In the 1960s, I taught for five years in a girls' boarding school in Kenya, two of those years as housemistress, and never heard a word about problems in dealing with menstruation. I have no idea how my pupils coped with it, but they must have, because there were very few unexplained absences, and I don't remember any of them squatting over holes in the ground. Now I am feeling slightly guilty because I - and, I suppose, my colleagues - never gave this issue a thought, albeit this was 50 years ago and perhaps we were more inhibited in talking about it than we would be now.