Barbara Seaman
| Barbara Seaman | |
|---|---|
Seaman in 1980
|
|
| Born | September 11, 1935 |
| Died | February 27, 2008 (aged 72) Manhattan, New York |
| Occupation | Activist, author, journalist |
| Years active | 1950–2008 |
Barbara Seaman (September 11, 1935 – February 27, 2008) was an American author, activist, and journalist, and a principal founder of the women's health feminism movement.
Seaman, whose parents, Henry J. Rosner and Sophie Kimels, met at a Young People's Socialist League picnic, grew up in a politically progressive milieu (Pete Seeger sang at her nursery school when she was four years old).
When she was in high school, Seaman won a contest for her writing and the prize was dinner with Eleanor Roosevelt, according to a 1997 interview of Seaman by author/attorney Karen Winner.
Seaman was sensitized at an early age to women's health issues when her aunt Sally died of endometrial cancer in 1959, aged 49. Her aunt's oncologist attributed her death to Premarin, which her gynecologist had prescribed for the relief of menopausal symptoms.
When the birth control pill came on the market in 1960, Barbara was writing columns for women's magazines such as Brides and the Ladies' Home Journal. She launched her career as a women's health journalist and brought a new kind of health reporting to the field, writing articles that centered more on the patient and less on the medical fads of the day. Seaman was first to reveal that women lacked the information they needed to make informed decisions on child-bearing, breast-feeding, and oral contraceptives. She even went so far as to alert women to the dangers of the Pill, whose primary ingredient was estrogen (also the active ingredient in Premarin, which had contributed to the death of her aunt). Prolific output and the popularity of her published articles won Seaman membership with the prestigious Society of Magazine Writers. Through this organization she met Betty Friedan, who asked her to cover events such as the founding of NOW (1966), the founding of NARAL (1969), and other similarly important feminist developments. She was also befriended by Gloria Steinem and became a contributing editor at Ms. magazine.
...
Wikipedia