Speaking as a woman, there is one week I loathe more than any out of the month. Realizing that that week has begun when I am unprepared is horrifying.
When I reach into the pocket that I usually keep my menstrual hygiene products in and find that I have forgotten to restock, it feels like the floor has dropped from underneath me. When I look outside the stalls for any aid, there is none.
None of the bathrooms I have been to on campus have menstrual hygiene products provided by the university.
Longwood University, being a previously all-female school, has an overwhelming population of women. Longwood reports that about 70% of the student population is female.
The buildings that have bathrooms I have used are Grainger, Wygal, Allen, Dorrill Dining Hall, and Upchurch University Center. While that is only a small portion of the buildings on campus, it is baffling to me that neither the dining hall nor Upchurch, both highly trafficked areas on campus, offer an emergency source of pads and tampons.
Some faculty have taken it upon themselves to stock the bathrooms. In Grainger, the small yellow bucket on the sink used to hold a few tampons for anyone who needed them. That stash ran out in a matter of weeks and was never replenished.
Above the sink is a sign that states “free feminine hygiene products at Elwood’s Cabinet,” the emergency food pantry for Longwood students. While Elwood’s Cabinet offers an excellent service, if I am in desperate need of a menstrual product, the sign is almost a taunting message that comfort and cleanliness is far out of reach.
College students already struggle with money, and the average person who menstruates will spend $13.25 per month on menstrual products. It’s a body function that happens naturally, and yet we are forced to spend over $6,000 on it in our lifetime.
Boston University has been making efforts to make period products more accessible to students since 2018. One of the issues they ran into is that the supplies would disappear quickly, though likely not as quickly as that little yellow bucket was depleted.
The menstrual hygiene products placed in bathrooms are not meant to be a student’s sole source of menstrual products but more for emergencies.
Finding the correct dispensers would be the key to solving that problem. If it gives just enough security where you can’t grab them by the handfuls in combination with the signage already in the bathrooms providing information about Elwood’s Cabinet, students are given not one but two easily accessible resources to help them.
With definitions of gender expanding, it might not be a bad idea to put some in all bathrooms, not just the ones marked female.
If Longwood would do this, it could avoid bringing its citizen leaders public humiliation as a consequence of the smallest amount of forgetfulness or miscalculations.
