They wanted to put a box of free sanitary pads in the school. They heard: Please do not spoil the image of the city

How did it start?

With the girls at the Pink Box Foundation. They are the ones fighting menstrual poverty and advocating for pink menstrual hygiene boxes to appear in public places. Girls are discovering at every turn that there is little knowledge about menstrual poverty in our country. They wanted to fill this gap by preparing a more systematic study. Together we worked out their project.

What is its primary purpose?

We even tried to do a representative quantitative study – because we wanted to see how many women from specific social groups experience menstrual poverty. We decided that we were not able to conduct the study as is. Remember, our budget was non-existent. So, we decided that would be the plan for the future, and first we would do a qualitative study – reach out to women and ask them about their experiences. We chose locations from a variety of areas, as diverse as possible. There was Sochaczew and Zielona Góra. There were small towns and big cities. At first, we wanted to physically reach each of the selected villages, but the pandemic thwarted these plans and eventually all focus interviews were conducted through an online communication platform. We recruited participants locally.

How many women did you talk to?

We conducted eight focus interviews (i.e., focus group interviews) with 69 women participating. The group wasn’t large, but we were able to make sure that each woman was given a lot of time, allowed to speak in many areas. We wanted to explore the topic from the perspective of very different women – with different incomes, beliefs and experiences.

Poverty and material deprivation are fairly well mapped in Poland. And menstrual poverty?

It’s as if it didn’t exist. It is unnamed. Or rather – unnameable. Women, when asked without time to consider it, assure us that it does not exist.

Why?

Because it’s doubly stigmatising. Menstruation itself and the ailments associated with it are realms of taboo and shame. Poverty is also shameful, people don’t want to admit it, they often hide it from the world.

Did that surprise you?

It was a total shock to me that menstruation is a bigger problem for women than it was a few decades ago. That 2022 women are embarrassed to talk about sanitary pads and that there are still some women who have or have had problems accessing sanitary products. But while this reluctance to name the problem puzzled me at first, it’s actually easy to understand. No one wants to talk about the embarrassing stuff. Our participants did not want to play the role of the unfortunate woman who uses rags or newspaper because she cannot afford sanitary pads.

Or maybe that just didn’t happen in this group...

Once we were able to break down this barrier of shame, it became apparent that each of the women interviewed had experienced a situation of not having adequate menstrual hygiene products – for a variety of reasons. As one of the participants in the study said: each of us could have experienced period poverty at some point and found ourselves in a situation where we did not have enough money to freely buy sanitary pads. Or when they had to limit their spending in some way, faced with the decision of what to buy and what to give up. And I wanted to tell you that our interviewees represented the average income-earning Polish woman. Those stories show that if you don’t have money for everything, spending on pads is one of the first to be cut.

Do you have any specific examples?

One woman, a mother of two daughters in their teens, brought to our attention how difficult it is when you have to multiply your expenses for menstrual supplies by three every month. This woman is an independent mother and she must be able to pay for everything on her own salary. And sometimes, she says, she gives up her own comfort to pay for her daughters’ pads. There is a lot of so-called soft poverty in these stories. It’s when you can buy pads or tampons, but not the ones you need, just the cheapest ones. Or you can only afford one package a month, and you need more products. After all, it is obvious to every woman that bleeding is different at the beginning of the period and at night, when products with the highest absorption are needed, and differently in the following days, when the absorbency of the pad may be lower. For this, at the end of the period, many of us would be able to make do with a hygienic pad. But buying three different packets a month is a luxury that definitely not every woman in Poland can afford. Or yet another issue that is not necessarily due to poverty, but causes discomfort and hinders accessibility to hygiene products – is the price of single sanitary pads. Which of us hasn’t had a situation where she suddenly needs a sanitary pad – literally one, but right away? It turns out that in commercial places, where there are vending machines with sanitary pads, such a single item costs as much as five zlotys.

Again, it proves that menstrual poverty has many dimensions.

It’s an exclusion with a physiological dimension and on top of that it strikes a blow to the emotions. Women talked a lot about how not having a purely physiological need met was terribly humiliating. What’s important to me is that even if we don’t all regularly experience menstrual poverty for economic reasons, the experience of deprivation is absolutely universal and affects us all. Participants in the study said that the surprise of having an unexpected period and the associated problems – such as not having a sanitary pad – was everyone’s experience.

How about preparing girls for their first period?

Here again the surprise, because after all we are so modern, both at home and at school. And the theme of the unpreparedness of very young girls, their ignorance about physiology, was a recurring one. An additional problem for girls is the lack of resources to purchase menstrual supplies due to caregivers’ disregard for their needs. Parents do not give money for sanitary pads, girls – ashamed – are put in a situation that they have to ask for them. I listened with horror to stories of female students who were punished for leaving school to buy sanitary pads.

I guess this shows how important pink boxes are.

They should definitely be in all schools and public places. This issue of shortages was particularly pronounced during the pandemic, when there were times when shops were closed and access to hygiene items was difficult because of this. Some problems mainly affect women from small towns and villages. They are the ones who have the most of such experiences, because there are places where shops are not well stocked with these materials, they are not – as in a big city – at your fingertips, so – as the respondents told us – ‘if you didn’t buy it, you don’t have it’. I’ve also heard stories about menstrual poverty, which is when a girl looks for a shop where sanitary pads are cheaper because if she buys the more expensive ones, she won’t have enough for dinner. And did you know that menstrual poverty is associated with transportation exclusion?

In what way?

For example, in that women travelling from a small town to a city are deprived of the opportunity to buy a sanitary pad because there are no shops along the way. Or, even if they have a sanitary pad, there is no toilet where they can change it. Because the issue of public toilets in our country is awful. I know this from personal experience. I used to travel from Łódź to Wiśniowa Góra near Łódź and I used public transport. With changes. There are no more bushes along the route because beautiful and modern bike paths have been made, so the bushes and brushwood have been cut down. Instead, no one thought that pedestrians, bus passengers, or cyclists would benefit from a toilet, so they don’t exist. I once asked the traffic dispatcher to let me in the service toilet.

We experience it, but we actually don’t often talk about it.

We also talk too little about shaming women and girls. And I have listened to dramatic stories of how cruelly one can be treated. At one dormitory, the boys discovered used sanitary pads in the waste bin in the toilet. And then they taped those bloody sanitary pads to the door of the girls’ room. Can you imagine? And yet we’ve had menstrual hygiene product ads in the media for 30 years, and it would seem that generations of girls would not be shamed for their femininity.

Which, after all, is natural and obvious.

And it turns out, still not enough. We asked the participants in our study what they experienced and how they felt about it, but we also really wanted them to feel empowered. Therefore, in developing the conclusions of the report, we did not use our observations, but just asked women what should be done and what should change to make things better. This resulted in a list of solutions – from the local community level to government and parliament – that simply need to be implemented. Among other things, the women emphasised the need for education – of youth and adults. But they placed a very strong emphasis on including young boys in conversations about menstruation.

Then no girl would experience situations like those at the dormitory.

But it’s not just young boys who are the problem. Adult, serious people of both genders also. Local activists working with the Pink Box Foundation were also among those surveyed. And in a certain town – I know the name, but I won’t say because it’s a small town and everything would be immediately clear – they encountered resentment against putting a pink box in a public space.

For what reasons?

Image. There was a situation when the girls wanted to hang such a box of sanitary pads in the school, and the school principal protested: ‘First of all, please don’t do this to a small school, and secondly, please don’t spoil the image of the city’, and when asked why she replied: ‘The word poverty has a bad connotation, it puts a label on us’. We began to wonder during the study whether it might be better to drop the term ‘menstrual poverty’ from the message, since some people don’t like it that much.

What do the study participants think about this?

They also wondered about it. But they came to the conclusion that we shouldn’t throw anything away. Because it is the invisibility of the phenomenon, the avoidance and evasion that makes us hide and be ashamed. Women still tell stories of hiding a sanitary pad when going to the toilet at work because they go to great lengths to make sure no one knows they are on their period. Many female interview participants stated that tabooing the topic is about us – we are the ones hiding the tampon up our sleeve. Participants in the study said that stigma is there because we are silent. That’s why we need to start speaking out about menstrual poverty so everyone knows it exists. Then we can work to minimise it and then make it go away.

How can it disappear?

A pink box should be in every school and office. But this is a drop in the ocean of need. We have a table with recommendations for community policies, for local policies, for state policies. The issue for parliament and government: the issue of price, that is, the need to reduce the tax on menstrual products. And menstrual hygiene products should be available for free in schools, health centres, offices and other public places. They should be available in all public toilets just like toilet paper. Administrators and managers of these sites should take care of this. Full stop.

 

The report ‘Menstrual Poverty in Women’s Opinions and Experiences’ was prepared by activists from the Pink Box Foundation together with Izabela Desperak, PhD, from the Department of Political and Moral Sociology at the Faculty of Economics and Sociology, University of Łódź

Author: Agnieszka Urazińska

Ilustracja: Marta Frej

The text was published in „Wolna Sobota” a magazine of „Gazeta Wyborcza” on 23 April 2022