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Comming soon! Improved Barbara Seaman article

Here is the current version:

Barbara Seaman (born 1935) is a women’s health activist. She co-founded in 1975 the National Women's Health Network, with Alice Wolfson, Belita Cowan, Mary Howell, M.D., and Phyllis Chesler, Ph.D. , and authored a number of critical books and articles.

Seaman lives in New York City and received her BA and LHD from Oberlin College as a Ford Foundation scholar. She was also Sloan Rockefeller Fellow at Columbia University's School of Journalism. She began her career as a science writer and editor for various women’s magazines as a frequent contributor to the New York Times and the Washington Post and has been either a columnist or contributing editor at Ms., Omni, Ladies' Home Journal, Hadassah, Bride's and Family Circle. [1]

In 1969, she completed her first book, The Doctors’ Case Against the Pill, which led United States Senate to calls for a hearing on the safety of the combined oral contraceptive pill. As a result, a health warning was added to the pill, the first informational insert for any prescription drug.[2] On April 27, 1970, Robert Finch, Secretary of HEW, wrote in a letter to Barbara Seaman: "I just wanted you to know that I read your book, THE DOCTORS’ CASE AGAINST THE PILL, and it was a major factor in our strengthening the language in the final warning published in the Federal Register to be included in each package of the Pill."

Seaman continued to author articles and advocate for women’s safety and participation in their own medical treatment specifically concerning hormonal contraceptives and childbirth and the unwillingness of some doctors and pharmaceutical companies to disclose risks to patients and consumers, and allow them to make informed consent. In June of 2000, the New York Times published a piece entitled, "The Pill and I: 40 Years On, the Relationship Remains Wary."[1]

Seaman went on to create many books, articles, plays, films, and anthologies. Her major works include: Free and Female (1972), Women and the Crisis in Sex Hormones (1977 with G. Seaman), Career and Motherhood (1979), Rooms with No View (1974), Women and Men (1975), Seizing our Bodies (1978), Lovely Me: The Life of Jacqueline Susann (1987), The Greatest Experiment ever Performed on Women: Exploding the Estrogen Myth (2003), and For Women Only: Your Guide to Health Empowerment with Gary Null (2000).

In 2000, Seaman was named by the US Postal Service as one of 40 honorees of the 1970s Women’s Right Movement stamp.[3]

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References

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Suzanne Braun Levine's Inventing the Rest of Our Lives: Women in Second Adulthood (New York: Viking, 2005):

"We owe any mastery we have achieved over our own health management to the efforts of Seaman and her sisters-in-arms. The strategy was established early on: Energize a grassroots constituency that lacked a voice; create coalitions from smaller autonomous groups (mobilized around particular conditions, or the needs of a particular demographic group, or local issues); share strategies, contracts, and information through informal but efficient networks; and form alliances with sympathetic sources on the inside of government, industry and the profession. And there was one more thing.

'We made it is rule to take no money from those who might expect their pound of flesh in return Seaman remembers. 'Otherwise Grassroots turns into Astroturf.'

"Although our medical problems are not yet getting the attention they deserve, women's health interests are now on the public agenda. They are there, because women whose medical needs have been neglected are demanding attention, because women's health has become a field with a body of information that professionals have to be aware of, and because women consumers have become active participants in their own care. Today there remain urgent societal problems in need of a movement. One of them strikes particularly close to home.


PBS American Experience: The Pill

Womens e news article

WebMD bio

book author bio

Who's Who in America: 46th - 61st edition 2007

Science Magazine, Aug 11 1995, article by Charles Mann entitled Women¹s Health Research Blossoms

Notes

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  1. ^ "Author Bio". Hyperion Books. 2002. Retrieved 2006-09-05.
  2. ^ "Barbara Seaman". Jewish Women's Archive. Retrieved 2006-09-05.
  3. ^ Seaman Honored with US Postage Stamp


Here is my version:

Barbara Seaman (born 1935) is a women’s health activist.