Menstrual cups, thought by many to be a relatively new phenomenon, actually date back to the 1930s. Invented by the American actress Leonora Chalmers as a discreet alternative to the cumbersome feminine hygiene contraptions that women once wore belted around their waists, menstrual cups are finally showing up on the shelves of major drugstores. This past July, the prestigious medical journal The Lancet issued an extensive global report endorsing their efficacy, the first of its kind.
Nevertheless, most people would be hard-pressed to identify the squishy, bell-shaped silicone receptacles, much less explain how they work. (To clarify, they’re designed to be inserted inside the vagina and can be worn for up to 12 hours at a time during menstruation; they’re also reusable for up to five years.) That fact is not lost on Sara Eklund, the woman behind Noble Cup, Ethiopia’s first menstrual cup brand. “On a recent trip to America, an immigration officer asked me what I do in Ethiopia, I told him I sell menstrual cups, but he had no idea what they were,” says Eklund. “When I explained it to him, he shook his head and said, ‘Oh, that would never work in America.’ So I told him, ‘Actually, it does.’”
While major strides have been made in the States to reduce the stigma surrounding menstruation, such conversations are still in their infancy in East Africa. As a teenager, Eklund remembers loading up her suitcase with tampons on family vacations to California which she would bring back to Ethiopia, where they are still considered taboo and not widely available. So when Eklund, who is now 30, discovered the menstrual cup as a 25-year-old grad school student living in New York, it was something of a revelation. At once cost-effective and environmentally friendly, the simple device had changed her life. Imagine what it could do for countless women in Ethiopia? “It was really the first time that I started to think outside of myself about how other women in Ethiopia were navigating this,” says Eklund, whose mother is an Ethiopian entrepreneur and father is an American member of the Peace Corps. “I knew I needed to do my research.”
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December 31, 2019 at 01:21AM
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Meet the Woman Bringing the Menstrual Cup Movement to Ethiopia - Vogue
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