THE VFA PIONEER HISTORIES PROJECT

Judy Lewis

“Our rights are continuously endangered. The work is never done.”

Interviewed by Mary-Ann Lupa, VFA Secretary, March 2025 

JL:  My full name is Judy Ann Lewis, but I only use Judy Lewis. I was born in Bellingham, Washington on July 31st, 1946.

MAL:  What about your family background?

JL:  Well, I want to start out by telling you a little bit about the strong women and feminist men in my family, because I think that’s an important background for all of this. I would just like to acknowledge the strength of my grandmothers, my mother, my aunts, and my father. My grandmother, both of my grandmothers, but my father’s mother, was in a coal mining family in the mountains and in the Cascades of Washington. She left my father’s father because he was an alcoholic and abusive when she was 21 years old with a small baby in 1920.

I never had a chance to talk to her about this, but the fact that she did it is just extraordinary to me. Then my mother was a Rosie the Riveter during the war and worked basically her entire life, except for the few years she was off having my sister and myself. My aunts also have been very strong women.

I just visited one, my only remaining aunt, who was 100 years old, who started out as a retail clerk and ended up with her own boutique. These are people who have faced incredible adversity and come through, and I just want to acknowledge that. And my father, who was a born feminist, probably because of his mother and his sisters, never told me there was anything I couldn’t do because I was a girl, and I just want to acknowledge that.

MAL:  Was that true of your sister, too?

JL:  I mean, my sister comes from the same family, and my sister, yes, is also a very strong woman. She absolutely is. We’ve had very different lives, but we clearly come from the same stock. I grew up with my sister, who’s two and a half years younger than I am, in Des Moines, Iowa.

My parents left Washington State and drove cross country when I was six months old, because I think my mother was so homesick for her family after being in Washington State during the war. Both of my parents worked. My mother graduated from high school, my father did not. He worked a variety of jobs. He didn’t get his GED until he was probably in his 50s, but he still moved up. He was a natural leader in spite of limited education, and he was a self-taught man in many ways.

We grew up in a small, working-class house built just after the war. My father was a bus driver to begin with, so I would get on the bus with my mother and talk to everybody evidently, at the age of one year old. I would just go up to people and start talking to them. And then my father became a postal worker because that was a better, secure job. In both of these positions, he was involved in the unions.

At the post office, he became the President of the Postal Clerks Union, and from that, became the Secretary General of the AFL-CIO in Iowa. So, I grew up with a very strong labor background. My classmates, who did not – most of them – and I, would have little debates from grade school on about these kinds of issues. That was a fun way to grow up and learn to defend myself in situations where many other people had different opinions.

My father left when I was 17, and so my mother was a single parent to my sister for the remainder of her growing up. During that period of time – I guess it was right before that period of time, when I was 16 – we went to Mayo Clinic and learned that my mother had a hereditary neurological condition, which both my sister and I ended up with. So, that was an important point in my life in terms of just making me think about what I wanted to do and how I wanted to live my life.

MAL:  While you were an adolescent then, basically.

JL:  Yes. I was 16, and I watched the whole thing on a screen because I was very interested in health and medicine and science. So, I viewed it as another dissection, only it was of me. I ended up getting this big infection, and I didn’t want to tell all of my classmates what was going on. I told them when they’d ask me what happened, I would say I had elephantiasis. Now, I know what elephantiasis is now because of my global work. I don’t know where I came up with that, but it stopped everybody from asking any more questions, so it worked.

Anyway, in high school, I did a lot of science projects and was involved in a lot of student organizations. Then I got a notice that I got a Pell grant, which meant I could go to college. I remember that day still because I cried because I was so happy that it meant I could go to college. Then it turned out that I got a full ride scholarship from my high school, from the family of a boy who died in the class ahead of mine. That was a gift I will forever be grateful for.

MAL:  Unexpected, obviously.

JL:  Yes, but it just meant that I could go to college and focus on academics and student life. I was very, very fortunate. At the University of Iowa, which was a lot bigger than my high school, I got involved in a lot of student organizations again. I was in the honors program, which was another very significant part of my life, and I just started to become much more aware of everything that was going on in the world.

One of the first things I did, I had joined a sorority because it reminded me of going to camp as a campfire girl, the comradery. Then I realized that I didn’t really want to be part of the sorority. They were all nice people and everything, it just wasn’t my thing. At that point, you had to wear a skirt and a girdle, and you couldn’t have long hair. I was just like, I’m not doing this. I had to live in the dorm anyway because of my scholarship.

MAL:  That was your freshman year then?

JL:  Yes. I found my way into sociology and psychology. Because I was in the honors program, I could take many different courses in different fields and have the top professors. That was an amazing experience. Religion, and Asian history, things I’d never been exposed to before. I think that was when I got more involved, both in anti-war and women’s issues and was reading more feminist literature.

I think I was born a feminist because of the background that I was born into. I always thought that women had equal rights, or should have equal rights, and I was always trying to fight for them in one way or another. I ended up as the President of the Senior Class, which I took great joy in because in high school, girls could only be the secretary of the class. I graduated early because I had met my soon-to-be husband at a sociology conference, and we got married, and I moved to Illinois to go to the University of Illinois, where he was on the faculty.

MAL:  And you were what age at that time?

JL:  I was 21. It was too young to get married, but that’s what people did then. And he was 12 years older than I was, and had been married and had two children. I think it’s important to say at this point that in college, I decided I didn’t want to have children. Which meant when I had any romantic relationship with someone that was serious, I was very clear about that. Then that meant that a lot of them weren’t going to work out because they wanted to have children. The fact that my husband had two children and didn’t want any more children made it a lot easier for me in that respect. I also had everybody tell me I was wrong that I didn’t want to have more children.

At the University of Illinois, I couldn’t get any kind of scholarship because I was married to a faculty member. I ended up switching from taking coursework to working for the Department of Mental Health in the state of Illinois when they were deinstitutionalizing mental patients. So, I learned a lot about systems. In all of college, I had maybe one female faculty member that I wanted to be like, and she was an art history teacher. I had one female sociology teacher, and she was the worst. She was my intro, and I was like, If this was my only course in sociology, I would never be a sociologist. 

In mental health, my mentor, our supervisor, was a woman named Johanna DeVries, and she was quite remarkable. I learned so much from her about leadership. She was the only woman, except for me, in that office. Unfortunately, she had a brain tumor and died, but she was a very important person to me, as was that experience in terms of learning that I didn’t want to take care of individual patients. I wanted to fix these systems that clearly were not working well. It was also a time I learned a lot more about data and the importance of data and collecting useful information and feeding it back to people. So that was pretty formative. It was pretty exciting to be at the University of Illinois in the ’60s.

MAL:  When you joined the Mental Health Department, did you then stop going to U of I?

JL:  I did, because I wanted to have more work experience before I continued my education. By that time, we decided we were going to look for other opportunities. My husband at the time wanted to do more applied sociology, and so we just looked for places where he could have a job that would be doing the work he wanted to do in running mental health systems, and I could go to graduate school in medical sociology, as it was called at the time.

I got a fellowship at Yale, and he got a job with the Department of Mental Health in Connecticut. We moved to Connecticut in 1969, which was also the summer that the Black Panthers were on trial, and I woke up to having a tank coming down the street one morning. That was an experience I’ll never forget either. It was a huge trial, and they were afraid there was going to be unrest. I lived on one of the major streets in New Haven, and there were tanks coming down the street one morning.

I did my medical sociology training at Yale. While I was at Yale, I was very much involved in women’s issues, and I was part of the Women versus Connecticut suit to legalize abortion in Connecticut. For all of my life at that point, because I didn’t want to have children, I was desperately afraid that I would get pregnant and have no options. So, because I was a graduate student, and because I was married, I was a good candidate to be on the stand for this suit.

It was a pretty brutal experience because the lawyers went after us in no uncertain terms, including asking me if that meant I wished I’d never been born. Which, of course, is not the point, but that was the tack they were using. That case really was formative for me in many ways, and I’m so glad I had the opportunity to participate in it. And then that became a foundation for Roe vs Wade and then everyone had access. But it was just a very, very difficult time for everybody.

MAL:  Had you brought the issue of sterilization in that case?

JL:  That actually was kind of a constant theme after I decided I didn’t want to have children. I had a very bad experience with the early birth control pills because they were so strong that I was hemorrhaging, and then didn’t have normal periods for a long time afterwards. The first time I went to Planned Parenthood, I was told that I should just get pregnant and that would take care of the extra bleeding problem.

I was like, No, this is not why I’m here, and I started exploring. And the answer was always, “No,” that I couldn’t get sterilized because I was too young to be making that decision, because it was a permanent decision, and clearly, I did not know enough to be able to make that myself. So, I would periodically ask about the opportunity to be sterilized and be told that that was not available for me. In fact, I did not get a tubal ligation until I was 32 years old, and that was after I had to have an abortion because I had a contraception failure. That’s a whole issue in terms of women’s agency, and ability to decide.

Also, while I was at Yale, there were no women faculty. There were other women students, but no women faculty, and Yale was totally male at the undergraduate program. We had a visiting professor from California, a woman, so I was very excited about that. She’s the one who told me that I would really regret not having children by the time I got to the age I am now.

I do not regret that, but you can’t, as a 23-year-old person, say, I know when I’m 80, I will not regret it. So, it was one of those things. It’s a ludicrous argument in many respects because you shouldn’t be having children so they’ll take care of you anyway. But she was a bit of a disappointment in terms of a feminist role model.

Then when I was finishing up my PhD at Yale, I had an opportunity to go to work at the University of Connecticut at the medical school. It was a brand-new medical school. The only other jobs that were available in Connecticut were teaching intro sociology, and I didn’t want to do that. So, I left the program a little early in order to take the position.

And when I took that position, I knew I wanted to start using my family name again because it was the beginning of my professional career, and I wanted my name back. That was not an opportunity for me when I got married. And so, I did all the research about what you have to do to have your own name, or change your name in any way, actually, and did everything by the books.

There was no problem with my work, but when I started to get a telephone line established or a credit card established, I was told I couldn’t do that because I was married. I spent actually probably a couple of months without a phone because I was determined that I wasn’t going to do it in my husband’s name. One woman in particular that I was talking to kept saying, I don’t understand why you want to do this. I don’t understand why you want to do this. I’m like, Because it’s my name and I want to establish my independence.

They weren’t going to do it. I finally threatened them with a class action lawsuit because I wasn’t the only person in this situation, and I actually would have enjoyed it, I think. But they backed off when I started threatening that. Then at the end of it, the woman said to me, Well, I have two daughters, and now I think I understand. That’s probably as important to me as the fact that I got the phone line in my own name, that she actually finally understood why this was important.

At the University of Connecticut, I, again, had the good fortune of being able to do a lot of different things. I’m just going to focus on the things that really, I think, are part of coming from a feminist perspective, which is looking also at the needs of all marginalized people and people who don’t have a voice, and a social justice and human rights perspective. I think probably the most important thing is always being an advocate. Clearly, we can’t stop doing that now. Again, when I started out in medical sociology, it was all male people who were doctors. And the books were things like, Boys in White about medical education.

To begin with, it was a matter of looking at the limited number of women and trying to find ways to support them. That included looking at any small group teaching that we did to make sure that there were at least two women in a group so that one woman wouldn’t be representing all women.

Then over time, getting involved in admissions committee work and working against ageism and sexism in the sense that if a 35-year-old woman wanted to go to medical school, many people on the committee thought that that was too old, which, of course, it’s not too old.

Secondly, nobody signs a contract when they go to medical school to practice medicine for their entire life. I succeeded with that argument to the point that we started having more diversity in age, which also benefited some men, too, because there were men who wanted to come back and become doctors. There are plenty of people who get medical degrees who never practice a day of medicine. That was another area where I tried to do a lot of advocacy.

Because there were so few women on the faculty, I was often asked to teach things that were not my area of expertise because the men didn’t want to deal with it. Because it was a new medical school, they brought in a lot of senior faculty who were all white men from Eastern medical schools. Then there were the junior faculty, of which I was one at the time.

That was an interesting experience. I created a lot of medical education programs, most of which were trying to get students to think more broadly about the communities that they work with and the perspectives of people outside the office when they’re sitting there in their dressing gown. “What’s their everyday life like?” so that you can be more realistic about it.

MAL:  Were they recruiting more women faculty at the time at all?

JL:  Yes. When I started out, there were five women faculty. I don’t know the exact rate, but it’s certainly 50/50. Medical students are more like 70/30 females.

MAL:  70 females?

JL:  Yes, so that has definitely changed over time. Anyway, in the clinical medicine course, when it came time to teach how to take a sexual history, which they had never done before, this was a new thing in the curriculum that we were actually going to teach students how to do. Then that would become my job, because the two older men in the course that I was teaching with didn’t want to touch it with a 10-foot pole.

But it also gave me an opportunity to work with a lot of the sexist language in medicine. Not intentional necessarily, but if you consider that all of this vocabulary came from the time when men were the only people practicing medicine, I think it makes it more understandable. For example, there’s something called an incompetent cervix. Now, that is a ridiculous statement in the first place. Or calling anyone who has more than one sexual partner promiscuous. Promiscuity was one of the words I really worked hard to get rid of in taking a medical history.

Then there were also student groups. In order to have a student group, an organization, you had to have a faculty advisor. I had students come to me who wanted to learn how to do abortions and start a medical students for choice group. So, I worked with them, with planned parenthood, to teach them about family planning and abortion techniques. I’m happy to say that I did that for probably 10 to 12 years until there were enough female OB/GYN faculty to take over.

We now have some really strong women faculty who are doing this work, and I’m very, very happy about that. Similarly, I also worked with the LGBTQ group the first time they wanted to start a gay-bi-straight alliance. At that point in time, way back, I mean, if you think in the ’70s, the gay students were told things like not to put the fact that they worked the Gay and Lesbian Health Collective on their resume because it would work against them. So, I did a lot of work to support them.

I mean, first of all, it was all right to put that on their resume. The people who were telling them that were people who had their own biases from before. So, I supported that group until actually quite recently, although we certainly then had gay faculty who were willing to come out and be supportive.

I worked with an MPH (Master of Public Health) student to create a transgender health and law conference, which has been going on for 20 years now, which provides a forum for all of New England for transgender people to find out about their legal rights in health care in terms of access to care.

Then one of the most enjoyable things I did, I created an elective on women’s health and global literature. It was an elective because you couldn’t do this for everybody, but it was a way to talk about women’s health issues and cultural issues using fiction. So, all female fiction writers from around the world. That’s probably the course I enjoyed the most of all the courses I ever developed.

I would teach that with a student, usually who was from another part of the world. I would have students come to my house and I would cook food from all over the world for them. Then we would go and sit in my living room and talk about the readings. I didn’t want to do it at the medical school because it was too confining. I wanted it to be a relaxing, non-judgmental discussion.

I learned a lot about what was going on at the medical school around the dinner table. That was how I found out about a couple of incidents of sexual harassment by faculty with women students or other inappropriate things that were going on so I was able to do something about that. There have to be a lot of different ways to connect with people to actually try to make some of the changes that have to be made in education.

MAL:  And this was particularly at Yale at the time?

JL:  No, this is all at UConn. Right now, we’re at the University of Connecticut School of Medicine. Where I’ve spent my entire life since 1973 after my time at Yale.

MAL:  When you were the plaintiff, was that Women versus Connecticut? Then that lasted how many years, and how did it affect, you said, Roe vs Wade?

JL:  Well, I think it was a foundational piece of law for Roe vs Wade.

MAL:  That they utilized?

JL:  Yes.

MAL:  And your case took two years, I think, right?

JL:  Yes. I think that has continued to be very important to me. So, after the Dobbs decision, I was pretty outraged, like everybody. I actually wrote a piece, which I think I’m going to send you. The argument was that there was no history of abortion in this country, which is absolutely not true, period. So, I wrote a piece for a community blog about what the history was because Keliah was wrong. I mean, it’s just not true.

Then I got involved in trying to raise money to support women coming to Connecticut for abortions, because Connecticut is one of those states that actually has very good protections for abortion care and abortion providers. We started something called Open Doors, which ended up raising funds for a couple of the abortion providers in the state to bring women in from out of state. We had the idea of bringing women in and providing housing and stuff, but that got very, very complicated. We spent a lot of time exploring options, but we ended up doing it more to provide it to the clinics.

MAL:  What was the Dobbs vs Jackson case? That was in 2022, right?

JL:  Right.

MAL:  And what was the gist of that?

JL:  The gist of the case?

MAL:  Yes.

JL:  That we can’t have abortion. It’s up to the states to fight abortions. So, it means that in half of the country, women do not have access to abortion, even in the case of miscarriage. It’s a very, very horrible situation. I’m working with a medical student now who’s just surveyed medical students and residents at University of Utah and Connecticut, and is finding that it’s not just OB/GYNs who don’t want to go to these abortion-restrictive states. It’s all doctors do not want to do that. That’s very important for people to understand because it means that there’s going to be less and less health care available in rural areas in those states of any kind, not just reproductive health care.

There is another part of my life I do want to mention, which is that I got divorced in 1976. I discovered that in dating, that people, men, were very attracted to me and my energy, until they wanted to change me. That kind of happened in my marriage and so I got a little leery of these situations because I had reached a point in my life, there was no way I was changing for anybody.

I met a wonderful man in 1984, Stuart Sakovich. We dated for three years, and he totally accepted me for who I was. It was such a wonderful thing to have happen in my life. Unfortunately, he died nine years ago, but we had a beautiful life together. I wouldn’t want to talk about my life without mentioning him.

MAL:  He was a faculty member, right?

JL:  No, he was not a faculty member. He was an accountant, which was really lovely because he kept my life in order.

MAL:  That’s great.

JL:  Yes. One of the other things I worked on was medical education and public health education curriculum development and teaching. And then I worked in the local Hartford and Greater Hartford area community on women’s issues around teen pregnancy and support for young women, adolescent sexuality, and I developed one of the first school-based health clinics in the country in 1975.

That was funded by Robert Wood Johnson and eventually provided health care to all the children in the city of Hartford. Hartford has been one of the poorest cities. It’s a small city, but poverty is concentrated in the urban area. It provided medical and dental care to those students.

MAL:  Now, both elementary and high school?

JL:  Elementary and high school. We started with elementary because once we got to high school, we had to deal with reproductive health issues, which took a lot more negotiating than dental care for third graders. I also helped students organize health education programs for those students, which included sexual education. That’s a program that still continues. That’s another gratifying thing.

But about the mid ’80s, I started getting involved in global health as well. I had always been interested, but wanted to know my community and my country first. In the mid ’80s, I had been teaching in a short-course program that we had for international program people and faculty from around the world called the Center for International Health Studies.

Got hooked up with some people from Sri Lanka, did a short project with them, and then went there in 1987 for a sabbatical year. My husband-to-be came with me, and we got married in Sri Lanka with an elephant as our chief guest because we were both too old to have any formal wedding here.

So, that was on reproductive health, that was on family planning methods. We found out that women were using natural family planning methods a lot. They thought it was a secret because nobody ever taught them about it. It was a time when they were doing a lot of the implants before they did them here. So, Sri Lanka was one of the places that tested the market. I spent a lot of time talking to women and health care providers, and the system was such that the health worker would decide what method would be best for the woman.

MAL:  When you say implants, you mean for contraception?

JL:  Yes. This was all about family planning. They would decide based on what they thought they knew about the woman what would be best for her, and then they would tell her that that was what she should use. All the hormonal methods were considered heady in the hot-cold theory, which Sri Lankan’s practice. And women didn’t like a lot of them so they learned about it from their neighbor or their sister. That’s why it was a secret method.

After I did this research, I did feedback with the government, and I suggested that they teach women how to use natural family planning, because there are ways you can do it so that it’s more effective. I, unfortunately, did not succeed. Although over time, since I’ve been involved in global health ever since that period, there are several new, very scientifically tested methods of natural family planning, like the standard day method.

There are cycle beads to help women keep track. There’s been a lot of innovation, but at the time, nobody wanted to talk about it. They thought it was better that women didn’t know, although, of course, women always find out things about their health from other women.

MAL:  Did they permit the pill?

JL:  They had the pill, they had IUDs, and then they were using the implants at that point. I think they were also testing the injectable as well. There were a lot of things going on, but the injectable required a special size needle, and that wasn’t always available. I learned a lot about how this health system channels people into the private care so that the physicians can make more money.

MAL:  Not just in Sri Lanka.

JL:  Not just in Sri Lanka, no. Then I started working internationally. I started working in Haiti, where I still work, initially on maternal and child health issues like emergency. In places like Haiti, where I work, they’re very rural, and access to emergency care is pretty difficult. So, women mostly deliver at home in the mountains.

If there’s an emergency, the question is, how do you get them to care? And that requires working with communities to set up a system of getting them to the closest road, having transport, having emergency care available. And we worked to do that. We were able to show an improvement in terms of women’s pregnancy outcomes and the infant outcomes. That was a really very important thing.

We have now moved on because many people are providing maternal and child health care, and are providing breast cancer care, which no one does. We are the only community-based breast cancer program in the country. We’re hoping to develop a model that will expand for the whole country. In spite of all the difficulties of working in Haiti right now, our people on the ground are still doing the work.

The other international thing that I have been very much involved in is a group of women who came together first in 1991, at a conference of the Network, which is for medical and health care profession training, because no one was talking about women’s health. We formed an interest group, and then we would see each other once a year, every other year, and would share resources with each other.

There were four of us that started that group. We finally got some funding in the early 2000s, and we started the development of modules to teach health profession students about women’s health topics, using cases from different countries, giving regional overviews as well as global overviews of things like not just maternal health care, but also things like nutrition, cervical cancer, and mental health, and violence against women, obviously.

Then in 2019, we incorporated operating in South Africa. We have 24 low-and middle-income countries that are part of this organization. We’ve done 55 projects, which we call seed grants, because they’re very small amounts of money. It’s $1,000 to $3,000 with which people have done remarkable things. Working with community groups, developing apps now; that’s a new take on what we’re doing. But really working with women to understand what their perspectives are, what they want at the community level, and then working with them to develop programs. That’s very important.

MAL:  Now, do those programs include their becoming medically knowledgeable to help other women?

JL:  Absolutely. I wouldn’t say medically so much as more health-aware about things, or getting their ideas about what to do about gender-based violence. They’re the ones who experience it. They know the culture in their communities. They often come up with some really good ideas about how to develop programs to address the issue. That has been a really important piece of work for me, and it’s given me the opportunity to meet women from all over the world, which has been really a privilege and a source of great happiness for me.

I have also had, in this global health part of my life, especially after I semi-retired from the medical school, done a lot of program evaluation. So, I’ve looked at things like traditional birth attendance in different parts of the world. Again, these are, for the most part, women who have traditional ways of delivering, who have been pretty much undermined by the health community even in places when there are not health resources to support them.

I think they’re valued community resources. These women know their communities, they know what the needs are, and they need to be valued for the important people that they are. In all of these situations, in many different countries, you have to make sure there’s room for women’s voices to be heard. Because if you have a community meeting in some cultures, only the men are going to talk. The only way you’re going to hear from the women is to create a separate space for them.

MAL:  And you put your group behind their expertise or knowledge of the community?

JL:  Yes, exactly. If you’re evaluating a program, you learn whether that program is really working or not and why or why not. That’s been a really great opportunity for me.

MAL:  What’s it like now? What’s ahead in the future?

JL:  In the future, the Women and Health Together for the Future is still happening. I am currently the chair. Hopefully not to be after next fall when we have our elections. But we’ve created a women’s health community of practice, and we’re developing guidelines for frontline health workers on women’s health issues, and we’ll be developing a curriculum for that.

In Haiti, we will continue to do the work. And now, I’m also involved with the Afghan Female Student Outreach, which started in 2023, which is providing online education to Afghan women at home. It began when the Taliban restricted them from going to the university, and we wanted to give them support because many of them were depressed, isolated, and wanted to move forward.

And so, I think we have 100 faculty from around the world right now. We’re teaching them online because they’re not to leave their houses. So, the only way that we can get to them is to teach them online. And we provide data packages for them so that they have access to the internet. It’s not great all the time. You never get to see them; you’re only teaching their names or some little thing because they don’t have the bandwidth to show their faces.

MAL:  On the other hand, they have the technology.

JL:  Exactly. That’s one of the most rewarding things. That is something that, unfortunately, will need to continue.

MAL:  You started a number of these kinds of programs also at UConn, right?

JL:  I’m not so much directly involved in programs at UConn now. I just work with individual students and occasionally give guest lectures because I’m an emeritus professor, so I still do something, but I have moved the focus outside now.

MAL:  Well, I think we covered a lot of ground, internationally included. If there’s anything else you want to add that we haven’t explored?

JL:  I think I’d like to close with the fact that we all need to be hyper alert right now because of what’s happening to women all over the world. With the increase in misogyny, in the increase in authoritarianism, and the fact that we need to be constantly vigilant. In this country, not just around the world, but in this country, our rights are continuously endangered.

The work is never done. I think that’s what keeps all of us going. I am incredibly honored to be part of this group of women who have accomplished so much. It’s an important thing to me so thank you for the opportunity.

MAL:  Thank you. I really appreciate it, and I’m glad that you wanted to share this with other women. With VFA. Thank you.