Sophia Brown: Student, Oxfordshire

I am part of a feminist book club at my secondary school in Oxfordshire, which has been running for many years, giving students at our school a voice in a world beset by patriarchy. Within the club we discuss feminist books, poems, and societal issues surrounding women and other marginalised groups - along with current political affairs. At the start of this year, we were asked to discuss issues in our society which were important to us and landed on the topic of period poverty and the normalisation of menstruation. 
 
After talking about the problems of period poverty in wider society, we focused on how it affected students. We discovered through our conversations that there were a lot of problems within school which deeply affect students on their periods. Many students who menstruate won’t come into school during their periods due to not having the sanitary products to make them feel comfortable during that time. This is clearly a problem as we want everyone to have the equal right to come to school. The students within the book club who have periods also talked about how problematic our period product placement is around school as they are situated at our reception which is unfortunately located at the very front of the school and if you’re on the other side of school, it’s inconvenient. 
 
We wanted to tackle this issue within our school and decided to create gender neutral period product bags to make period products more accessible. We created them to be gender neutral as many transgender and non-binary students within our group expressed their discomfort with overtly feminine period packaging and we didn’t want anybody to feel physically, let alone emotionally, uncomfortable during their periods. 
 
There is at least one period bag within each department, with the department heads being the designated people to ask if anyone needs a sanitary product. We wanted to create a bag for each department so our period bags would be accessible to everyone anywhere in school. In each bag we included some pads and tampons to suit each individual's preferences.
 
The bags were created by students in our group, as well as other art and textiles students, during after-school hours. Now, instead of having to awkwardly run to the other side of the school to get a period product, there are many easily accessible bags dotted around every area of our school.  Posters are also being created to make people aware of the change and we’re planning to place these around school detailing the locations of the period bags so everyone can be informed. 
 
We wanted to go further with our project and researched how period poverty affects people outside of schools as well. One of our students discovered Monica Lennon’s period bill in Scotland and we were inspired to work towards supporting a similar bill within England. We have reached out to Ms Lennon and asked about what we could do as students to begin this change. 
 
We’re also aiming to put in measures to make period products accessible outside of term time and trying to find a way to make period products more eco-friendly as we’re aware of the pollution and plastic is pumped into our oceans and planet.