shangfeng,
shou han, fenghan and ganmao seem to have had a broader definition that cannot be
simply translated as ‘chills’ or ‘common cold’ in English. Commonly seen in Chinese
medical texts such as the Comprehensive Compendium of Good Formulas for Women
and the Imperially Compiled Golden Mirror of Medical Learning, these terms broadly
suggested an important category of ‘cold damage’ diseases attributed to pathological
cold that encompassed a wide range of ailments from fatal febrile epidemics to upper
respiratory distress.65
Some other advocates of western sanitary science associated ‘catching wind and
cold’ with the threat of pathogens entering through the vagina. Those who linked cold
and wind with abnormal vaginal discharges and reproductive diseases reproduced the
fuke etiology of menstrual disorders. As mentioned earlier, traditional medicine had it
that exposure to pathogenic forces in the environment (i.e. wind and cold) could cause
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menstrual blood to congeal, just as the ‘cold wind’ caused the bodily Blood to stagnate.
But modern authors replaced the archaic language with scientific terminology. Consider
Shen Fang’s comment, ‘Exposure to wind and cold, even brief, will cause inflammation
of the uterus’.66 Zhen He explained that this inflammation occurred because ‘the uterine
orifice opens widely during the menses, making it easier for pathogens [bingyuanti] in
infected water to invade the body’.67 While the neologism used to translate ‘pathogen’
(the cause of disease in biomedicine) occurs here, its activity is strikingly similar to
the wind and cold of fuke.68 This reveals that scientific, and particularly anatomical,
vocabulary was still somewhat flexible and could be combined with traditional terms
and ideas. The female hygiene prescribed in popular women’s magazines was neither
strictly Chinese nor western: a new concept of health practice was emerging.
Long-established ideas about health along with influences from western hygiene
literature can also be seen in the discussion of menstrual psychology.69 Again, while
the logic involved may be different, the acknowledgment of emotional influences on
menstrual weakness appeared in both scientific articles and fuke texts. In order to ‘quiet
down both the physical body and the mind’, modern medical writers suggested a diet
of light and easily digested fare instead of alcoholic beverages and spicy foods, seen
as contributing to menstrual illness.70 What a woman wore during menses also had
to be considered, since a corset or any other sort of binding clothing might increase
abdominal pressure and result in the combined physical and mental symptoms of
fatigue, headache, impatience and melancholy.71
Advocates of western sanitary science generally accepted the integration of ‘menstrual mood’ into their explanatory framework. Acknowledging the importance of
maintaining a healthy balance between body and mind tended to dissolve the stark
dichotomies between ‘traditional China’ and the ‘modern west’. Sean Hsiang-lin Lei
has observed that the introduction of western hygiene to twentieth-century China was
built to a large extent upon two models: the bug that harbours pestilential disease and
the body as a machine.72 In general, psychological factors were neglected. Yet Chinese
practitioners – whether trained in biomedicine or traditional Chinese medicine – responded to this materialism with a renewed emphasis on regulating thoughts, emotions
and desires – which was drawn from the Chinese tradition of yangsheng (nurturing
life). Lei certainly did not assume that east and west offered utterly incommensurable
approaches to the promotion of mental hygiene; instead, he set out to show that those
who promoted western hygiene in China presented it in a form that incorporated many
specifically Chinese attributes.73 As indicated above, the focus on body-mind balance
in the scientific accounts of menstruation reveals how Chinese biomedical writers endeavoured to place physical hygiene and mental hygiene on an equal footing. While
it is difficult to discern the extent to which the Chinese tradition had influenced their
point of view, because discussion of ‘menstrual moods’ also existed in western medical literature, we can certainly see a dynamic process between the two.74 Anyone who
promoted exercise, a balanced diet, what today we call ‘anger management’ and moderation in exposure to the elements – not too hot, not too cold – was neither far from
western medicine nor from the Chinese tradition of self-cultivation, which claimed
that unhealthy habits would upset the body-mind balance.
But these similarities should not lead us to the hasty conclusion that modern female
hygiene never broke with the past; traditional words and wisdom were incorporated
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into the newer discourse only once they had passed muster. For example, the concern
with ‘catching wind and cold’ sounds like advice from an old-timer who thought that
being infected with ‘cold wind’ would impede the circulation of Blood. However, as
discussed above, a close reading shows that the language in which the injunction was
expressed was somewhat equivocal, a zone for contention among various knowledge
traditions. Like Lei, I argue that the arrival in China of ‘female hygiene’ precipitated
a confusion of boundaries between western sanitary science and Chinese medicine.
While western concepts had swept into the pages of women’s magazines, they did
not entirely replace older ideas. Scientific vocabulary, particularly the biomedical
lexicon, was still flexible, a macaronic language of old and new. As a result, neither
biomedicine nor traditional Chinese medicine was able to define its own borders: the
discursive multiplicity revealed a two-sided process of dynamic definition.
To be sure, female hygiene was a new idea based on scientific knowledge from the
west, but in the first third of the twentieth century the modern biomedical understanding
of health and diseases had yet to take root. This rendered hygiene a problematic
category that found hybrid expression in the public media. More profoundly, the
multiple meanings assigned to hygienic menstruation underscored the fluidity of the
nascent discourse; female hygiene was both part of and quite distinct from the broader
field of individual health. Because of the vulnerability and variability of the menstrual
body, women were advised to monitor their physical pain and the unusual emotions
summoned by menstruation, and they were offered a variety of self-treatments from
which to choose. Modern menstrual discourse thus created an alternative epistemology
for the ordering of the female body: female hygiene was as much about preventing
reproductive illness as it was about the ability of individual women to understand their
own bodies. Moreover, it was about how to sense and physically engage with their
bodies in daily life.
Bodily sensations and menstrual ‘know-how’ in everyday life
Those who returned consistently to the ideal of ‘female hygiene’ devoted considerable
effort to maintaining the body-mind balance on a daily basis. As public advocates
insisted, the primary locus for menstrual care was everyday life. ‘Sex Knowledge for
Women’ instructed girls to douche with warm water every morning and evening.75
Moderate exercise and proper rest were the guidelines. Bi Xia reminded menstruating
women of possible deviations from the normal ‘attitudes of spiritual life’.76 Women
were expected to be conscious of the cyclical changes in their bodies and maintain a
steady emotional balance.
For modern medical writers, female hygiene was as much about living a healthy
life as it was about the ability to sense and manage the body. More practically, they
associated routine health practices with bodily sensations that generated a unique
form of ‘how-to’ knowledge.77 Take the example of bathing, descriptions of which
usually invoked the sense of smell. ‘Sex Knowledge for Women’ suggested douching to
eliminate the ‘decidedly offensive odour’ supposedly caused by decomposed menstrual
blood. To eliminate the smell, the author gave detailed instructions on how to wash
the genitals with a shower of water: ‘The douche may consist of two quarts of water
in which has been dissolved a teaspoonful of common table salt, or a tablespoonful
of borax or boric acid. Such things as alum, potassium permanganate, carbolic acid,
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lactic acid, or tincture of iodine should only be used when leucorrhoea is present, and
generally only under a physician’s directions’.78 In addition to smell, some medical
writers expressed a concern about bath temperature, stressing the importance of testing
the water. Taking a cold or overheated bath during menstruation was considered not
merely harmful to health but also ‘a violation of the rules of hygiene’.79
All this information about washing was imparted in a straightforward prescriptive
tone. Ingredients for the douche were itemised and instructions for applying them were
given, together with suggestions as to how the senses of smelling and touch could help in
preserving hygiene. While the ideas of ‘cleanliness’ or ‘avoiding wind and cold’ might
have loomed large in the writers’ minds, they seldom offered theoretical explanations.
Instead they proposed a unique form of ‘how-to’ knowledge that associated health
practice with bodily sensations. This embodied, practical knowledge took form as
women carried out everyday health routines.
The emphases on bodily senses and knowledge of practice stood out especially
when medical writers talked about hygienic equipment. Compared to the silence or
vagueness in traditional Chinese medical texts on the subject of menstrual flow and its
disposal, modern biomedical writers described a range of home-made cloths and commercially available products. Format (the size and the shape) and texture (dependent
upon the fabric used) were two important considerations. Qu Jun instructed his readers
to employ a sponge, completely sterilised and secured by a cloth folded in a diaper
shape. He had no patience for Chinese-made napkin pads composed of ‘coarse and
hard’ cloth, which failed to protect the skin of the perineum.80 Other writers disparaged home-made menstrual cloths as ‘filthy’, ‘coarse’ and ‘prone to scraping women’s
private parts’; they argued that menstrual pads should be made of a ‘soft, absorbent
material’.81
Zhen San, on the other hand, criticised the manufactured sanitary pads and belts
for having a ‘larger coverage area’ (apparently unfit for Chinese women) that could
accelerate the decomposition of sweat and menstrual blood, producing unpleasant
odours.82 Zhen offered detailed instructions on how to make menstrual pads, ‘Use
sterilised or salicylic acid cotton wool, three or four centimetres long, to press against
the part [i.e. the vulva]. Fasten it in the crotch with a cotton belt folded into a T-shape.
Fix the device at the waist, using lengths of string at front and rear’.83 Equally important
was using the pads correctly, ‘When experiencing an excessive loss of blood, change
[the pad] two or three times a day. The used pad was discarded’.84 In sum, the ideal
menstrual pad was well-tailored, sterilised and made of fine materials. Surprisingly,
most writers expressed greater concern for health hazards resulting from poor fitting
or coarse materials than from a lack of sterilisation.
As in their advice on bathing, writers highlighted the importance of bodily sensations in managing menstrual bleeding. Most conspicuous was their appeal to the
practicalities of hygiene. Despite the association with the biomedical idea of ‘cleanliness’ and germ theory, menstrual pads and their use were described in a very mundane,
practical way. Instead of invoking the theories of sanitary science or late imperial fuke,
writers offered highly technical details on how to ‘do’ female hygiene. For them, it
was as important for women to ‘know’ their bodies as it was to ‘sense’ and ‘deal with’
their bodies.
The emphasis on individual women’s experiences, which appeared in all of the
multiple menstrual discourses in the popular media, demonstrates how hygiene was
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gendered in early twentieth-century China. First, female hygiene was strictly individual; it considered how a woman ate, rested, exercised and bathed in daily life. Without
so much as alluding to the state administration of public health, the phrase ‘female
hygiene’ was reserved for attending to the flow of menstrual blood, a set of actions
in which the individual experiences of life and the sense of personal responsibility
were equally significant. Second, the discussion of menstrual ‘know-how’ shows how
the concepts of women’s ‘health’ and ‘care’ were reconfigured to reflect a growing
concern with ‘doing’. Although the discourse of female hygiene was in many ways
reminiscent of that of late imperial fuke, the association between the practices of ‘body
care’ (for example, bathing and using menstrual pads) and the preservation of health
was essentially a modern invention. As a result, the term ‘female hygiene’ represented
a process in which daily self-care activities were incorporated into a new conceptual
basis of approaches to health; it also illustrated a movement from private discussions
among women to public discussions in the press.
Rogaski has spoken of ‘hygienic modernity’, that era marked by a growing hegemony of biomedicine and imperialist interventions in the public health of colonised
peoples.85 The state set out to protect the general health of its citizens, transforming
them into the healthy constituents of the national body. The term weisheng, revived by
Meiji Japan and applied to a set of concepts and practices new to East Asia, facilitated
this transformation, becoming essential to the branch of government investigating individual sanitary habits.86 However, ‘female hygiene’ had little to do with bureaucracy.
When consumer culture began to flourish, these new sets of individual health routines
were further reconfigured as an alternative logic for consumerism. As discussed below,
menstrual hygiene was transformed from doing into buying.
Consuming female hygiene: popular attitudes and marketing strategies
As experts forged a new menstrual language and set of practices, non-experts helped
define female hygiene. Some began to see it as an explanation for the superiority of
biomedicine – they had accepted at face value the new model of menstruation. Others
took elements of this new notion of hygiene, evaluated their usefulness and grafted them
onto traditional ideas, which they considered just as effective in preserving women’s
health. The lack of a single, unified consensus on the meaning or importance of this
knowledge circulating in popular discourse ensured that no dominant understanding
of female hygiene emerged in early twentieth-century China.
Consider the letter a reader wrote to Ladies’ Journal in 1930, an inquiry to the
‘Advice Columns on Medicine and Hygiene’ (Yishi weisheng guwen):
I am a twenty-year-old woman, and I had my first period at fourteen. In the last two or three years,
during the first day or two of my period, I have had a sore waist and an aching back, a throbbing
pain in my lower abdomen, weakness in my legs, and a slight genital pain when urinating. But after
the third day these miseries disappear, and I’m as healthy as usual. Are [the symptoms] caused by
the cold bath I take and the fruit I eat at the beginning of each period?’87
At first glance, this passage simply echoes the scientific theme of menstrual normality. The reader was obviously very clear about certain ‘standards’ for determining
whether she had a normal menstrual cycle or not. She declared her current age and her
age at the onset of menses. Both implied that she, according to scientific standards,
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was capable of reproduction. A close reading, moreover, reveals her awareness of
bodily sensations during menstruation. This reader offered a vivid sketch of discomfort, which conjured up the menstrual symptoms enumerated by public advocates like
Qu Jun. Finally, her concerns about cold baths and eating fruit also appeared in late
imperial fuke, which held that cold water and raw fruit would cause Blood to stagnate.
The physician who responded used his scientific understanding of anatomy, suggesting
that the cause might be a prolapsed uterus. Exposure to cold water and diet were ruled
out as contributing factors. In spite of such rigid attitudes, some articles in the Ladies’
Journal written by proponents of western medicine did address the dangers of ‘cold’,
clearly related to concerns raised in traditional Chinese medicine.88 Such passages
are further evidence of the hybrid and contested epistemological boundaries of female
hygiene.
Popular discussions also revealed a growing sense of hygienic practicality. Few
women asked about how to use commercial products to collect menstrual blood,
but dozens asked how to deal with menstrual blood in their daily lives. ‘Is it all
right’, one woman asked, ‘to use sanitised cotton [yaomian] or cloths [yaobu] to
wash the genital area with boiled water, Ivory soap, or water and boric acid?’89 Some
readers employed the new lexicon to ask whether, ‘in terms of hygiene’, a regular
bath during menstruation ‘was beneficial or harmful’ (duiyu weisheng shang youwu
libi).90 And questions about the effectiveness of patent medicines were framed in
terms of Chinese medical theories; the answers of the physician usually revealed
a professional anxiety vis-à-vis indigenous traditions.91 The resulting multiplicity
of popular discourses pointed to the transformation of meanings of ‘health care for
women’ in twentieth-century China. In a uniquely Chinese hybrid form, elements
associated with female hygiene shifted from an earlier notion of ‘menstrual regulation’
to an emphasis on individualism and daily health practices.
The reconfiguration of female hygiene was inevitably intertwined with a burgeoning consumer culture. Commercial menstrual products were first sold in Shanghai and
Hangzhou at the beginning of the 1920s.92 The advertising campaign for Kotex sanitary
napkins, starting in the mid-1920s, did not rely on vague euphemisms: something ‘unhealthy and home-made’ was being replaced with ‘new, scientific and sanitary’ pads
that absorbed fluid and could be discarded. The hygienic standards of modern health
would be maintained since, as the advertisement pointed out, using a makeshift bandage
more than once could endanger reproductive health. Moreover, Kotex advertisements
usually employed medical authorities to lend the product a dependable, salubrious and
hygienic air. When Kimberly-Clark, the manufacturer of the Kotex line, first launched
this campaign in Ladies’ Journal in 1928, the repeated invocation of the sanitary qualities of disposable products found explicit reinforcement in the popular science articles
appearing alongside the advertisements. For example, ‘Sex Knowledge for Women’,
serialised that same year, linked menstruation and hygiene over and over.93
Unlike the readers’ letters coloured by Chinese medical thoughts, advertisements
derived their validity from their association with science. This reveals the marketing
strategy of the manufacturers: by prioritising the hygienic properties of disposable
sanitary napkins – the same properties evidently prized by medical professionals – they
hoped that readers would envision buying their products as entering a new, healthy,
scientific world. Chinese women who were too embarrassed to purchase menstrual
pads and belts in a drugstore could order them from magazines or directly from the
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manufacturers.94 Some of these foreign companies even sent samples free or for the
cost of postage.95 During the 1920s, ten yuan fetched a dozen boxes of disposable
sanitary pads, whether bought in a local store or by mail.96 Advertising asserted that
hygiene could only be obtained as a purchased commodity – it could not be made at
home. The hygienic female was always already a consumer.
By playing up personal control and bodily efficiency, advertising associated the female body with the new possibilities for personal agency. Advertisers set out scientific
explanations of menstruation that proposed a simple consumption habit (purchasing and
using sanitary pads) as the means to bridging health practices (engaging in menstrual
hygiene) and female corporeal experience (feeling a certain way during menstruation).
Many of the advertisements described the discomfort felt by menstruating women,
offering as a palliative sanitary pads made of softest gauze and sponge that ‘adjusted
to the body, assuring women of comfort while remaining nearly undetectable’.97 An
advertisement for ‘Medicinal Cotton Wool for Female Use’ (Nüyong yaomian), manufactured by the Sanyou Corporation, acknowledged women’s sensory experiences and
their responsibilities in managing menstruation for themselves by presenting the voice
of a woman suffering:
‘I, unfortunately, was born a woman. Whenever my period arrives, the dampness is annoying, and
the paper bandage [used to collect menstrual blood] is coarse and as prickly as a thorn. How can
anyone understand the mental agony? I wish to thank my husband, who bought me Medicinal
Cotton Wool for Female Use made by the Sanyou Corporation – it is affordable and wonderfully
comfortable . . . . In the future, I’ll never worry about my period again’.
The narrative ended with a transition to a disembodied, presumably omniscient voice,
which stated that the cotton wool made by Sanyou was ‘directly beneficial to hygiene’
and that the women who benefited from it should ‘tell their relatives about it, sharing
their happiness with all the women of the world’.98
No longer was the menstruating woman cast as an invalid. This wave of advertisements beckoned women to fulfil their modern roles by managing their bodies while
maintaining personal hygiene: to be modern was to be healthy, and the challenges
posed by menstruation could be overcome if women purchased and used proper sanitary products. Straddling the flexible border between scientific discourse and daily
health practice, the advertisements for female hygiene products and readers’ questions
in the medical advice columns created an alternative epistemology for the ordering
of the female body. The reasoning, in essence, was based on two axioms: first, that
hygienic menstrual care was exclusively directed at individual habits of daily life,
and second, that there was no other way to be a hygienic woman than to purchase a
commodity – the new disposable sanitary napkins.
Conclusion: a path to gendered modernity
This article traces the emergence of a shared ideal of female hygiene in the early Republican period while insisting on the multiplicity of discourses about menstruation.
On the one hand, the sudden appearance of articles and publications on menstrual
management marked a shift away from the comprehensive and erudite tomes issued
by prominent learned physicians in the late imperial period toward short articles written in the vernacular for lay readers. Menstruation became normalised as a natural
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phenomenon that could be observed by individual women and discussed in public. On
the other hand, the absence of a single, consistent menstrual discourse highlights the
equivocal and often contested boundaries between western sanitary science and traditional Chinese medicine at a moment when medical professionals exchanged opinions
with laypersons in public forums. Rather than associate an individual’s physiological
functions with a hegemonic approach to health under the state, as previous scholarship
tends to do, I have argued that the meaning of ‘female hygiene’ in modern China was
more fluid, as western sanitary science and traditional Chinese medicine found hybrid
expression in the public media.
Advertisements for sanitary pads prompted my second finding: the market intruded into discourses of female hygiene. In fact, purchasing the disposable sanitary
napkins marked a clear break with a tradition of silence on how to absorb menstrual
blood. The advertisements that emphasised hands-on practice integrated into daily
consumption revealed that one aspect of women’s progress lay in the ability of every
woman to properly manage her menstrual discharges. The participation of individuals
in defining female health practices marked the advent of a new kind of popular medical
market: beginning in the 1920s, people had access to medical knowledge of various
sorts and selected from a range of hygienic products and sources of information.
Creating a scientific language for thinking about and managing the menstruating
body was never a simple process in early twentieth-century China. While publishers
and merchants imported many objects, ideas and texts from the west, translations
both literal and figurative produced a hybrid form of female hygiene characterised
by conceptions of menstrual normality and menstrual vulnerability, bodily sensibility
and individual knowledge that hopped across epistemological, social and cultural
borders. The emphasis on individual bodily experiences showed that female hygiene
was achieved not by state intervention, nor through the hegemony of science, but rather
through the transformation of routine practices in daily life. Menstruation’s discursive
multiplicity, therefore, reveals the problematic meanings of ‘public’ and ‘science’
in a discussion of how women’s private and personal bodies fashioned a gendered
modernity.
Glossary
an zheng tiao zhi
anji
anjing
baoyang
Bencao gangmu
bingyuanti
bingyue
binian
chang
duiyu weisheng shang youwu libi
feng leng
fenghan
fuke
Funü shibao
funü weisheng
dd
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Funü weisheng xinlun
Funü yixue zazhi
Funü zazhi
Furen daquan liangfang
furen weisheng
ganmao
Gujin yitong daquan
Huangdi neijing
huo
jujing
kangfu weishengmian weishengdai
leng
liang xing
luan xibao
luanchao
luanzhu
luanzi
neiwaikou
nüyong yaomian
Nüzi zhi xing de zhishi
qi
san
shangfeng
shengli de zuoyong
shou fenghan
shou han
Suzhou nüke yishe
tiangui
tiaojing
tong
weisheng
weisheng zhi xue
xi shen qi yin
xie
xinshui
yang
yangsheng
yaobu
yaomian
yin
yin qi
Yishi weisheng guwen
yixueshi
yiyu shangfeng
yuan
yuejing
yuejing baoyang zhi fa
yuejing bushun
yueshi
yueshui
yuexin
Yuzuan yizong jinjian
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Notes
I would like to thank Professors Dorothy Ko, Eugenia Lean, Kim Brandt, Rebecca Jordan-Young, North American
Gender & History co-editors Sarah C. Chambers, Ruth Mazo Karras and Regina G. Kunzel and the two
anonymous reviewers for reading this article carefully and offering insightful comments and suggestions at
various stages of its development. Previous versions of this article were presented in the Nineteenth Annual
Graduate Conference on East Asia at Columbia University (6 February 2010) and the First Annual BerkeleyStanford Graduate Student Conference in Modern Chinese Humanities at the University of California, Berkeley
(17 April 2010). I benefited from comments from Professor Haiyan Lee, Jeannette Ng and the other conference
participants.
1. Advertisement for Kotex sanitary napkins, Funü zazhi 14 (May 1928).
2. At the end of the 1920s, advertisements for menstrual hygiene products began to appear in Ladies’ Journal.
Kimberly-Clark launched its first advertising campaign for Kotex in May 1928. Johnson & Johnson’s
first advertisement for Modess appeared in August 1930. The first advertisement for Comfort Sanitary
Napkin and Belt was published in November 1931. A number of advertisements were also seen in such
female periodicals as Family (Jiating), Women’s Monthly (Funü yuekan) and Women’s Eastern Times (Funü
shibao). Local hospitals and companies also made sanitary belts and pads and advertised them in the same
magazines. See e.g., the advertisements for ‘improved women’s sanitary cloths’ (gailiang nüzhi weisheng
bu), made by Guangyu Obstetrical Hospital, in Funü zazhi 8 (June 1922) and for ‘medical cotton wool for
female use’ (nü yong yaomian), made by the Sanyou Corporation, in Funü yuebao 1 (May 1935).
3. Qu Jun, ‘Funü weisheng zhi yiban’, Funü shibao 3 (August 1911), pp. 25–9, here p. 25; Ms Shen Fang,
‘Funü weisheng tan’, Funü zazhi 1(January 1915), pp. 2–10, here p. 2.
4. The notion of ‘emergence’ deserves a note here since recent works on historical ontology and critical science studies have devoted considerable attention to exploring how certain concepts/objects/practices ‘came
into being’ via historically specific circumstances. I find Michelle Murphy’s analysis of ‘Sick Building
Syndrome’ in twentieth-century America particularly useful, as she delineates how indoor chemical exposure became not just materially present but also an object that both experts and laypersons addressed from
different epistemological traditions. See Michelle Murphy, Sick Building Syndrome and the Problem of
Uncertainty: Environmental Politics, Technoscience, and Women Workers (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2006).
5. In Rogaski’s comprehensive analysis, weisheng was more than ‘public hygiene’, which for English speakers
suggests that individual health is very much part of the health of the nation. Weisheng also included
dietary campaigns and practices associated with the pre-modern individualistic notion of ‘guarding life’.
But weisheng’s earlier connotations concerned only individual hygiene, while later the term embraced a
concept of public health that subsumed the individual under the nation. This was a part of the state project
of modernisation. See Ruth Rogaski, Hygienic Modernity: Meanings of Health and Disease in Treaty-Port
China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), pp. 17–18; 300–01.
6. See e.g., Chun-Yan Chou, ‘Zou chu jinji: jindai Zhongguo nüxing de jingqi weisheng, 1895–1949’, Zhengzhi
daxue lishi xuebao 28 (November 2007), pp. 231–86. I extend that argument by foregrounding a definition
of ‘female hygiene’ based on women’s personal experiences and urban consumer culture.
7. Wang Zheng, Women in the Chinese Enlightenment: Oral and Textual Histories (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1999), pp. 67–8. While rural women’s experience is equally important, given the
constraints of sources, it is beyond the scope of this article to examine the impact of the modern discourses
on the overall experience of menstruation in twentieth-century China. It is worth noting that women’s
issues – including sex and private life – reappeared in the urban popular press in the post-1949 era.
See Emily Honig and Gail Hershatter, Personal Voices: Chinese Women in the 1980s (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1988).
8. Lara Freidenfelds, The Modern Period: Menstruation in Twentieth-Century America (Baltimore, MD:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009).
9. See e.g., Tim Burke, Lifebuoy Men, Lux Women: Commodification, Consumption, and Cleanliness in Modern Zimbabwe (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996); Sharra L. Vostral, ‘Masking Menstruation:
the Emergence of Menstrual Hygiene Products in the United States’, in Andrew Shail and Gillian Howie
(eds), Menstruation: A Cultural History (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005),
pp. 243–58; Freidenfelds, Modern Period.
10. The earliest account of the use of menstrual cloths is presumed to date from the Han dynasty (194
BCE). For example, Prescriptions for Fifty-Two Diseases (Wushier bingfang) contained a fragmentary
account of ‘cloths for women’s monthly period’ (nüzi yueshi bu) as one ingredient in a medical compound. See Ma Jixing, Mawangdui gu yi shu kaoshi (Changsha: Hunan keji jishu chubanshe, 1992),
p. 498.
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11. Yi-li Wu, Reproducing Women: Medicine, Metaphor, and Childbirth in Late Imperial China (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2010), pp. 188–223; Jen-der Lee, ‘Childbirth in Early Imperial China’, in
Angela Ki Che Leung (ed.), Medicine for Women in Imperial China (Leiden: Brill, 2006), pp. 108–78.
The medicinal use of various substances derived from the human body – including menstrual blood and
menstrual pads – was conventionally listed in the Chinese medical literature, notably juan (chapter) 52 of
Li Shizhen’s Compendium of Materia Medica (Bencao gangmu), from the sixteenth century (comp. 1552–
78; repr. Taipei: Taiwan shang wu yin shu guan, 1983), pp. 1–50. On the early history of such practices,
see Jen-der Lee, Nüren de Zhonghuo yiliao shi – Han Tang zhi jian de jiankang zhaogu yu xingbie (Taipei:
Sanmin shuju, 2008), 281–304.
12. On the popular health manuals in the Qing period, see Wu, Reproducing Women, pp. 54–83.
13. Qu Jun, ‘Funü weisheng zhi yiban’, p. 27; Zhen San, ‘Guanyu funü shengzhi bufen de weisheng changshi’,
Funü zazhi 14 (September 1928), pp. 31–8, here p. 35.
14. Quoted in Chou, ‘Zou chu jinji’, p. 262. See also Wen Shilin, Kunlun lüxing riji (1941; repr. Tianjin: Tianjin
guji chubanshe, 2005), p. 88.
15. Qi is a central concept not only in medicine but also in the understanding of the cosmos. Scholars have
rendered the term variously as ‘vapour’, ‘energy’, ‘matter-energy’ and ‘influence’. It was believed to be
crucial to maintaining life and growth, and its exhaustion meant death. See Charlotte Furth, A Flourishing
Yin: Gender in China’s Medical History, 960–1665 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), p.
21; Rogaski, Hygienic Modernity, p. 29. While the word xie is often translated as blood without further
comment, its medical associations with cosmology moved me to distinguish the English word with a capital
letter here. Not specific to certain bodily functions or structures, ‘Blood’ refers to the primary vitality paired
with qi that underlies all organic processes, essential to the survival of all the body’s organ systems. In yinyang dualism, Blood is identified as the female form of vitality, manifested in the concretely material female
sphere of sexual acts and reproductive processes. See Charlotte Furth, ‘Blood, Body and Gender: Medical
Images of the Female Condition in China, 1600–1850’, Chinese Science 7 (December 1986), pp. 45–66.
16. Furth, A Flourishing Yin, p. 74.
17. Wu, Reproducing Women, p. 89.
18. Furth, A Flourishing Yin.
19. This passage is translated in Francesca Bray, Technology and Gender: Fabrics of Power in Late Imperial
China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), p. 326.
20. Bray, Technology and Gender, pp. 326–34; Furth, A Flourishing Yin, pp. 74–7.
21. This passage is translated in Furth, A Flourishing Yin, p. 75.
22. Charlotte Furth and Ch’en Shu-yueh, ‘Chinese Medicine and the Anthropology of Menstruation in
Contemporary Taiwan’, Medical Anthropology Quarterly 6 (March 1992), p. 30.
23. Corida Ming-Yeuk Chu, ‘Menstrual Beliefs and Practices of Chinese Women’, Journal of the Folklore
Institute 17 (January/April 1980), pp. 38–55, here p. 43.
24. Wu, Reproducing Women, p. 89.
25. Wu Qian (ed.), The Imperially Compiled Golden Mirror of Medical Learning (Yuzuan yizong jinjian)
(Shanghai: Shanghai guji, 1991), ch. 44, pp. 1–44, here p. 2.
26. I am grateful to the anonymous reviewer who pointed this out to me.
27. See e.g., Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: an Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London:
Ark, 1966); Emily M. Ahern, ‘The Power and Pollution of Chinese Women’, in Margery Wolf and
Roxane Witke (eds), Women in Chinese Society (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1975). Concerns about
pollution were manifest in the gynaecological writings of the Ming–Qing period, when physicians linked
religious, magical and medical theories to tame the polluting power of the folk tradition. See Charlotte Furth,
‘Concepts of Pregnancy, Childbirth and Infancy in Ch’ing Dynasty China’, Journal of Asian Studies 46
(1987), pp. 7–35, esp. pp. 7–9.
28. Angela Ki Che Leung, ‘Women Practicing Medicine in Premodern China’, in Harriet T. Zurndorfer (ed.),
Chinese Women in the Imperial Past: New Perspectives (Leiden: Brill, 1999), pp. 101–34.
29. Frank Dikötter, Sex, Culture, and Modernity in China: Medical Science and the Construction of Sexual
Identities in the Early Republican Period (London: Hurst, 1995), pp. 3–4.
30. Unlike other women’s publications, many of them short-lived, the Ladies’ Journal enjoyed sustained popularity in the first half of the twentieth century, with vigorous sales in such areas as Shanghai, Guangzhou,
Guangdong, Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Beijing, Fujian and even south-east Asia and Japan. See Jacqueline Nivard,
‘Women and the Women’s Press: the Case of The Ladies’ Journal (Funü zazhi) 1915–1931’, Republican
China 10:1b (1984), pp. 37–55; Hsu-Chi Chou, 1910–1920 niandai duhui xin funü shenghuo fengmao: yi
‘Funü zazhi’ wei fenxi shili (Taipei: National Taiwan University Press, 1996), p. 40; Wang Zheng, Women
in the Chinese Enlightenment, pp. 67–8. With its first issue published in 1911, Women’s Eastern Times
© 2013 John Wiley & Sons Ltd
Female Hygiene in Republican China, 1910s–1930s
31.
32.
33.
34.
35.
36.
37.
38.
39.
40.
41.
42.
43.
44.
45.
46.
47.
48.
49.
50.
51.
52.
53.
54.
55.
56.
57.
58.
59.
60.
61.
62.
63.
64.
65.
315
is considered one of the earliest women’s journals from the Republican period. See Joan Judge, ‘A New
Approach to the Popular Press in China: Gender and Cultural Production, 1904–1937’, York University,
Toronto (2013), <http://www.yorku.ca/ycar/Joan_Judge.html>.
Qu Shaoheng, Chankexue jiangyi (Shanghai: Qushi fufu yiyuan, 1928).
Qu Jun, ‘Funü weisheng zhi yiban’, pp. 25–7.
Ms Shen Fang, ‘Funü weisheng tan’, pp. 2–3.
Hu Dingan, ‘Funü jie de putong bing’, Funü zazhi 8 (August 1922), pp. 81–2, here p. 82.
Qu Jun, ‘Funü weisheng zhi yiban’, p. 25.
Qu Jun, ‘Funü zhi weisheng zahua’, Funü shibao 4 (September 1911), pp. 17–29, here pp. 18–19.
Ms Shen Fang, ‘Funü weisheng tan’, p. 3.
Zhen He, ‘Yuejing zhi weisheng’, Funü zazhi 4 (December 1918), pp. 4–6, here p. 5.
From the appearance of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859), developments in the natural and
medical sciences promoted the success of a new model, cell theory, leading to a new perspective on
menstruation. Anatomical studies identified the existence of egg cells in the ovaries of mammals and
associated menstruation with fertility. See Anne E. Walker, The Menstrual Cycle (London: Routledge,
1997), p. 17.
On the broader debate between partisans of traditional Chinese medicine and modern biomedicine, see
Sean Hsiang-lin Lei, ‘When Chinese Medicine Encountered the State: 1910–1949’ (unpublished doctoral
thesis, University of Chicago, 1999).
Anonymous, ‘Bianji yaozhi’, Funü yixue zazhi 1 (1927).
Wang Qiuyun, ‘Nüzi tiangui fei yuejing shuo’, Funü yixue zazhi 1 (1927), p. 2.
Wang Baoqi, ‘Lun yuejing fei chengtai zhi yaossu’, Funü yixue zazhi 4 (1928), p. 5.
Wan Jihua, ‘Nüzi tiangui fei yuejing shuo’, Funü yixue zazhi 2 (1928), p. 7. For further discussion on the
responses of practitioners of Chinese medicine to the biomedical explanation of menstruation, see Chou,
‘Zou chu jinji’, pp. 254–5.
Sex Knowledge for Women and Girls: What Every Woman and Girl Should Know (New York: Critic and
Guide Company, 1917) is one of a number of popular health guides written by Dr William J. Robinson,
who was serving as the chief of the Department of Genito-Urinary Diseases and Dermatology at Bronx
Hospital and Dispensary when his book was published. The Chinese translation abbreviated the book’s
title and omitted the last chapter.
See e.g., ‘Nüzi zhi xing de zhishi’, Funü zazhi 9 (March 1923), pp. 115–21, here p. 117.
‘Benshe tebie qishi’, Funü zazhi 10 (February 1924), p. 435; advertisement for Funü weisheng xinlun,
Funü zazhi 12 (December 1926).
‘Nüzi zhi xing de zhishi’, p. 112. Compare with Sex Knowledge for Women and Girls: What Every Woman
and Girl Should Know, p. 44.
Jing Ren, ‘Yuejing de zhangai ji qi chulifa’, Funü zazhi 12 (September 1926), pp. 49–53, here p. 50.
Wu Qian (ed.), Imperially Compiled Golden Mirror of Medical Learning, ch. 44, pp. 1–44, here p. 3.
‘Nüzi zhi xing de zhishi’, pp. 112–13.
Qu Jun, ‘Funü zhi weisheng zahua’, p. 19.
‘Nüzi zhi xing de zhishi’, p. 113. To reflect the liberties taken by the Chinese translator, I have slightly
revised the passage as it appears in Robinson, Sex Knowledge for Women and Girls: What Every Woman
and Girl Should Know, p. 48.
Qu Jun, ‘Funü weisheng zhi yiban’, p. 25.
Qu Jun, ‘Funü weisheng zhi yiban’, p. 25.
Qu Jun, ‘Funü weisheng zhi yiban’, p. 25.
See e.g., Bi Xia, ‘Lun jingqi zhong de weisheng’, Funü zazhi 15 (August 1929), pp. 21–2, here p. 21.
Jing Ren, ‘Yuejing de zhang’ai ji chulifa’, p. 53.
Qu Jun, ‘Funü weisheng zhi yiban’, p. 26.
Moxiuer, ‘Jiankang yu funü yundong’, Funü zazhi 9 (September 1925), pp. 1501–8.
Shalibo, ‘Funü weisheng xin lun’, Funü zazhi 10 (January 1924), pp. 265–74, here p. 270.
Qu Jun, ‘Funü weisheng zhi yiban’, p. 26.
Qu Jun, ‘Funü zhi weisheng zahua’, p. 18.
Zhen He, ‘Yuejing zhi weisheng’, p. 5.
Jane Farrell-Beck and Laura Klosterman Kidd, ‘The Roles of Health Professionals in the Development
and Dissemination of Women’s Sanitary Products, 1880–1940’, Journal of the History of Medicine and
Allied Sciences 51 (1996), pp. 325–52, esp. pp. 329–30. On shangfeng, see Chen Zhiming, Comprehensive
Compendium of Good Formulas for Women (Furen daquan liangfang) (Shanghai: Shanghai guji, 1991),
ch. 6, pp. 1–36, esp. pp. 13–15; on shou han, see Wu Qian (ed.), Imperially Compiled Golden Mirror
© 2013 John Wiley & Sons Ltd
316
66.
67.
68.
69.
70.
71.
72.
73.
74.
75.
76.
77.
78.
79.
80.
81.
82.
83.
84.
85.
86.
87.
88.
89.
90.
91.
92.
93.
94.
95.
96.
97.
98.
Gender & History
of Medical Learning, ch. 44, pp. 1–44, esp. pp. 17–18. Fenghan and ganmao are compounds regularly
used to refer to various forms of diseases caused by pathogenic ‘wind’ and ‘cold’. See Chen Zhiming,
Comprehensive Compendium of Good Formulas for Women, ch. 18, pp. 1–35, esp. pp. 33–4; Wu Qian
(ed.), Imperially Compiled Golden Mirror of Medical Learning, ch. 41, pp. 1–36, esp. pp. 20–21.On the
history of ‘cold damage’ diseases, see Marta Hanson, Speaking of Epidemics: Disease and the Geographic
Imagination in Late Imperial China (New York: Routledge, 2011).
Ms Shen Fang, ‘Funü weisheng tan’, pp. 2–3.
Zhen He, ‘Yuejing zhi weisheng’, p. 4.
Wu, Reproducing Women, pp. 107–12.
Western hygiene literature also talked about the relationship between menstruation and emotions. See e.g.,
the passage quoted from the translation of Sex Knowledge for Women and Girls: What Every Woman and
Girl Should Know, at the beginning of this section.
Jing Ren, ‘Yuejing de zhang’ai ji chulifa’, p. 53.
Moxiuer, ‘Jiankang yu funü yundong’, p. 1503.
Sean Hsiang-lin Lei, ‘Moral Community of “Weisheng”: Contesting Hygiene in Republican China’, East
Asian Science, Technology and Society 3 (2009), pp. 475–504.
Lei, ‘Moral Community of “Weisheng”’, p. 481.
Western medicine developed an explanatory framework for female health that turned upon casting the
menstruating body as essentially vulnerable. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the concept of the
‘menstrual mood’ was added to that framework. See Walker, Menstrual Cycle, pp. 30–31.
‘Nüzi zhi xing de zhishi’, Funü zazhi 9, p. 114.
Bi Xia, ‘Lun jingqi zhong de weisheng’, Funu zazhi 15 (August 1929), pp. 21–22.
On the emergence of ‘how-to’ knowledge in the popular press and how it bespoke a new discourse of
‘modern science’ in the Republican period, see Eugenia Lean, ‘Chemical Manufacturing in the Inner
Chambers: the Gendered Virtue of Production Knowledge in 1910s China’ (paper presented at the Fourth
International Conference on Sinology, Taipei, Taiwan, June 2012).
‘Nüzi zhi xing de zhishi’, Funü zazhi 9, pp. 114–15.
Qu Jun, ‘Funü weisheng zhi yiban’, p. 27.
Qu Jun, ‘Funü weisheng zhi yiban’, p. 26.
Xun, ‘Yuejing shi ying zhuyi shixiang’, Funü zazhi (Beijing) 1 (January 1940), p. 41; Dong Zhiren,
‘Weisheng jianghua: geren weisheng funü’, Yiyao weisheng yuekan 7 (February 1933), p. 21.
Zhen San, ‘Guanyu funü shengzhi bufen de weisheng changshi’, p. 35.
Zhen San, ‘Guanyu funü shengzhi bufen de weisheng changshi’, p. 35.
Zhen San, ‘Guanyu funü shengzhi bufen de weisheng changshi’, p. 35.
Rogaski, Hygienic Modernity.
Rogaski, Hygienic Modernity, pp. 163–4.
Ladies’ Journal initiated this regular feature in 1925, inviting readers to write in with questions about their
health problems. According to Che-chia Chang’s statistics, most of the inquiries came from big cities such
as Shanghai, Beijing and Guangzhou; some were from the countryside or even overseas. Gynaecological
problems occurred in roughly 10 per cent of the inquiries. Chang, ‘Funü zazhi zhong de yishi weisheng
guwen’, p. 149. ‘Yishi weisheng guwen’, Funü zazhi 16 (August 1930), pp. 141–4, here p. 143.
Qu Jun, ‘Funü weisheng zhi yiban’, p. 26; Qu Jun, ‘Funü zhi weisheng zahua’, p. 18; Shen Fang, ‘Funü
weisheng tan’, pp. 2–3; Zhen He, ‘Yuejing zhi weisheng’, pp. 4–5.
‘Yishi weisheng guwen’, Funü zazhi 16 (January 1930), pp. 31–3, here p. 33.
‘Yishi weisheng guwen’, Funü zazhi 14 (August 1928), pp. 35–8, here p. 36.
See e.g. ‘Yishi weisheng guwen’, Funü zazhi 12 (December 1926), pp. 135–7, here p. 136.
Chou, ‘Zou chu jinji’, p. 263.
The juxtaposition of Kotex advertisements and articles on menstruation in Ladies’ Journal was noted
by Tani E. Barlow. See Barlow, ‘Wanting Some: Commodity Desire and the Eugenic Modern Girl’, in
Mechthild Leutner and Nicola Spakowski (eds.), Women in China: the Republican Period in Historical
Perspective (Münster: Lit, 2005), pp. 312–50.
Advertisement for Kotex Sanitary Napkins, Funü zazhi 14 (May 1928).
Advertisement for Tampax Tampons, Jiating 3 (October 1938), pp. 88–9.
Advertisement for Improved Women’s Sanitary Cloths manufactured by Guangyu Hospital, Funü zazhi 8
(June 1922).
Advertisement for Kotex Sanitary Napkins, Funü zazhi 14 (June 1928).
Advertisement for Medicinal Cotton Wool for Female Use manufactured by the Sanyou Corporation, Funü
yuebao 1 (May 1935).
© 2013 John Wiley & Sons Ltd