The National Women’s Health Network (NWHN) held its 2010 Annual Fall Benefit on Wednesday, November 3, at The Studio Theatre in Washington, DC.  With over 100 enthusiastic guests in attendance, the event raised almost $50,000 for the Network’s programs.  Anne Kasper and Miriam Zoila Pérez were honored with the Third Annual NWHN Barbara Seaman Awards for Activism in Women’s Health.  Barbara Ehrenreich was the guest speaker.  Click here for her talk at the event.  NWHN celebrated its 35th anniversary with the premiere of a video about NWHN.

Anne Kasper has been an advocate, sociologist, researcher and public policy expert on women’s health for nearly 40 years.  She first came to Washington in 1970 to work for the Committee for National Health Insurance, a labor-led health reform campaign, where she handled “women’s issues”.   Since then, Anne used women’s health movement strategies in her ongoing work as a leader in the struggle for health care reform.  After founding the NWHN’s Women’s Health Clearinghouse in 1977, Anne brought the spirit of listening and responding to women’s concerns to the Campaign for Women's Health, a coalition of more than 100 organizations working to advance women's health issues in health care reform in the 1990s.  Most recently, she founded the Maryland Women's Coalition for Health Care Reform, a statewide alliance of women and women’s organizations working to bring comprehensive health care to all Marylanders.

Miriam Zoila Pérez is a reproductive rights and justice activist; writer and blogger; speaker on lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and questioning individuals (LGBTQ) issues; and editor at the popular blog Feministing.com.  As an e-communications manager for the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health (NLIRH), she is also an organizer and advocate for Latina women. Miriam is a young North Carolina native from a Cuban immigrant household. The founder and sole blogger of RadicalDoula.com, she writes about her broad, progressive vision for birth activism.  Her writing has also appeared in Bitch Magazine and The Nation.  In 2009 she was awarded the Women’s Information Network’s Young Women of Achievement Award.  

The Barbara Seaman Awards for Activism in Women’s Health were established after Barbara’s untimely death in 2008.  The Awards recognize work that exemplifies the spirit and approach of Barbara Seaman, including her bridge building between generations, her unwavering insistence on listening to women and her dogged determination to see abuses corrected.  She was a co-founder of NWHN.

From left to right: Bindiya Patel, NWHN Board Chair; Miriam Zoila Pérez, Awardee; Barbara Ehrenreich, Guest Speaker; Anne Kasper, Awardee; and Cindy Pearson, NWHN Executive Director