Barbara Seaman addressed the gendered prejudice in medicine, that being a woman was seen as an illness. Her exposes of the risks women undergo to simply control their reproductive lives, with the medicine at hand, helped improve the standard of care women received across the board. Her work changed the medical community, establishing that women be treated with dignity, honesty and care.

The Book That Changed The World

Barbara’s first book, The Doctor’s Case Against the Pill, (1969), helped launch the Senate hearings on the safety of birth control pills in 1970.

In her first book, The Doctors’ Case Against the Pill, Seaman exposed the serious and little-known side effects of the high-estrogen pill prescribed at the time. Women weren’t warned that the pill could cause heart attacks, strokes, depression and a host of other ills.

Her investigative work prompted Senate hearings in 1970 that led to a warning label on the drug and the mandatory inclusion of patient-information inserts. Her work ensured greater safety and set a precedence that women were indeed watching.

Feminist Disobedience

When women who had been harmed by the pill were barred from testifying at the hearings, they fought back by constantly interrupting, calling out questions such as "Why isn’t there a pill for men?” and "Why are 10 million women being used as guinea pigs?” Seaman wrote 30 years later in the New York Times.

Those acts of "feminist disobedience,” as Seaman called them, are often portrayed as ground zero of the women’s health movement.[1]

According to Cindy Pearson, Executive Director of the National Women’s Health Network (NWHN):

"The (Senate) hearings inspired even more action by young feminists, who decried the lack of women’s participation in the process. Led by Alice Wolfson of D.C. Women’s Liberation, they repeatedly disrupted the hearings, demanding to know why patients were not testifying and why there was no pill for men. These demonstrations, widely covered by the international press, are now considered the Boston Tea Party of the women’s health movement.""

Carol Downer remembers the hearing and voices of women disrupting the Senate hearings on her car radio in Los Angeles, and being so struck by the power of their action that she had to pull her car over. Shortly afterward, she and colleague Lorraine Rothman took a trip across the country to teach thousands of women about cervical self-examination and menstrual extraction. Many other grassroots women’s health projects sprang up over the next few years, and by the mid-1970’s the women’s health movement consisted of hundreds of local projects, including clinics, self-help groups, writing groups and education projects.[2]