Leaders Receive NWHN Barbara Seaman Award for Activism in Women's Health

On October 6th, over 65 guests to launch the NWHN’s Barbara Seaman Award for Activism in Women’s Health. While the event honored the memory of the Network’s co-founder, Barbara Seaman, it was also a fundraising success that generated $31,000 for the Network. We were delighted to be hosted by Sybil Shainwald at her Fifth Avenue apartment in New York City. Sybil is a pioneering women's health activist and litigator, past NWHN Board Chair, and long-time friend and colleague of Barbara Seaman.

Phyllis Chesler, another NWHN co-founder, wrote an essay about the evening for Salon.com, which is excerpted here. She writes: “So, there we all were, veteran feminist health activists of all ages in that apartment with views of Central Park. We were partying above the verdant green tree tops in a tastefully decorated adult tree house decorated in muted colors with Picassos on the walls. Barbara would have loved it. She was so at home in well-appointed, do-gooder settings -- perhaps a necessary consolation for a life devoted to the kind of muckraking that leads to particular punishments.”

“Sybil, our host, was former chair of the NWHN Board and the nation’s go-to lawyer for DES litigation. She was co-counsel in the first DES daughter case, Bichler v. Lilly, and has written, testified and lectured about obstetrical malpractice, unnecessary hysterectomies and product liability litigation. The assembled NWHN members, board members activists, authors, lawyers, professors and politicians included: Ninia Baehr, author of Abortion Without Apology; Rebecca Chalker, author of A Woman’s Book of Choices: Abortion, Menstrual Extraction, RU-486; Laura Eldridge, who was Barbara’s co-author of the recently published No-Nonsense Guide to Menopause; Susan Love, breast cancer surgeon and author of Dr. Susan Love's Breast Book; Susan Wood, former head of the FDA’s Office on Women’s Health; and many other wonderful woman (and some men!) of all ages.”

Two awards were presented that night. The first went to Lynn Paltrow, Executive Director of National Advocates for Pregnant Women, for her important legal work on behalf of pregnant women’s civil rights. The second award went to Gina Arias, Program Director, Empowerment and Wellness, at Housing Works, who is working to defeat the twin plagues of homelessness and AIDS, both of which affect many women of color.

After the event Phyllis asked Cindy what she thinks the Network has accomplished. As quoted in the Salon article, Cindy responded, “‘I was struck by how far the movement has come. Barbara clamored for women’s questions about their health to be taken seriously -- by clinicians and by researchers. She and her allies have accomplished that and much more. There are no more quotas on women in medical school, no more bans on loved ones in the delivery room, contraceptives are much safer, patients have the right to written information about the drugs they've been prescribed, and there are hundreds of studies under way researching important women's health issues. And yet, as I looked around the apartment and recognized so many leaders and she-ros of the women’s health movement, I was also struck by how far we still have to go. When Barbara, Belita [Cowan], Alice [Wolfson], Mary [Howell] and you founded the network, you described the goal ‘to work for a health care system more appropriate for women as consumers and providers.’ How I wish that healthcare system existed! We all know how far we are from a system that includes everyone, treats patients with respect and caring and is supportive of the humanity of clinicians.

So, there we were, a lifetime away from when we first started out, toasting Barbara’s work in Sybil's apartment, congratulating the awardees. Then someone said: ‘What a shame that Barbara cannot be here.’ I said, ‘But I think she is here,’ and everyone laughed and loved the idea that Barbara is, indeed, living on through her work and through us, her friends and her family.”

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