RIP Barbara Seaman (Updated)

Power Surge: Interview with Barbara Seaman
Exploding The Estrogen Myth

Barbara Seaman's book The Doctor's Case Against the Pill, and her later book about hormone replacement therapy, Women and the Crisis in Sex Hormones, her later books about DES, Women and the Crisis in Sex Hormones, and hormone replacement therapy, The Menopause Industry: How the Medical Establishment Exploits Women, were seminal feminist tracts. My copies were dog-eared because I was always lending them to friends who were considering the pill or HRT. She was right on about both: huge experiments by the male medical community, where healthy women were given untested and experimental drugs for perfectly natural conditions that were not illnesses. A woman who needs birth control is not sick. A woman experiencing the symptoms of menopause is not "ill"; she is experiencing part of life.

Barbara Seaman was fired from almost every magazine she ever wrote for, when the pharmaceutical companies threatened to pull advertising if her work was published. She was a real feminist pioneer. Not surprisingly, the corporate media is ignoring the death of this influential feminist. As of the time of the post, only 8 media outlets have published the AP an obituary of Seaman.

She will be missed.

HuffPo: Leora Tanenbaum
Your Pill is Safer Because of Her

HuffPo: Jennifer Baumgardner
Remembering Barbara Seaman

TPM Cafe: Let us remember Barbara Seaman, crusading pioneer of the women's health movement

Chesler Chronicles: An Elegy For My Friend "Babz," aka Barbara Seaman (1935-2008) (a tribute by another feminist writer, Phyllis Chesler, the author of Women and Madness)

Newsday: Barbara Seaman, women's health advocate, dead at 72

Our Bodies, Ourselves: Remembering Barbara Seaman

Women'sSpace: “Dear Injurious Physician” — In Memorium: Barbara Seaman, Sept. 11, 1935-Feb. 27, 2008

UPDATE: As of 10:00 a.m. on Friday, only two additional corporate media outlets have published an obituary of Barbara Seaman: the Washington Post (and not just the AP obit, they wrote their own) and the Philadelphia Daily News. Is the corporate media ignoring the death of this feminist pioneer to keep their pharmaceutical advertisers happy? I emailed the NYTimes last night lamenting their lack of an obit, and got a form email in response, but neither the Times, the Boston Globe, nor the LATimes reports on Seaman's death today. Shame.

UPDATE 2: Updated to correct my mistake in confusing Women and the Crisis in Sex Hormones with The Menopause Industry: How the Medical Establishment Exploits Women.