Period poverty’s impact on the futures of its most marginalized groups

Abstract


 The main objective in this paper was to conceptualize how period poverty impacts the upward mobility of women and girls in the United States. With the topic of period poverty gaining awareness and the idea of menstruation becoming more mainstream, the impacts of menstruation on a menstruator’s future must be acknowledged also. One of the main ways to identify these impacts, specifically from a financial perspective, is through socioeconomic growth as it demonstrates an intersection between a person’s economic stability and the opportunities they have been given from a younger age. In this paper, period poverty and its influence on upward mobility is broken into demographic groups of girls in middle and high school, women in college, low-income women, and incarcerated women. This research connects the areas of period poverty and upward mobility to identify how financial precarity and menstruation limit the futures of its most struggling groups.