Barbara Seaman, born September 11, 1935; died February 27, 2008

I came to New York City in 1993, age 22, to take an internship at Ms. magazine. Within a few months, I was asked to fact-check a profile of Barbara Seaman, a pioneer in the women's health movement on the...

I grew up in the kind of Midwestern small-town household in which my mother stayed at home with us kids, dealing with meals, laundry, cleaning, and volunteer work, while my father worked as a doctor and was the more authoritative disciplinarian. We were three daughters, though, and while our family...