When the Private Becomes Public
By: Tyler A. Donohue
Tags: Gender Equality, Menstruation, Homelessness, Social Impact, Womens Health

Imagine if you had to make the choice between food and toilet paper. We would find that ridiculous, wouldn’t we? Both are connected and completely necessary. Yet, every single month millions of women have to make the decision of whether to buy food or menstrual products. On average, a box of tampons costs around $7.62. Without the financial security and stability to afford such products, many women experiencing homeless must turn to McGyvered resources such as socks, plastic bags, rags, and toilet paper. Or, if they somehow can afford tampons, they might use them for much longer than medically safe, which can lead to serious, even life-threatening infections.

What is Period Poverty?

Menstrual activism grounds itself in the concept of period poverty, or “the state in which people who menstruate find themselves without the financial resources to access suitable menstrual products.” The impacts of period poverty are far-reaching and require analysis on both a personal and structural level. Since 2015, this grassroots movement has gained increasing momentum at the local level. In 2016, we began to see structural shifts when New York City became the first US city to require that all public schools, homeless shelters, and prisons provide free pads and tampons.

To Be Homeless and Menstruating

According to the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, 553,000 people are experiencing homelessness on any given night. Of those experiencing homelessness, approximately 28% are single women. Yet these statistics do not account for the women who experience “hidden homelessness.” While there are thousands of women sleeping on the streets, many more “do not access homeless services but stay in other temporary forms of accommodation such as the houses of relatives, friends, or hostels.” These women are living in precarious and makeshift housing situations and are often lacking consistent access to reliable private sanitation facilities and clean water.

Are Menstrual Activists Doing it Right?

As conversations around menstrual health have grown louder, so too has the “period-positive”capital-F feminist branding. This has led to oversights in the multiplicity of factors at play. Period-positive activists and academic scholarship alike have neglected to consider the socioeconomic diversity of people who menstruate, and have failed “to take into account how their experiences and identities transform the ways in which they relate to their menstruating bodies.” In order for any critical feminist approach to be sound, it must be intersectional. Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw formulated the theory of intersectionality in 1989 as a lens or prism with which to see the way various forms of “inequality operate together and exacerbate each other.” Any attempt to address period poverty without addressing the overlapping of inequalities that occur for homeless women would be sorely lacking in its approach.

In her analysis, Crenshaw explains that “women come from a whole range of backgrounds,” and “if our visions of peace don’t include these differences then our peace will be partial.” Menstrual activism largely focuses on either the privileged middle class of the Global North or the socioeconomically marginalized of the Global South, thereby overlooking all those in the middle. In order to understand the structural changes that need to be made to support menstrual health, we must understand its impact on those experiencing homeless. Considering the corporal and emotional impact of menstruation of such women will allow us to better understand the feminist narrative that “the personal is political.” Understanding the intersection of personal and political interest is a vital part of creating a more nuanced approach to menstrual activism. In her article “The Realities of Period Poverty: How Homelessness Shapes Women’s Lived Experiences of Menstruation,” Shailini Vora writes, “if it is true that a person lives through their body, then it is through the freedoms and restrictions of their bodily capacities and mobility that this living occurs.”

Privacy is Paramount, But Hard to Find in Public

Mobility and freedom from bodily restriction become unbelievably fraught when you are experiencing homelessness. Bleeding bodies are not seen as publically accessible or “normal.” In fact, we all know too well that bodily fluids and functions evoke adverse responses. It is this “cultural representation of a sticky, messy femininity that places menstruating women at the borders of social legitimacy.” Thus, menstruators can only claim normalcy, or public decency through the concealment of their menses. This, of course, proves rather difficult when you are homeless.

Homeless women are, according to Vora, the embodiment of abjection. They represent the “seepage beyond the boundaries of ‘acceptable’ social life,” and are cast out as dirty, deviant, and transgressive. Thereby living in a constant paradox — feebly attempting to conceal and keep private her “flowing, leaky body,” all the while under the public gaze. During interviews, Shailini Vora was told by all homeless female participants that their monthly bleed was emotionally and physically painful, and “rife with negative sensations, such as irritability, stress, vulnerability,” and anxiety or depression. The inability to access privacy and the required ability to be constantly mobile undermined the participant's ability to self-care and fully manage menstruation. This yearning for privacy was one of the most contentious points made by those interviewed, due to the “extreme visibility of homelessness, which contrasts sharply with the intimacy needed to manage the physical and emotional aspects of menstruation.”

Donations Are a BandAid on a Bullet Wound

One would expect homeless shelters to be the much-needed reprieve for women who are suffering from a multitude of overlapping disadvantages. While cities like New York have legislated to ensure consistent access to menstrual products, and many shelters around the country do have products on hand, the stigma and taboo around menstruation prevent many women from confidently seeking the products they need. Also, the idea of these shelters as safe havens does not always come to bear. Unfortunately, there are also institutional power relations between women and those working at shelters. Some homeless women were interviewed and reported that shelters can function like prisons, where they serve as “disciplinary institutions through which homeless bodies are governed and controlled.”

While grassroots activism has flourished in the US and UK to help alleviate the situations for millions of menstruators living in poverty, in-kind donations do not necessarily address the more structural issues, nor does it take into consideration some of the more nuanced aspects of menstruating while homeless. We have to consider whether these free provisions are really addressing the complex and multivalent issues at play? Conceding, of course, to the fact that it is certainly not grassroots organizers’ job to address structural inequality.

Such grassroots organizations usually function under a model of donating tampons and pads, but there is also a tremendous push toward environmentally conscious period products. However, when pushing eco-feminist causes, these organizations should certainly consider the extent to which homeless women can partake in “environmental menstrual feminism,” because it is “extremely limited due to its complete reliance on women’s consumption patterns and privacy of sanitation facilities,” to which, homeless women rarely have access.

How to Create Grassroots and Structural Reform:

So, what can we do to more adequately address the disadvantages and injustices faced by those experiencing both menstruation and homelessness? On a grassroots level there are three significant steps to take:

Homeless services need to improve communication around the availability of menstrual products and work to destigmatize menstruation within their walls. Measure success by how many people are actually receiving and using donations, not how many donations are received by the organization. Move beyond using access to products as the only impact measurement, and actively include access to private, safe, and sanitary facilities.

On a larger scale, there are far more reaching steps that the government can take to create structural reform: