The Women's Community Cancer Project Mural is an outdoor mural located in Harvard Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA. [1] It was created by Somerville, Massachusetts artist and activist Beatrice "Be" Sargent in 1998 and dedicated in 1999. [2] The mural is a memorial to twelve women activists who died of cancer. It pays tribute to their contributions and those of people currently fighting the environmental causes of cancer. [3]
The Women's Community Cancer Project Mural was co-created by the Women's Community Cancer Project (WCCP) and Be Sargent. [4] The WCCP was a grassroots volunteer organization that came together after Susan Shapiro of Lexington, Massachusetts published the article "Cancer as a Feminist Issue" in the newspaper Sojourner: The Women's Forum. [5] WCCP's members included women with cancer or histories of cancer as well as friends, family, and care-givers of those with cancer. It advocated for new medical, social, and political approaches to cancer—particularly cancers that affect women. WCCP was a founding organization of the National Breast Cancer Coalition. In 2003, it announced that it would continue its work in coalition with other activist organizations. [6]
The Women's Community Cancer Project Mural is displayed at 20 Church Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts. [7] These activists are pictured in the mural: [8]
Alongside the activists' portraits, the mural depicts examples of environmental carcinogens. Referring to those images in her mural, Be Sargent said, "The powers that be are not going to quake in fear at seeing the carcinogens represented. But passersby may start to avoid and protest these carcinogens—and that might make the powers that be quake in fear." [10]
A carcinogen is any substance, radionuclide, or radiation that promotes carcinogenesis. This may be due to the ability to damage the genome or to the disruption of cellular metabolic processes. Several radioactive substances are considered carcinogens, but their carcinogenic activity is attributed to the radiation, for example gamma rays and alpha particles, which they emit. Common examples of non-radioactive carcinogens are inhaled asbestos, certain dioxins, and tobacco smoke. Although the public generally associates carcinogenicity with synthetic chemicals, it is equally likely to arise from both natural and synthetic substances. Carcinogens are not necessarily immediately toxic; thus, their effect can be insidious.
Sojourner Truth was an American abolitionist of New York Dutch heritage and a women's rights activist. Truth was born into slavery in Swartekill, New York, but escaped with her infant daughter to freedom in 1826. After going to court to recover her son in 1828, she became the first black woman to win such a case against a white man.
Charles Sprague Sargent was an American botanist. He was appointed in 1872 as the first director of Harvard University's Arnold Arboretum in Boston, Massachusetts, and held the post until his death. He published several works of botany. The standard botanical author abbreviation Sarg. is applied to plants he identified.
Sandra Steingraber is an American biologist, author, and cancer survivor. Steingraber writes and lectures on the environmental factors that contribute to reproductive health problems and environmental links to cancer.
Susan Starr Sered is Professor of Sociology at Suffolk University and Senior Researcher at Suffolk University's Center for Women's Health and Human Rights. Previously, she was the director of the "Religion, Health and Healing Initiative" at the Harvard University Center for the Study of World Religions, and a Professor of Sociology and Anthropology at Bar-Ilan University, Israel. Her interests include both research and advocacy/activism.
Samuel Seymour Epstein was a physician and, at the time of his death, professor emeritus of environmental and occupational health at the School of Public Health of the University of Illinois at Chicago. He is known for his contributions on avoidable causes of cancer, for which he was given the Right Livelihood Award in 1998. His papers are held at the National Library of Medicine in Bethesda, Maryland.
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Cambridge Hospital is a community teaching hospital located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The hospital is located at 1493 Cambridge Street, between Inman Square and Harvard Square. It is one of three hospitals that are parts of Cambridge Health Alliance.
Alice K. Wolf is an American politician. She served as a member of the Massachusetts House of Representatives from 1996 to 2013, representing the 25th Middlesex District. On March 22, 2012, Wolf announced that she would not seek re-election. Her term ended in January 2013.
Risk factors for breast cancer may be divided into preventable and non-preventable. Their study belongs in the field of epidemiology. Breast cancer, like other forms of cancer, can result from multiple environmental and hereditary risk factors. The term "environmental", as used by cancer researchers, means any risk factor that is not genetically inherited.
Breast cancer awareness is an effort to raise awareness and reduce the stigma of breast cancer through education on symptoms and treatment. Supporters hope that greater knowledge will lead to earlier detection of breast cancer, which is associated with higher long-term survival rates, and that money raised for breast cancer will produce a reliable, permanent cure.
Pink Ribbons, Inc. is a 2011 National Film Board of Canada (NFB) documentary about the pink ribbon campaign, directed by Léa Pool and produced by Ravida Din. The film is based on the 2006 book Pink Ribbons, Inc: Breast Cancer and the Politics of Philanthropy by Samantha King, associate professor of kinesiology and health studies at Queen's University.
Feminist technoscience is a transdisciplinary branch of science studies which emerged from decades of feminist critique on the way gender and other identity markers are entangled in the combined fields of science and technology. The term technoscience, especially in regard to the field of feminist technoscience studies, seeks to remove the distinction between scientific research and development with applied applications of technology while assuming science is entwined with the common interests of society. As a result, science is suggested to be held to the same level of political and ethical accountability as the technologies which develop from it. Feminist technoscience studies continue to develop new theories on how politics of gender and other identity markers are interconnected to resulting processes of technical change, and power relations of the globalized, material world.
Tamara Eugenia Awerbuch-Friedlander is a biomathematician and public health scientist who worked at the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) in Boston, Massachusetts. Her primary research and publications focus on biosocial interactions that cause or contribute to disease. She also is believed to be the first female Harvard faculty member to have had a jury trial for a lawsuit filed against Harvard University for sex discrimination.
Ecofeminism is a branch of feminism and political ecology. Ecofeminist thinkers draw on the concept of gender to analyse the relationships between humans and the natural world. The term was coined by the French writer Françoise d'Eaubonne in her book Le Féminisme ou la Mort (1974). Ecofeminist theory asserts a feminist perspective of Green politics that calls for an egalitarian, collaborative society in which there is no one dominant group. Today, there are several branches of ecofeminism, with varying approaches and analyses, including liberal ecofeminism, spiritual/cultural ecofeminism, and social/socialist ecofeminism. Interpretations of ecofeminism and how it might be applied to social thought include ecofeminist art, social justice and political philosophy, religion, contemporary feminism, and poetry.
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Esther Rachel Rome was an American women's health activist and writer. She was part of group of 12 women who co-founded the Boston Women's Health Book Collective, and wrote a widely published book called Women and Their Bodies that was updated and expanded over time. Rome successfully campaigned at grassroots levels at getting standardized absorbency ratings onto tampons, and was a consumer representative for the Food and Drug Administration in bringing about a partial moratorium on silicone-gel breast implants in 1992. Before her death, she was co-authoring a book on women's health issues in relation to her wish to accommodate their partners in a close relationship. Rome was one of 12 women memorialized by the Women's Community Cancer Project of the Women's Center of Cambridge in 1998.
Rita Arditti was an Argentine biologist, educator, activist, and writer.