Let’s Talk About It, Period.

It’s a rainy November evening in Eugene, Oregon, and one of the local school districts is holding one of its weekly school board meetings. Nothing about the Thursday meeting seems particularly out of the ordinary, as the group of educators and policy makers conduct their business, facing a conference room full of mostly empty plastic chairs. In the front row, however, sit three high school girls. They look like your typical trendy high school sophomores, rocking their light-wash mom jeans and holding their hydroflasks decked out in stickers. One of them sports a Harvard t-shirt, and another wears a purple sweatshirt plastered with the logo of her lacrosse team. 

On a school night such as this, one would usually find the girls at one of their after-school club meetings, a friend’s house, or at home doing homework, but instead they sit at the Eugene Education center, listening intently and eagerly awaiting the portion of the board meeting open to the public. The girls’ attendance tonight was not unusual to this meeting. They have been showing up for weeks now, and will not stop until they are taken seriously.

Posey Chiddox, Violet Neale, and Nabikshya Majhi are three of the faces behind PERIOD Eugene, a branch of the global non-profit PERIOD. The Portland-based organization promotes service, education, and advocacy about period poverty; and attempts to end the stigmas surrounding menstruation. 

Failure to provide free menstruation products in public restrooms is a legitimate equity issue. One in five girls in the United States have at one point left school early, or missed school altogether, because they lacked proper access to menstrual products, a phenomenon often referred to as “period poverty.”

 “The first few times we spoke, the board members' responses were along the lines of ‘Thank you so much for coming; we appreciate you being student activists’- and then they wouldn’t actually do anything,” said 15-year-old Posey Chiddox, President of PERIOD Eugene. “It took so long for them to realize that we weren’t gonna leave until they did something about it.”  

As the girls give their tireless testimony to a room of somewhat uncomfortable faces of the school board members, their mission is clear. The girls want free menstrual products provided in all public-school restrooms in the 4J district. 

“It’s the inequity of not having these products, and the fact that a lot of people at my high school and around Eugene couldn’t afford these products in the first place,” said PERIOD Eugene’s Policy Director, Violet Neale. “Having to lend them to my own friends because they can’t get them at home was really difficult to see.”

Although 15-year-old Neale claims to be an inexperienced public speaker, she knows her stuff when it comes to period policy. When she’s not playing lacrosse or running cross country, she’s the one behind the microphone at city council meetings, rattling off facts to educate the public about this not-so-often discussed equity issue. 

Neale explains that her school specifically–Churchill High–has a wide socioeconomic range of students in comparison to other high schools in Eugene. This drives the Churchill community to be extra conscious, as they tend to experience period poverty on a daily basis. 

“Students will purposely put pads and tampons in the girl’s locker room to share with everybody on a regular basis,” said Neale. “It’s just something that the Churchill community does for each other.”

Seeing this issue first-hand, as well as experiencing the day to day stigmas as women who menstruate, is what inspired Chiddox to start a Eugene chapter of PERIOD. Already the President of Sheldon High School’s Women’s Advocacy Group and Oregon chair for the High School Democrats of America, the socially-inclined Chiddox has what it takes to lead PERIOD Eugene. 

“I noticed that all my friends would hide their tampons and pads up their sleeves when they went to the bathroom, and I thought ‘this isn’t how it should be,” said Chiddox. “I was never the type of person who would hide my tampon or my pad. I would always just carry it to the bathroom, and I thought that that needed to be normalized.” 

Chiddox reached out to leaders of Women Advocacy Groups, Feminist Unions, and student groups alike throughout different high schools in Eugene. Neale, Michaelson, and other passionate students joined the Eugene PERIOD Chapter soon after, and have been determined to make a difference ever since. They were going to mandate free pads and tampons in their high school bathrooms. 

The process wasn’t easy. Since September 2019, the girls have been familiar faces in open public forums nearly every week, fighting for period equity. Neale explained that despite the eventual unanimous vote to pass their proposal, they all had their legitimate doubts regarding whether or not they’d be able to convince lawmakers to act or to get a full understanding of the issue. 

“I think just looking at the school board members’ faces, you could sense a little bit of uncomfortableness, even from some of the people who were supportive; just from us talking about periods so blatantly, calling it a natural need, and calling out the school board for not taking action,” said Chiddox.  

Though the initial reactions were not exactly what the girls were hoping for, their testimonies at weekly meetings paired with the support from school board members like Gordon Lafer and Martina Shabram helped them to garner more respect from the board members. 

Not only is Lafer a member of the 4J school board, but he also has a daughter in eighth grade; he knows that periods often come at inconvenient times of teen anxiety and general stress. After he saw a story that New Hampshire passed a law mandating free pads and tampons in middle and high schools and found further research that there were similar laws in New York, Illinois, California—and even Portland—he knew it would be realistic to achieve something similar in Eugene. 

“It’s obviously a gender equity issue,” Lafer said. “If more guys menstruated, the common sense of this would have been obvious a long time ago.”

 In August, Lafer proposed a policy to provide free menstrual products in the restrooms of the 4J school district. While a majority of the board agreed with the reasoning behind his proposal, some did not believe that the provision of free pads and tampons should be made an official school board mandated policy. 

“People on the board argued that policy should be reserved for bigger issues,” Lafer said. “We have a policy that says that we need to integrate pest management for cockroaches in the schools. I don't think this is a less big deal than that. So that’s one of the places where I think the student testimony was really helpful.”

As of January 2020, all schools in the 4J district are required to have dispensers filled with free period products in the restrooms. This accomplishment, however, was just the first step. The students and Lafer aren’t settling for complacency; they want to institute a wider policy regarding period inequity.

“After we passed 4J, we realized that this is much bigger than just a Eugene issue,” Neale said. “Shortly after we had Bethel school district, the other district in Eugene, come out and say that they were going to implement policy to have it in their bathrooms.”

Neale has since been reaching out at city council meetings to push a policy of providing free menstrual products in all public restrooms in Eugene, not just in schools. The Eugene City Council has recently agreed to implement a trial run of providing free products in public places such as the Eugene Library. And, if it goes successfully, these products will be provided in all Eugene public restrooms. 

“We’re gonna keep showing up and making sure they follow through with it, but this is our next big thing. It’s exciting,” said Neale. 

While PERIOD’s eventual goal is to implement this public policy in public restrooms all across Oregon, Neale explains that the organization has hit a bit of a roadblock in terms of reaching out to representatives due to the fact that the next legislative session isn’t until 2021. So, the girls plan to contact state representative Julie Fayeh, a supporter of the movement, again later in the year to reiterate their cause as the session gets closer. 

If Eugene city council determines the trial run as a success, all of Eugene’s public spaces will provide free menstrual products, thanks to the efforts of PERIOD. And if the state legislature passes, products will be free everywhere in Oregon. Then, perhaps, nationwide. Lafer believes this dream isn’t unrealistic at all. 

 “We wouldn’t have bathrooms without toilet paper or soap... Based on what it costs it seems like something worth pushing.”

Anyone can attest to the sheer panic of sitting down on the toilet in a public restroom, only to realize that the stall they’re in is out of toilet paper. The awkward yell into the abyss of the bathroom which follows, asking if anyone has any toilet paper that they can kindly pass under the stall. 

Sure, it’s a bit uncomfortable - but it’s normal. Everyone uses toilet paper. 

Only people who menstruate can relate to the anxiety of meticulously planning a trip to the bathroom. Awkwardly sliding a tampon up their sleeve as they attempt to make it out of the classroom and to the bathroom stall. And that’s assuming that they even have easy access to affordable menstrual products in the first place. 

But thanks to the influence of Chiddox, Neale, Majhi, Lafer, and the states already on board with this movement, this equity issue is on its way to being resolved. Periods may never be fun or glamorous, but someday lawmakers may be able to address the issue like adults.