Many people in Oxford menstruate regularly, and yet, when walking around the city or entering its crowning jewel – the Radcliffe Camera – one struggles to find any trace of this extraordinarily common phenomenon. This is certainly true for the beautiful, albeit painfully impractical, University-owned-and-run library, which doesn’t offer period products in any of its bathrooms.
When Oxford University welcomed its first female students to Lady Margaret Hall, the nine pioneering women lived and worked under rules that prevented them from, for instance, walking “unsupervised” with a man. Until 1920, they were not actually able to graduate with a degree. Oxford has come a long way over the past century but provisions and considerations for women remain woefully insubstantial. Much more research and advocacy should focus on the lack of resources in place to prevent spiking in clubs, sexual harassment between peers, and the conscious or unconscious biases that continue to put female students on the back foot in tutorials. Nevertheless, one of the simplest and yet damning indictments of Oxford’s “patriarchy” problem is the complete and utter disregard for the needs of those who menstruate.
How ironic that one might find a historical account of the evolution of menstrual products on the shelves when there is not a single menstrual product in sight. None of the bathrooms even contain a machine to be used in a pinch, let alone a selection of free products suited to the needs of a diverse range of bodies. Sheffield Hallam University sets a good example for Oxford as to how this blatant shortcoming might be amended; there are free period products throughout the campus bathrooms and, according to their website, any student can simply ask for the type they need. If they would rather do this confidentially, they can ask at the desk for “Tammy” (tampons) or “Patricia” (pads).
To the senior executives of the Bodleian Libraries, I might say, imagine yourselves in the position of someone caught off guard by their period while working in the Rad Cam.
Perhaps your bag is upstairs, or perhaps you forgot to pack a pad or a tampon today – it’s easy enough. In any case, now you must fashion some sort of improvised emergency liner out of painfully thin, scrunched up toilet paper. It will have to be temporary, of course, and the time pressure is on to race out the building to the local Boots and buy a replacement. It will be uncomfortable too, both physically and in the sense that you are doubtless wondering if the balled-up loo roll has formed a visible lump on their behind or, worse, has already begun to unravel. The scenario is all too real for menstruating people who choose to study at the Rad Cam. Let me put that failing into perspective.
Oxford boasts a student body that consists of over 13,500 female students, – a figure that exceeds the male population by almost 500 students. Determining an exact figure of menstruating people is not clear, as not all women menstruate and not all those who menstruate identify as women. The figure, then, might be designed to overcount the population affected by this issue, to mitigate the risk of underplaying or misrepresenting the amount and range of people that this article represents. Along the same lines, although these people may not all use the Rad Cam regularly, if even a quarter of them make use of it in a week, that could still be, at a generous approximation, over 3000 students that might be menstruating in the Rad Cam at any given time. Based on the average menstrual cycle, we might reasonably estimate that there could be hundreds of people in the Rad Cam on their period every single week – not including any staff. Their natural bodily experiences are neither provided for nor even acknowledged.
When I spoke to the Rad Cam enquiries team twice to ask that they consider this issue, I received no reply beyond the underwhelming and essentially avoidant: “I will pass on your suggestion to senior staff to discuss.”
The response is disappointing but not surprising within a country whose government, until the 1st January 2021, openly taxed period products as luxury items. Indeed, the attitude of some major institutions to menstruation has always been ill-informed and inconsistent. It is little wonder that such ignorance occurs, given the failings of institutions on every level to adequately educate its members, especially those young men who are least affected. A study from June 2024, led by the University of Bristol and Anglia Ruskin University, found that many of their participants had left school lacking basic knowledge about menstruation and feeling ill-equipped, with 62.4 percent rating their education as “poor” or “very poor” in preparing them for managing menstruation. Until the issues and bodies of those who menstruate are treated as an important facet deserving of resources and attention, the very serious and tangible consequences of patriarchal inequality will persist.
This resource gap is not good enough from the Rad Cam or indeed, a university that brags its influential position as a leading education institution. If the library and University want to uphold their values of sophistication, accessibility and integrity, then they ought to start by providing all readers with an equal opportunity for a stress-free and sanitary working environment. Too often issues like these go unaddressed and unspoken because those in power are not representative enough of the population they purport to serve. Indeed, the recent Research Briefing on Women in Politics and Public Life, published by the House of Commons Library, highlights the shameful statistics that in the Commons women make up just 35 percent of MPs and in the Lords a mere 29 percent. From the Cabinet to the can, more than half of the British population are depreciated.
So, what is the solution? It is, of course, true that period product dispensary machines are a pain in their own right, because who carries around coins these days? More seriously, the machines represent a prevalent and dangerous precedent that suggests period products are luxury items rather than essential items that a university as prestigious and wealthy as Oxford should surely provide for its readers completely free of charge. Although many colleges have taken the step to make period products readily available and ostensibly free in their campus bathrooms and JCRs, even in these instances, few of the products provided are actually wholly “free” for students. Colleges do not generally obstruct JCRs from funding the distribution of menstrual products across campuses. These schemes are, however, dependent on the unseen, and persistent labour of Women’s Officers, Gender Reps, and Wellbeing Committees. Such programs still ultimately resign period products to the category of “luxuries”, akin to any “Wellbeing Farm Animals” that might be brought in to combat the notorious fifth-week blues, as they are paid for by JCRs. Truly free period products, provided by the University, would be a great marker of an institution that recognises that periods are neither a choice nor a pleasure and a machine in the Rad Cam bathrooms is the very least we deserve.
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