Conference on Women’s Health & the Environment

I am happy to kick off Teresa Heinz Kerry's blogtour promoting the “Conference on Women’s Health & the Environment” held in Pittsburgh on April 20th.

Teresa Heinz Kerry’s two marriages bring together two American political traditions, the Republican Heinz family and the Democratic Kerry family, and shows how good people in both parties have common ground. Teresa herself is of Portuguese descent and grew up in Mozambique. To those who think French is the most romantic of the Romance languages, to my mind Portuguese is a much more beautiful and romantic language, though also a bit sad and wistful. Educated in South Africa and Switzerland, Teresa is fluent in 5 languages. She received the Albert Schweitzer Gold Medal for Humanitarianism in 2003 in recognition for her philanthropy through the Heinz Family Philanthropies which also sponsors the conference.

Much of her philanthropic effort has focused on two areas: the environment, and women’s health and economic security. To most Americans, environmental issues and women’s issues tend to be put in separate conceptual boxes. We have an environmental movement and a feminist movement and the two are not perceived as intersecting. But in Europe, particularly in the European Green movement, these issues are conceptually much more closely linked. I once was able to hear my mother, an Anthropology professor and one-time coordinator of Women’s Studies at California State University Northridge, speak on the link between these two movements, presenting them as, in essence, the two areas where traditional, patriarchal attitudes have most glaringly failed, leaving problems and inequalities that are among the most difficult issues of the modern world. The way I look at it, human society from the development of agriculture on has been understandably obsessed with fertility: the fertility of our crops and our families. This obsession has led both to the success of our species in thriving practically everywhere on earth, but also has led to what amounts to unacceptable treatment of both the land that sustains us, and one half of our species--women. Industrial poisoning of our water supplies and fish stocks, global warming, overpopulation, domestic violence, unequal pay for equal work, laws limiting a woman’s right to control her own fertility, and many, many other issues that make headlines today are at least in part a result of the patriarchal and agricultural obsession society has had with fertility for some 10,000 years. Not to say there aren’t other aspects to these issues, but the cultural mindset that dominates the world is one where both the environment and women are resources to be exploited for the benefit of the species and are not often valued for themselves.