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Barbara Seaman

Content type
Collection

Barbara Seaman

Project
Barnard: Jewish Women Changing America

Judith Rosenbaum interviewed Barbara Seaman on October 30, 2005, in New York, New York, as part of the Barnard: Jewish Women Changing America Oral History Project. Seaman discusses her research on preventative hysterectomies, the influence of Rose Kushner, her family history, activism in the women's movement, and challenges as an activist journalist confronting the pharmaceutical industry.

Barbara Seaman

Muckraking journalist Barbara Seaman survived a tumultuous childhood in New York City to become a bestselling author, a prominent second wave feminist, and, as a founder of the women’s health movement, an architect of informed consent. A lifelong scourge to the pharmaceutical industry, Seaman exposed the dangers of the high-dose birth control pill, hormone replacement therapy, and male doctors’ hubris.

Silence Breakers Throughout History Composite (Color)

Historical Silence Breakers

Bella Book

Here are just a few of the Jewish women throughout history who spoke out, breaking long-held silences about social issues and women’s disenfranchisement. Their stories remind us that change happens when women use their voices, loudly and together.

Barbara Seaman / Miriam Perez

Women's Health Activists

Putting Women's Health in Their Own Hands

Barbara Seaman

This feminist disobedience, day after day, became a major story in the news, and by June we had secured an FDA warning to users of the Pill.

Barbara Seaman, 1935 - 2008

Thinking about Barbara, I realize that she was a one-woman social networking site. She remembered everyone she had ever met and tried to connect them with everybody else she had ever met. She recalled where you were from, whom you dated, your health problems, and your writings or accomplishments and then she introduced to people who you should know.

The women honored by the passage of healthcare reform

Leah Berkenwald

Last night the House of Representatives passed the healthcare reform bill in what is being called a historic victory for progressives and healthcare activists, despite the inclusion of abortion restrictions. Still, the bill will make healthcare accessible to many who could not afford it under the current system and will curb some of the most unethical practices of insurance companies, such as dropping coverage when a child gets sick.

Topics: Medicine

Standing up for women's health care

Judith Rosenbaum

These last several weeks, I (like other JWA bloggers) have walked around in a haze of frustration, rage, and despair over politicians' apparent blindness to the centrality of women's health to national health. As a historian, I can attest that as goes women's health, so goes the health of the nation.

Topics: Medicine

Don't forget Barbara Seaman!

Judith Rosenbaum

I read this New York Times article about the role of pharmaceutical companies in creating a market for treating menopause at about midnight, and I was so appalled that the article doesn't mention journalist and women's health activist Barbara Seaman that I couldn't sleep and got out of bed at 1 a.m. to write this post.

Three generations of activist Seaman family mark 10th anniversary of Women's Strike for Equality

August 26, 1980

When women and men paraded down New York's Fifth Avenue on August 26, 1980, to mark the tenth anniversary of Women's Strike for Equality and the sixtieth anniversary of women's right to vote, three

Who’s your women’s health hero?

Judith Rosenbaum

Our Bodies, Ourselves has created the Women's Health HeroesAward and is seeking nominations! I'm so excited about this opportunity to celebrate the activists I admire and to learn about the women whose work I'm not yet familiar with.

Topics: Feminism, Medicine

Health Activism, American Feminist

American women have been the “perennial health care reformers.” Women’s health activism has often coincided with other social reform movements. Since the late 1960s, Jewish women have helped create and sustain the women’s health movement through decades of substantial social, political, medical, and technological change.

Plan B

JL

On this weekend twenty six years ago, women paraded down New York's Fifth Avenue to mark the tenth anniversary of Women's Strike for Equality and the sixtieth anniversary of the women's right to vote.

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