DR GABRIELLE JAMELA HOSEIN
FOR MANY years, UWI students in my Women's Studies class opted to do their popular actions, meant to raise awareness about women's rights, on issues related to menstruation. Groups of young women and men created petitions to the Guild of Students for free distribution of pads and tampons in women's washrooms. They held open-air workshops outside of the library on health challenges associated with menstruation, and natural remedies. They created games about myths and facts, awarding winners menstruating vagina cupcakes, designed with multi-coloured icing and quite delicious.
These were opportunities for students to practise peer education, particularly on issues miscast as private. Menstruation provides an excellent example of such casting. Its intersections with public discourses of shame, workplace demands, health-sector response, poverty, and access to clean water and sanitation facilities are largely invisible.
We still consider public talk about periods to be too personal, despite half of the population bleeding every month for most of their lives, with implications for their school participation, health, employment and costs of living.
These student actions didn't lead to sustained activism, but I thought of them seeing feminist organising finally emerge. Today, Feminitt Caribbean, founded by Ashlee Burnett, is showing such leadership, with a Safe Cycle project which includes public education and period kits which provide three months of period products plus tools, resources and information for 120 young people.
The project tackles myths and stigmas that can make people who menstruate feel unsafe, alienated and ashamed. It's keen to engage men and boys in education efforts, recognising that they are excluded from information about menstruation too early on.
It highlights the challenges of period poverty, which is when young people can't afford pads or painkillers or healthy food that prevents anaemia, or don't have equitable access to clean running water for menstrual hygiene, particularly in rural or low-income areas.
Finally, the Safe Cycle project will undertake a needs assessment of the 120 young people to identify and support those who need help accessing gynaecological care to enable them to have safe cycles.
For these young activists, including Sapphire Alexander, who created the digital initiative Caribbean Feminist; Amy Li Baksh, who produces eco-friendly period products through her small business the Lily Pads Project; and Feminitt's current team of Chanelle Beatrice, Jade Sullivan, Saidi Moseley and Alexandria Sanchez, as Burnett puts it, 'Being able to have a safe cycle is a human right. It is a slice of having good health and well-being.'
Expanding our understanding of women's needs as human rights is essential as is seeing menstrual equity as an issue of gender, sexual and economic justice, and even as part of rights of disabled people. Meeting these needs through the recently la
