Postcolonial Knowledge from Empires: The Beginnings of Menstrual Education in Taiwan, 1950s–1980s

On 12 September 1963 an article titled "Menstrual Education" appeared in the newspaper Zhengxin xinwen bao (徵信新聞報).¹ The article advocated teaching children developmental physiology as a "natural phenomenon." It praised the notion of ridding people of the confusion and ignorance supposedly rooted in their old ways:

In the United States, menstruation education consists of showing Disney cartoon films. In a science museum in Chicago, every physiological phenomenon from fertilization to birth is exhibited in detail in the Miracle of Development Room using plastic and plaster models and charts. Adults who walk into the room are reportedly always shocked, while the millions of elementary school children who visit yearly are unperturbed, encountering it with ordinary curiosity. Indeed, their reactions indicate the benefits [of such education]. For example, 11-year-old Johnny was happy to now understand the principles of how he was born and impressed by the wonders of life. A fourteen-year-old girl named Meili was having her period, and she was so afflicted and lonely. After entering the room, everything became clear to her, and she was rid of confusion and bewilderment. She was very happy. Children are taking in [the display] as a kind of natural phenomenon, and they are learning from it with a humble heart.

(Ishigaki Junji 1963)

The article introduces this US method of countering nonscientific views by way of a Chinese translation of the writings of a Japanese public health educator, Ishigaki Junji (石垣純二, 1912–76). Featured alongside it was another essay, translated by Lin Xincheng (林信成) and also originally in Japanese, titled "Cuowu de jiankang guannian" 錯誤的健康觀念 (Mistaken Health Concepts). The latter article asserted that superstition and tradition were sources of incorrect knowledge that will "not stand the trial of medical researchers' thorough investigations" (Lin 1963).²

As early forays into menstruation education in Taiwan, these two articles possess two striking features: the postcolonial configuration of knowledge transfer and the rhetoric of science as a liberatory force. The first article presents a model of science-based social progress from the new empire (United States) conveyed in translation via a piece of writing from the former empire (Japan), and the other was a translation from a Japanese magazine. Learning science from the empire(s) was presented as a form of enlightenment, and in freeing the mind from the shackles of tradition, it could even be comforting—as in the case of the young girl learning about menstruation in a scientific light.

Previously, menstruation had rarely been a subject of science or education in Taiwan. A few studies on menstruation were carried out by colonial obstetrician gynecologists during the early colonial period (Fu 2005: 108–14). The colonial physician Wei-shui Chiang (蔣渭水) had written a few newspaper essays in the 1920s advising parents to prepare their daughters for the arrival of menarche, but until the 1960s, menstrual knowledge had largely been limited to the domestic sphere and primarily circulated informally among married women and, albeit more awkwardly, by their mothers, grandmothers, and other womenfolk in their social networks (Wang 2016). In 1968 and 1971, however, health education became a distinct subject in the elementary and junior high school curriculums, respectively, heralding the beginning of menstruation education outside of the domestic sphere.

Only by following the lead of Japan and the United States did postcolonial leaders in Taiwan make menstruation a subject of education aimed at reforming the nature and sources of health knowledge in the name of an anticommunist US regime of scientific progress and economic growth.³ This article examines the emergence of Taiwanese discourses on menstrual education in the public sphere, which were an important means of creating a new, large-scale social order designed to mitigate the supposed inadequacy of the local knowledge conveyed by mothers and other women to young girls within the domestic sphere. I focus on the postcolonial geopolitical framing and universal knowledge claims (in the rhetoric of "correct" and scientific knowledge) of menstruation education in the context of Taiwan's ambiguous political economic status (Marks 1997: 210). Exploring the emergence of menstruation education in postcolonial Taiwan, I analyze three intersecting...