Do You Have A Tampon?

We all bleed every month. Well, not everyone, but over 2 billion people menstruate worldwide each month, including women, adolescent girls, and transgender and non-binary individuals. An estimated 500 million of the 800 million people who menstruate on any given day experience period poverty, and in the United States, nearly one in four face the same barrier. In Massachusetts, one in seven children struggle to pay for menstrual products.

Across the world, menstrual stigma, a cultural and social phenomenon characterized by secrecy and shame around menstruation, serves as an additional barrier to accessing proper healthcare.

Harvard’s menstrual support resources are limited. In 2023, a student-led team founded by Shruthi Kumar ’24 worked with the facilities team on the Making Harvard 100% Period Secure project, which aimed to provide free, high-quality, accessible menstrual products across all women’s and gender-neutral bathrooms on the Faculty of Arts and Sciences campus. As part of the project, the team conducted a landscape analysis and negotiated directly with distributors. The team successfully installed menstrual product dispensers in over 800 bathrooms across campus.

“I was pleasantly surprised at just plain old access on campus. I think almost every other bathroom has tampons, pads, etc.,” Claire Sim ’30, a member of FLOW’s board who primarily works on community engagement, said. However, Sim noted that she had never used the products before and so could not comment on their quality.

Since then, the College has not followed up to assess the program’s success. The College has also not updated its plan to ensure high-quality products remain available in all campus bathrooms. New bathrooms have been constructed in the Science Center as part of the College’s plan to ensure compliance with accessibility standards. After the project, the College also closed the Women’s Center in 2025, which previously stocked menstrual products.

The Harvard College Menstrual Equity Coalition, often referred to as Harvard FLOW, is the University’s primary student organization dedicated to advancing menstrual health and destigmatizing menstruation on campus. FLOW’s work aims to build upon the Making Harvard 100% Period Secure campaign.

Ashi Prashapati ’29, co-president of FLOW, explained that she had been passionate about period poverty work for a long time. “I think in your day-to-day, as a person of color, as a woman, as any marginalized group, your body is inherently viewed as deficient, either by the medical society or just in the way people interact and treat you,” she said to the “Harvard Independent.” Racial bias exists throughout the healthcare system: 21% of Black women say they have been treated inequitably by a healthcare provider due to their race, compared to only 3% of White women. “I think menstrual equity is such a foundational way in tackling that idea of deficiency or the stigmatization around women’s bodies, or just the female norm,” Prashapati said.

“We are not a very well-known club,” Prashapati noted. Although FLOW has been around since 2019, it has only grown in presence over the last two years. Despite its lower profile, the club creates space for important conversation, Prashapati explained. “People around me get a lot more comfortable about talking about their bodies, talking about menstrual experiences and issues,” she said.

Though unable to share particular stories shared during the club’s events, to protect student privacy, Prashapati explained that there were issues with menstrual resources at Harvard. “Menstrual poverty is something that students have experienced, and that is why we have space like this on campus,” she continued. This issue is not unique to Harvard; 17% of college students who menstruate experience period poverty and struggle to afford products, and nearly 50% say they stretch their products or avoid changing them on college campuses.

Sim agreed that financial circumstances were a significant barrier to product access. “We live in an extremely expensive area. Our CVS is probably our go-to for products,” she said. “My friends and I were at CVS and just looking at the prices and just absolutely astounded. So I think that is probably one of the biggest things. And it is obviously not sustainable to rely on going to a machine in the public bathroom every single day.”

One first-year at the College said she felt menstruation resources were widely accessible on campus. “My experience has been very positive being a menstruator on campus, because I do not know if every proctor does this, but my proctor leaves tampons in the hallway for me,” an anonymous first-year at the College said. “I’m not embarrassed to ask for help, so if anything ever went wrong, I would immediately find someone who can help me.”

The student added that she believed Harvard had an obligation to ensure there was no period poverty on campus. “Every proctor should be supplying tampons and everything.”

Sim and Prashapati both observed that access to menstrual products is fundamentally a structural issue. “The majority of people who are making legislation who are supposed to be at the top are usually not menstruators, which I think already is a huge barrier,” Sim said.

“People viewing menstruation as a deficiency … just as something that you can not take pride in or you can not celebrate, is probably a big hindrance in feminist movements,” Prashapati said.

Access to products is not necessarily the biggest issue at Harvard. Echoing Prashapati, Sim added that the College can also focus on social perceptions of menstruation: “I think there are a lot of organizations that are doing really great jobs at decreasing stigma there. But I think it is more about the individual and with smaller groups of people.”

FLOW has been trying to increase its presence through collaborations with other student organizations, such as the Harvard Baking Club. Together, the groups organized a workshop on menstruation nutrition, where attendees baked cookies and assembled charcuterie boards while discussing how to nourish one’s body during different phases of the menstrual cycle. Prashapati believes the College could offer similar support. “That’s something really easy that any nutritional service on campus could provide, or even if we had little pamphlets in the dining hall that could talk about that,” she said.

FLOW continues to work to increase period accessibility on campus and is hosting an open mic on Nov. 13. “We bring those stories to light so we are more connected as a community and are able to relinquish any shame around that,” Prashapati said.

Anika Gupta ’30 (anikagupta@college.harvard.edu) is comping the “Harvard Independent.”