Barbara Seaman 1935-2008: Author, Activist, NWHN Co-Founder

By Cindy Pearson, Executive Director

I still remember the “Barbara Seaman care packages” that I used to send my friends 30 years ago. What’s a Barbara Seaman care package? It’s a small box filled with vitamins and supplements and, most importantly, a copy of Women and the Crisis in Sex Hormones. I treasured my own copy of Women and the Crisis because it gave me information I could use to protect my health. For years, I did my best to share both the book itself and the information it contained with every woman I cared about. This was back in 1978, and the book was a bestseller by that time, but I still couldn’t stop myself from buying copies for everyone I knew. At the time that I was making my care packages, I’d never met Barbara and really didn’t know much about her. Little did I know that, 30 years later, I’d be standing in front of a roomful of people gathered to celebrate my 20th anniversary at the Network, thanking Barbara for making it possible for me to spend so many wonderful years working at the organization she helped create.

Barbara began her career in the 1960s as a muckraking journalist. Her first book, The Doctors’ Case Against the Pill, exposed the risks of the newly introduced birth control pill and led Senator Gaylord Nelson (D-WI) to hold hearings on the issue. Outraged women, armed with the information from Barbara’s exposé, disrupted the hearings’ all-male witness panels and insisted that the Senators hear both women’s experiences with the Pill, and women’s questions about the health issues affecting them. The ferment aroused by Barbara’s work helped launch a political movement, which led directly to the creation of the National Women’s Health Network.

The Network’s work is infused by Barbara’s best qualities and values – dogged determination to see medical abuses corrected, unwavering insistence on listening to women, and fearless willingness to challenge medical authority. We worked together with Barbara on some of the biggest issues in women’s health, including the fight to ensure that adequate research be done on the safety of menopause hormone therapy. Barbara was so happy when the results of the Women’s Health Initiative were widely reported, and women could finally make truly informed decisions about menopause hormone therapy, and as we all know, thousands of women have avoided breast cancer thanks to this information.

Barbara knew for several months before her death that she had advanced lung cancer. When doctors confirmed that no treatment could extend her life, Barbara made an informed choice to seek palliative care and continue her work. In the time she had left, she finished two books -- The No Nonsense Guide to Menopause and The Body Politic – and also made time to sit down with me for two long interviews. During our last conversations, Barbara made it clear that even though her professional identity was as a journalist and author, her proudest accomplishment was her role in founding the National Women’s Health Network. Barbara died at her home in New York, surrounded by her family, on February 27, 2008. We will miss her.