Feminist Uses Of Science And Technology:
Rita Arditti, Adriane Fugh-Berman, and Cindy Pearson

by Lisa Burke

Thanks in large part to the longstanding efforts and ongoing advocacy of the Science and Technology Task Force, there were three distinguished panelists for informative plenary. The three panelists, each in her own way, considered questions including “How and to what extent is scientific activism used to advanced feminist, anti-oppression goals and to create science and health work for all women?” and “How and to what extent is science and technology used to advance global human rights work?” (excerpted from 2004 conference book) Together Arditti, Fugh-Berman, and Pearson led the audience through a nuanced critical exploration of the complex and multi-dimensional relationships among women, science, and technology, all placing health of mind, body, and spirit clearly at the center.

Cindy Pearson

Proudly identifying herself as “a feminist since high school,” Cindy Pearson, Executive Director of the National Women’s Health Network, began by highlighting the herstoric connection between the National Women’s Health Network (NWHN) and the National Women’s Studies Association, noting that both NWHN and NWSA were born of the same critical moment: “Science, as we experienced it in the United States in the 70s, was solidly part of the patriarchy” and “Health as a biomedical science - women’s experience of health - was colored by race, class, age, sexual orientation, ableism – all those nuances shaped by science as part of patriarchy.”

Embodying its commitment to “create social change, create social justice, and make women at the center,” Pearson pointed to the network’s focus on making visible and audible “women’s description of women’s experiences of their bodies.”
Shaped by its founders’ own feminism, Pearson related, the National Women’s Health Network (NWHN) consistently “us[es] science to challenge science” and envisions remodeling rather than dismantling the current system. In discussing the work of NWHN, Pearson stressed the critical work in these areas being done by numerous sister organizations, including the Milwaukee-based Endometriosis Association and DES Action, to name a few. Pearson noted that many of the organizations that share a focus on using science as a feminist tool as the National Women’s Health Network does also have in common that they take no drug company money at all.
Pearson illustrated the use of science as a feminist tool by relating how the network challenged “the definition of older women’s bodies as deficient,” but first she acknowledged a significant reality: “For women who have symptoms, those are real, and so we value women’s voices relating their own experiences of and within their bodies.” Pearson also acknowledged the need, at times, to manage such real symptoms medically.

The “drive to move the market beyond effective symptom relief accelerated as babyboomers got closer to ‘that’ age” while convergence of consumer movements, health movements, and feminist movements marked arrival at a moment in which to experience significant transformation. In response to the effective work of these three movements, medicine responded, as it continues to do, with scientific justifications, justifications that evolve and change, bend and fold, over time in response to different activist efforts.

Pearson continued her illustration by pointing to the mythological medical dogma, “Modern women outlive their ovaries.” Pointing to the faulty comparison between menopause and diabetes and medicine’s underlying logic (you replace insulin so why not replace estrogen?) she presented an overview of the waves of scientific justification for this medical myth beginning with osteoporosis (hormones reduce bone loss) in the 1980s to health benefits (hormones contribute to a healthy heart) in the 1990s.

Vigilance, sustained and continuous, is essential, Pearson noted, if feminist uses of science are going to challenge science effectively and transformatively. Whether testifying before the FDA or monitoring pharmaceutical advertisements in magazines, persistent vigilance lead the NWHN to validate its opposition to this medical dogma by proving that what is “lost” through menopause “does not need to be replaced in order for a woman to live out the rest of her life healthfully.”
Encouraged and energized by her work at the NWHN, Pearson reminded the audience that “feminist activism is always difficult and always worth it” and challenged attendees to use their feminist locations to make necessary changes for the betterment of women’s health at all levels.

Dr. Adriane Fugh-Berman

Dr. Adriane Fugh-Berman, MD, addressed the intersection of health, science, and technology by focusing on a somewhat contrasting dimension: women and complementary & alternative medicine (CAM) – the how, the why, and even some of the why not.

Fugh-Berman began by offering several snapshots of the state of Medicine, using highly illustrative examples from her own medical training at Georgetown University Medical School, specifically the exclusion of female medical students from a course on sexually transmitted diseases and the prohibition on women students performing urological examinations on male patients at Georgetown University Hospital. Throughout her remarks, she carefully described in detail the rocky but well-groomed terrain of conventional medicine, highly occupied by the influence of pharmaceutical companies and “secured” by the underlying preference for profit over sound science.
Relating some skeptics’ concerns over the incompatibility of “real” medicine and CAM, Fugh-Berman highlighted the importance of her feminist and activist roots and the communities in which they were nurtured in sustaining her throughout her involvement in women’s health initiatives.

Describing the conditions of medical training (even under the best and most developed circumstances) – students are sleep deprived, overworked, and isolated, Dr. Fugh-Berman showed how the conditions which are “absent of care” are ripe for allowing pharmaceutical companies to enter, showering care upon interns, residents, and practitioners and advancing the companies’ interests subtly but consistently.
Chronicling briefly the move away from treating only the part to caring for the whole, Dr. Fugh-Berman confirmed the viable and significant relationship between conventionalmedicine and complementary and alternative medicine within the practice of Medicine or among the practices of healing and care. She acknowledged clearly “the multiple ways in which women’s health activism effectively brought about [and continues to bring about] necessary change” in the practices of medicine, the culture of medicine. Dr. Fugh-Berman also stressed “the importance [of] bring[ing] scientific [and] critical perspectives not only to therapies in conventional medicine but also to complementary and alternative medicine (CAM),” reminding attendees that “natural does not mean harmless.”

“Don’t be afraid,” Dr. Fugh-Berman noted. “The research that lay scientists have done is so important.” Feminist activists, educators, and scholars along with women in general have a vital and ongoing role to play in the transformation of the practices of healing.

Rita Arditti

The impact that lay scientists have in real life contexts was captured perfectly in the narrative presented by Rita Arditti, distinguished faculty member of The Union Institute. Well-known for her scholarship on reproductive technologies and her activism on breast cancer and the environment, Arditti focused her presentation on a very particular area of her work: the grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo (Argentina).

Engaging in a detailed chronology of “a specific case in a certain historical moment,” Arditti illustrated the convergence of “science and technology in the search for human rights and justice.” The critical and crucial connection among science, identity, and memory were woven throughout the story of the grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, the grandmothers of los desaparecidos (“the disappeared”).

The historical moment – Argentina, 1976. Rita Arditti took the audience to that moment: The coup of 1976 gave way to a military dictatorship that, under the doctrine of “national security,” gave the military “open access to do anything.” During a period of 7 years (1976-1983), 30,000 people – mostly young students and labor activists (age 16-35) – were disappeared. “Thirty percent (30%) of those disappeared were women,” Arditti reported, “and three percent (3%) of those were pregnant women.” In the time that followed, the women who became known as the grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo learned that the disappeared pregnant women were kept alive until it came time to give birth. The children were then taken from them, and the women were killed.

Continuing the narrative of the grandmothers, Arditti reported that in 1977, one year after the coup, the grandmothers gathered in the Plaza de Mayo, the center of cultural and civic life, demanding answers. The group that began with twelve women continued to gather at this same place weekly calling for justice not only for their daughters but also for their grandchildren. This group of women – mostly housewives or in traditional occupations for women – calling themselves mujeres comùnes (common women) – “challenged the separation between their private lives and the public spheres.” Most of the women in their 70s, 80s, or 90s, they began their search for two generations of the disappeared.

Learning that their grandchildren, “born in clandestine detention camps,” were allowed to live, the women sought relief from the courts and asked to have their grandchildren returned to their rightful birth families. The courts, however, asked for absolute scientific proof that the children were indeed their grandchildren and so their quest to find that proof took a new direction.

One of the founding members of the group recalled the day she read this line a local newspaper: “Scientists had found a way to identify a person through an examination of blood.” There was the beginning of the answer. That one line from a daily newspaper took their cause around the world and ultimately resulted in their work with scientists, like Mary Claire King, who were able to use to DNA blood testing to prove the identity of the grandchildren and provide the courts the absolute scientific proof required to return the children to their respective families of origin, the families from whom they had been taken before birth.

The story of the grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, as Arditti illustrates, is the story of science in the service of identity and the restoration of identity in the service of restoring memory, all crucial elements in preserving the record of one life, of many lives, of an entire people. Referring to the proverb, “Si estoy en tu memoria, soy parte de la historia” (“If I am in your memory, I am part of history), Arditti narrated the way in which this group of “ordinary” women became “agents for social change and human rights activists” and, in the process, lay scientists who pushed forward science in the service of the people. Committed to making visible ‘the dangers of forgetting, the dangers of silence,” these women, as Arditti records, made “a monumental contribution to the global human rights movement,” concretizing the connection between “blood and bones, identity and memory, the personal and the political,” even leaving their mark on international human rights documents like the Convention on the Rights of the Child and the adoption reform movement.

The grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo embody feminist activism in action, engaging science and technology in the restoration of identity and the preservation of memory. As Rita Arditti noted, referring to Gerda Lerner’s presentation on Thursday evening, these women, indeed, became “agents of history.”

The entire plenary session, from start right through the question and answer period, consistently demonstrated how a small group of ordinary women, no matter the circumstances or the context, can work together to engage science and technology in the service of the people. For feminist scholars and feminist activists, this call to consciousness, commitment, and ongoing action has been re-heard.

The three presenters made it clear: Feminist women’s health activism is making meaningful difference in so many places, spaces, and locations, realizing significant transformation of systems and lives by demanding science and technology at the service of the people.