Gen Z are leading the fight against Period Poverty

Her campaign has been bolstered by a 165,000-strong petition and a march of over 2000 people outside Downing Street in December 2017 which demanded that the free period scheme be implemented in all UK schools.

George has stated that her campaign, though it focuses on the tangible goal of getting more free sanitary products to those in need, also aims to tackle the stigma around periods. ‘Part of the reason period poverty hasn’t been addressed is because of the taboo around the subject’ she said. ‘But now so many more people are talking about it – it’s almost like there’s a period revolution happening’.

Bimini Love 

Bimini Love is another UK campaigner who helps being sanitary products to the homeless community of southern England. Starting her non-profit Street Cramps at age 15, Bimini set up a hugely successful crowdfunding campaign to finance her vision, which was to provide much needed help to the homeless women in her community.

Street Cramps provides homeless women with sanitary products in monthly boxes. Each box contains the essentials, pads and tampons, but also deodorant, baby wipes, clean underwear, and heat pads. These latter items might not seem strictly within the realm of necessity when dealing with a period, but they bring a much needed element of dignity and cleanliness to the lives of women who might often be strangers to comfort, and who may have felt shame and stigma during periods of menstruation in the past.

Bimini’s charity recognises that impoverished women deserve not just the bare necessities, but to have their humanity and their desire to feel clean and pain-free during their periods acknowledged.

Gabby Edlin

Gabby Edlin began work on the Bloody Good Period organisation in 2016, which has since turned into a national staple of the women’s health war-cry in the UK, and worldwide.

After volunteering for a local refugee drop-in centre in London, Edlin noticed that the lists of essentials delegated to visitors didn’t include anything for women’s periods. When she questioned this omission, Edlin was told that the organisation ‘wouldn’t give pads or tampons out unless it was an emergency’.

‘What does an emergency mean?’ she questioned. ‘Someone having to bleed on the floor?’

Spurred on by this, Edlin began the Bloody Good Period initiative as a side project, providing sanitary products to refugees and migrants. Since then, BGP has expanded into a full-blown NGO, branching into women’s health education for migrants and partnering with The Body Shop to raise awareness and reduce stigma.

‘Making women ask for [sanitary products] just seemed unreasonable and disrespectful… It’s important to notice how expensive these products often are too’ Edlin says. As the Bloody Good Period website points out, asylum seekers receive £37.75 to live on each week and pads and tampons can cost around £2.50.

Nadya Okamoto

Nadya Okamoto is the US based founder and Executive Director of perhaps the longest running and most successful period poverty initiative. PERIOD was co-founded in 2014 by Nadya and Vincent Forand with the practical intent of serving menstruators in need, running educations workshops, and starting conversations about periods and period poverty.

Experiencing homelessness during Okamoto’s childhood led her to the uncomfortable revelation that menstruating whilst in financial poverty was as impossible as it was inevitable. ‘The unaddressed natural need of periods’ became such an overwhelming point of concern for her, that she’s since suspended her studies at Harvard to run PERIOD full time.

To date, PERIOD has addressed over 700,000 individual periods through product distributed and registered over 600 ‘campus chapters’ (groups of students dedicated to PERIOD’s action plan of advocacy and education) across the USA.

PERIOD is currently the largest youth-run non-profit in women’s health, and is creeping up the charts towards becoming the largest youth-run non-profit in the world.

Thanks to activists like these ones, period poverty is finding a voice – and it’s growing louder. Since 2016, a total of 11 US states have dropped the period tax altogether, and a further 10 have considered similar repeal bills this year.

In 2017, a pilot program was launched in Scotland which provided free sanitary products in schools and food banks for women who couldn’t afford them. Since then, the program has been launched nationwide, and is set to implement free tampons and pads in high schools, universities, colleges, and prisons by 2020.

In perhaps the biggest win for the period poverty movement so far, at the beginning of 2019 Australia scrapped the tampon tax for residents altogether.

But progress remains slow, particularly in the UK. Whilst some big retailers such as Tesco and the Co-Op have agreed to swallow the 5% tampon tax themselves, and whilst the country has announced a free hygiene product scheme in prisons and schools to be implemented by 2020, periods still cost British women an average of £500 a year.

Period poverty warriors have their work cut out for them. Even if they manage to repeal the tampon tax altogether in western nations, the issue persists even more prevalently in the developing world, where calling sanitary products a ‘luxury item’ may not seem so laughable.

Moreover, taking the demands for an eradication of the tampon tax to its logical conclusion: if it’s wrong for the state to profit from the consequences of sexual difference (which it is), then so too is it wrong to allow an industry to profit from women for the same reason.

This argument potentially requires us to lobby the government for tampons and pads to be completely free, not just fractionally cheaper. The case could be made that periods should be entirely publicly funded, and perhaps this is the future of the period poverty movement.

The issues regarding women’s health policy in our government run deep and cannot be possibly addressed without a targeted campaign to ensure homeless and impoverished women have access to menstrual supplies, and a more holistic assessment of how our tax system affects women. Personally, I also wouldn’t mind a campaign forbidding male politicians to smirk at the word ‘tampon’.

These young women, and many of their contemporaries, have taken the first important step in beginning a long overdue dialogue of the cost of being women, and have improved the lives of thousands with their initiatives. They have ignited a movement of lobbying and campaigning that must be continued until complete public health equality has been achieved, and as they pass the baton of awareness to other Gen Zers we stand a better chance than ever of that goal being reached.