“PERIODS are not an emergency,” Gabby Edlin, founder of Bloody Good Period, tells Vogue. The self-described “social change creative” is talking about the moment she knew something needed to be done about the fact that very few food banks and asylum seeker drop-in centres were providing feminine hygiene products.
When volunteering at the New London Synagogue centre, she was told that they only handed out sanitary products - alongside food and clothing - in emergencies. “Number one, no one is going to ask because it’s embarrassing,” she explains. “They might ask once, but they won’t ask again. And number two, what is the emergency? If you’re going to bleed on the floor, you should be offered a pad.”
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What started as a whip-round for sanitary products on Facebook is now a growing enterprise with a vision to end period poverty. Edlin coordinates 60 volunteers, most of whom are in storage facilities unpacking and logging the products, and a small team that focuses on logistics. “Nobody is paid for anything,” she says. “It’s based on pure passion and commitment to making it happen.”
Now a year old and and supplying nine drop-offs in North London, Bloody Good Period has built up a level of trust within the asylum seeker community. “When I first started taking pads to the drop-offs, it was like a smash-and-grab,” remembers Edlin. “As people who are displaced, asylum seekers don’t know where their next supplies are coming from. Now they know we’re coming back and they trust us, it’s much more chilled. People take one or two packs, even though they’re entitled to take as many as they need to without judgement. At the last drop-off, I got a few hugs, which I wasn’t expecting. It sounds really small but periods can lead to friendship.”
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Providing a sustainable flow (Edlin's pun intended) of sanitary products is not as simple as supply and demand. “Ninety per cent of the women that we work with are black, and being white it didn’t occur to me initially that they need a specific type of shampoo,” she notes. “They would be too polite to ask for anything else because they felt that asylum seekers don’t deserve to ask for anything specific. That was a big wake-up call. You’ve got to make sense of people so you can help them.”
As well as targeting small independent brands – the big brands are not interested, she says – building up the donation network and hosting CupAware parties to help women feel comfortable using menstrual cups, BGP's next moves are still rooted in the need to readdress the period taboo in society.
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“It’s not enough to say that periods are a centuries-old stigma. It's sexism,” she says. “We live in a patriarchy that is not allowing women to take control of their bodies in the way that men are. If we didn’t live in a sexist society then people would realise that the things that affect women are just as important as things that affect men. People would always have had free sanitary protection.”
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She encourages people to stay cynical about “society’s inability to talk about things that come out of a vagina”, and though BGP supports the increased publicity the fight for gender equality is receiving through the Time’s Up movement, she is keen to remind people that celebrities endorsing social action is not a modern thing: “Look at Annie Lennox on poverty!”
“I think there are often people who jump on the band wagon without really assessing whether they’re actually contributing to the problem, for example Justin Timberlake wearing a #TimesUp pin at the Golden Globes, but then also working with Woody Allen. We haven’t won when all the male celebrities say they are feminists.”
BGP will be collecting pads and giving out information at London's Time’s Up rally, but urging people to actually talk about periods: “It’s easy for celebrities, or Theresa May and people in parliament to talk about shame and stigma, but they’re not actually talking about periods,” she explains. “It’s a lot harder to say that if you don’t have a pad your period can lead to infection. There are problems if we don’t deal with periods, and society needs to start taking note.”
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Find out how you can donate to BGP at Bloodygoodperiod.com, and meet Gabby Edlin and the BGP team at London’s Time’s Up rally on Sunday.
