THE VFA PIONEER HISTORIES PROJECT

Mona Sarfaty, MD, MPH

“So pretty early on, I got some understanding of the extent to which advertising was impacting behavior in our country and in our culture more broadly. And… I don’t think that young people growing up today have that same consciousness, which is shocking, really.“

Interviewed by Judy Waxman, Oral Historian, August 2025

MS:  My name is Mona Sarfaty, and I was born on June 20, 1949, in Syracuse, New York.

JW:  Tell us a little about your childhood and some things that led you to be the person you became.

MS:  When I was four, my parents moved from Queens to a house in Wantagh, Long Island, a very suburban new development. It was like a postwar development with a lot of other young families since they were all new houses. There were several families nearby with children of similar ages to my sister and me. Growing up, we had a little group of like-age children. And because our house was right in the middle of a cul-de-sac, right next to a road, but protected because it was a cul-de-sac, we were able to play together either in that cul-de-sac or in the yards of all our various houses.

Each of the houses had a reasonable backyard, and so we could play in the backyards, and we could move from backyard to backyard, or we could play in the street. And so there was a great deal of group activity that involved multiple kids of the same age, and we would play kickball, or I’d declare war was a game to play, or various other circle games, or we would play in our backyards.

It was very unsupervised. Parents were very little involved. So, most of the activities were essentially developed by and played out by the children, by us. And there were some creative activities. In the summers, we were not highly scheduled like children are today. We had lots of free time to just hang out with each other and develop our own interests and activities. Sometimes in the summer, we would put on shows.

I remember we had a clubhouse. It was basically underneath a redwood table in one of the backyards. We would plan our own activity. So, we put on a show one year, which I remember really well, because a little boy next door and I developed a real liking for each other. We were seven years old or so. We did a dance number in which we showed Dance Through the Ages. With little costumes, we did a waltz, and then a Charleston and then a swing dance, a Lindy. Anyway, there was a lot of time to do things like that.

We even had a little gang. And at one point, we were in conflict with a warring gang down at the other end of the street. Oh my gosh. Another cul-de-sac. I remember the people were throwing crab apples at each other. And we could ride our bicycles freely, also unsupervised. And I remember going out to some of the surrounding neighborhoods, and we found a house that was essentially an abandoned house. We explored that house until a policeman came and told us that nobody was allowed in that house. So, of course, we all got out. We decided it was a haunted house, with ghosts in there.

I also had another relevant experience when I was about five. A little boy who lived several doors down was throwing rocks at me, and I complained to my father. I got a little lecture from my dad about defending yourself, standing up for yourself. The next time the kid threw rocks, I tackled him. The two of us were five-year-olds rolling on the ground, fighting until some adult, some nearby responsible adult separated us and told us to go home, which we did. I remember I actually puked when I got home. So, it must have been an upsetting experience, but it was also an instructive experience about standing up for myself.

About the same time, I was one of the older kids in this group of children, about 10 or 12 of us. I had a younger sister who I was sometimes responsible for, or I guess to some extent, I was always responsible for her. When we started school, my kindergarten evaluation said I had a strong sense of justice. That is a really odd comment on a five-year-old’s evaluation. I don’t really remember that, but this was something I saw years later when I was reading the evaluations.

I do have some memories of kindergarten. All the kids were making fun of a little boy who was playing house. I don’t remember defending him, but I remember noticing and thinking it was strange that kids were making fun of him. I also remember a little girl left off at kindergarten who was crying and crying and crying. In my mind, that was something odd and memorable. There was a boy who lived another two doors down from us who was awkward physically, who wasn’t well coordinated. And I was a pretty well coordinated kid and also a fast runner. I remember this boy’s mother telling me that the other kids were making fun of her son, and would I try to look out for him?

So, I was identified as a responsible kid. I remember that we took a school bus together. There were a lot of other kids from our neighborhood and other neighborhoods on that bus. And I remember that five-year-olds were teasing each other, just being generally mean to each other. From that experience I developed this observation that five-year-olds, who adults mostly think of as cute and funny, can be really rather mean.

So what else can I tell you about that child? My childhood was very calm. We lived in a little suburban home. There was enough room there. We always had enough to eat. We had plenty of time to play. We didn’t have a lot of toys. I was not into dolls. Our toys were related to outdoor play, like a bicycle, a hula hoop and a Pogo stick. We also didn’t have a lot of the books that kids have now. I think the only books that I was read as a child were a few Bible golden books. Later, when I had my own children, I was fascinated by creative and confusing and interesting children’s books. But that wasn’t something that was a part of my world when I was growing up.

JW:  What led you to be interested in the women’s movement?

MS:   So, I had plenty of room growing up to realize my skills. I faced no restrictions. I only had a sister, so there wasn’t a boy in the family, and my father was a very supportive and loving and kind man. I remember in fifth grade, I was the fastest kid in the school in the 50-year dash. When my fifth-grade teacher decided to show the kids who had the top five averages in different subjects, I showed up on those lists. 

We had a girls’ basketball team in fifth grade and my best friend and I were the co-captains of the basketball team. The teams were all supervised by a woman gym teacher. Our basketball team ended up being a first-place basketball team, and I have a picture of us with little plastic trophies. The point is that I really had very little consequence to being female in my elementary school years.

When I went into junior high school, I’d say it was pretty much the same thing there. The junior high school was in a middle-class community, not especially affluent. My parents were the only college-educated parents on the block. On Friday nights, the gym was open, the cafeteria was open, there were mats for tumbling or other physical activities, there was music for dancing. So, they were providing activities for us on the weekends so we could have plenty of social contact. In my family, we didn’t go to camp. But the school did offer those kinds of constructive places for us to hang out.

Again in high school, I was on a ninth grade all-girls basketball team. I played tennis, and I ended up going out for cheerleading. I was unhappy like a lot of teenagers are, because I think that’s a period with a lot of uncertainties. I was not really cognizant of female disadvantages so I ran for school office.  But I ran for vice president and not for president.  I would never run for president, although I was experiencing success in other areas and was a fairly popular kid. I remember reading Seventeen Magazine and learning how to be a good listener, something I really absorbed in my approach to relationships with guys.

JW:  How did you get involved in the second wave, which we count as 1965 to 1982 when the ERA went down?

MS:  When I was in high school, my mother gave me The Feminine Mystique to read. I don’t know that I really understood it. I remember reading it and thinking about it a little bit. I don’t think that it had a big impact on my understanding of the world. However, I remember thinking from early on that my mother was a teacher and then a guidance counselor, and my aunts were nurses and teachers. Everybody was a teacher or a nurse. I remember thinking that I wanted to do something different. I didn’t want to do the same things that they did.  Whether that had to do with feminism or just how kids feel in general about their parents. I’m not sure.

The other thing in terms of family dynamics and how that impacted me, I didn’t really like the dynamic between my dad and my mother, nor his brothers and their wives. They seemed competitive in ways that were just unattractive to me. And I think that competition still happens between people. I don’t know what I think about that. It’s very complicated, but in any case, I remember having that perception.

I went off to college. As soon as you get into the outside world, it’s pretty hard to avoid knowing that in higher education, women do not play a significant role. Most of the professors and teaching assistants were men. I went to Radcliffe, which is really Harvard. Women were outnumbered four to one. There were some advantages to that. But it’s true that Harvard did not have a lot of women professors. I think, in fact, there were two at the time, because later, I interviewed the two of them for a story for the newspaper.

So, it’s hard to miss the fact that you’re terribly outnumbered and that women don’t seem to be thriving as productive members of those communities. That was definitely a perception that was there. And then the women’s movement hit around 1969, and there had been a push toward having co-ed living for quite some time. There was Radcliffe Housing and Harvard Housing, but people had been working on trying to move toward co-ed housing for a good long time, and it finally happened while I was there.

So, in my senior year, which was 1970 to ’71, I moved into one of the Harvard houses. It was down right in Harvard Square; it was a house that had a rich history of its own, and it was very exciting, actually. And there were a few women who moved into that house, and we would often eat together. We were definitely developing a feminist consciousness during those years because you couldn’t miss the fact that there weren’t very many women teaching assistants or faculty.

There were a lot of women who were more aggressive than I at Radcliffe, and more outspoken about some of the unfairness that was reflected in the hiring. I was definitely absorbing all that while I was there. And it was about that time, I think, that the Miss America pageant happened, where a number of feminists, including Gloria Steinem, I guess, burned bras.

JW:   I interviewed some people who were in that protest. They actually never did burn bras. They said, “well, we had a big can on the boardwalk and we threw bras and high heels and stuff like that in it. But we were on the boardwalk, we weren’t going to burn anything.”

MS:  That’s interesting. The reporters made it into a burning.  So, there was a certain amount of almost consciousness-raising going on among this group of women who were all living in this Harvard house. In fact, it was about that time that consciousness-raising had started to be a thing. I was listening and I had my own observations to contribute to those kinds of discussions, but it also opened my eyes to a lot of things that I hadn’t thought as much about.

The other thing was that I was against the war in Vietnam, and in anti-apartheid. There was a certain amount of campus politics that I was involved in around both of those issues. I attended demonstrations against the war in Vietnam, in New York, and in Washington. In some sense, I was already becoming an activist, getting more political. I was writing for The Harvard Crimson at the time. I co-wrote an article after the National Guard murdered those four students at Kent State, which was the spring of 1970.

There was a huge meeting at the football field, and thousands of students attended that meeting. A friend and I wrote the story for The Crimson about that event, so I was growing in consciousness. I also wrote a feature piece for The Crimson about the only two women faculty members that were at Harvard, one of whom was an astronomer, Cecilia Kompotkin. And I wrote a piece about the Unity City Bank, which was a black-owned bank in the Roxbury neighborhood in Boston.

I was developing an activist outlook and interest, and getting my consciousness raised politically, feminism, about race, about a lot of things about American society that really got deeply embedded in my understanding of how things work. I was reading some Marx. I actually majored in Chinese history. I read a bunch of Mao, and I read a lot of Chinese history, but history was my major, and I was always interested in history. At the time, at the beginning of college, I actually thought I would become a lawyer.

By my junior year, I decided I didn’t want to become a lawyer because there were too many corrupt lawyers. The lawyers were mainly defending the system, which was an immature radical point of view. But it was out there, and I absorbed it. And instead, I would do something that was more personally satisfying. I would go into medicine, and maybe as a doctor who was concerned about access and fairness so that I could help open a system where everybody had access to health care. That ended up being my personal focus.

Then after I graduated, I got one of these Rotary Foundation fellowships to go abroad for a year. I spent quite a bit of time in Sweden where I was looking at the National Health Service and thinking a lot more about democratic socialism and alternative ways of organizing services that were fairer and really met society’s needs, including all the people in society. The other little strain I should mention here, because I think about that now a lot, is that when I was in probably junior high, my mother gave me The Hidden Persuaders, the book by Vance Packard.

So pretty early on, I got some understanding of the extent to which advertising was impacting behavior in our country and in our culture more broadly. And just as an aside, it astonishes me that I don’t think that young people growing up today have that same consciousness, which is shocking, really. And maybe there’s a foundation of understanding the way people are getting manipulated that is lacking for young people today.

JW:  And with social media now, even more so.

MS:   Yes. And so that also prepared me to look at images of women and how mainly the print media at the time was portraying women, describing women, objectifying women, all the things that I was now understanding through consciousness-raising, and how the media was playing a role in that, and in all the places that that was being reinforced and the ways in which that was being reinforced. So, I was developing that mindset during those years, I guess, and I was also developing an activist life course.

JW:   Did you ever participate in a women’s group, per se?

MS:  Not until I was in medical school. That started in 1973. Our Bodies, Ourselves came out around that time. I had gotten quite interested in taking all the pre-med courses and became interested in being a doctor. Witches, Midwives and Nurses came out in 1973, and that was really about how the women who provided care, especially around reproductive care in the US, were essentially driven out of business by what was supposed to have been a quality improvement strategy that was implemented to try to clean up the unprofessional activities that were going on that were, they claimed, harmful to women.

JW:  Yes, like abortion, too, at that time. That was driven out by the AMA.

MS:  Actually, that is another important point. Roe v Wade was decided by the Supreme Court in 1973. I remember all of us celebrating with medical school classmates. While in medical school, we were learning some anatomy and understanding women’s reproductive needs and reproductive system. We started offering self-help groups at the health services. We would have these meetings with women who were interested, and they would get a speculum, and we would be in a setting in the health service where it was okay for women to put speculum into themselves and to look at their own anatomy. So that was a pretty important experience.

Interestingly, when I graduated, a good friend of mine and her boyfriend gave me an engraved speculum. I don’t know if I can still find it. I think at some point it broke, and I’m not sure whether I saved it or not.

JW:  What did you do when you became a doctor?

MS:  During medical school, there was a lot of dissatisfaction about the birthing process. The women’s health movement was very unhappy about the extent to which the birth process was very stilted, very controlled by male doctors, and forced women into a position in which they were giving birth under unnatural conditions – like being up in stirrups rather than being able to just push a baby out in whatever physical position was most comfortable or seemed most natural, and being sedated.

At the time, there was a lot of what was called twilight sleep medication given to women. So, women would be giving birth in conditions in which they were only semi-conscious, not terribly aware of what was happening, and sometimes didn’t have clear memories of what had happened to them. A whole literature and a whole movement were coming together to object to this approach to childbirth. I remember thinking about that while I was doing the obstetrics rotation in medical school.

There were a couple of things that happened, one thing in particular that happened that made a huge impression on me. There was a rather petite Vietnamese woman who was in labor, and she was starting to get into or look like the baby might be in distress. So, she was rolled into the operating room where they could either deliver the baby or do a C-section if it looked like that was necessary. She was put up in stirrups.

People around her, including the nurses and even the doctors, too, were saying, “We’ve got to get this baby out. We’ve got to get this baby out.” And she heard that and she said, “Got to get the baby out?” And she jumped off the table and squatted on the floor. And in a minute, she pushed that baby out. That was an amazing thing to witness, astonishing really.

JW: No C-section for her.

MS:  She had already had quite a few babies. They felt she was at high risk. I mean, that is a matter of pretty good, solid medical research that with multiple pregnancies, there are greater risks of uterine rupture and a variety of things can happen during the birthing process. So, they were worried about her, but she was a highly experienced birth mother.

JW:  And she took it on herself and said, “I’m going to do this.” Amazing.

MS:  Yes, I had that experience, and I had those concerns about the birthing process. I got through medical school, graduated, had a lot of confusion about what specialty I was going to go into, which is why I ended up choosing family medicine, because I liked several specialties, and I really didn’t know which to choose. So, I thought, “well, at least I’ll start here, and then I can see if I want to go in one particular direction or another.” But in any case, I went off to my internship in Rochester, New York.

I didn’t like Rochester very much. It was the coldest winter in recorded history. It was unlike anything I had ever experienced. After my internship, I decided I was going to take off a little time. And my two roommates, the women who had been my roommates during medical school, who were both in the social work school at State University of New York at Stonybrook, had moved to California. They were writing to me about how nice it was out there. And I thought, “oh, I’ll take a year off and I’ll go out to California,” and then I’ll figure out what to do.

So, I did. I took a year, and I was looking around for things to do, and I ended up working at the Berkeley Women’s Health Collective. I spent the year volunteering at the Berkeley Women’s Health Collective and got very involved with the women there who were very much a part of the women’s health movement, as you can imagine, because this was an independent free clinic that was started by women who really wanted to make a point of offering women more personal support during the healthcare process, and who also had other innovative ideas about how to deal with some of the more common maladies that everybody suffers.

They had an herbal operation going there with herbal teas, in addition to what was otherwise truly a clinic. There were a lot of women who were volunteering there. They had a couple of women physicians like me who would provide the medical care, and there were a lot of women who were essentially doing internships and who thought that they might want a health career of one type or another.

It put me in touch with a lot of younger women who had very strong feminist consciousness.

I know that definitely had an impact on me also. We had been teaching self-health groups in medical school, but now I was also in a position to teach younger women who clearly had a feminist orientation. So, I did that for a year, and then I started my residency at San Francisco General Hospital. It just so happened that they had a midwifery service there. So, when I did my rotation in obstetrics, I was able to spend time with the midwives, and I was extremely impressed.

I thought that their approach to doing deliveries was more humane, it was more graceful, it was less traumatic. They had the data to show that it was equally successful, if not more successful. I really wanted to learn from them. I made a point of spending a fair amount of time with them and allowing the birth process to happen, essentially, without being overly interfering, which is what the existing medical model was,

After a night on call, you would give a report to the chief resident and say exactly what had happened that night before. And I remember one time I was reporting and described a delivery that I had done, a baby that I had caught, and the woman was in what’s called the “left lateral decubitus” position. In other words, she was lying on her side, which is not a way that obstetricians generally deliver babies. And he looked at me and he said, “oh, just like a midwife.”  I felt so proud. I remember how great I felt about that.

I had friends who were midwives. It’s just all those issues about women’s knowledge and women’s experience and the learned experience that comes with spending time in watching and listening, as opposed to being overly interfering. These were important lessons that I was learning during that time also.

I thought the midwifery service was terrific. That approach to delivery was spreading around the country. There were more opportunities for women to give birth with midwives, or to have what at the time was called natural delivery without a lot of medications. And things were evolving. And it got to the point where I think there was a dialectical strain of activities starting to come together. The women’s health movement was succeeding in applying pressure to the system.

So, around the country, most hospitals that were doing deliveries were offering labor rooms. Women did not have to go into an operating room to deliver. They could deliver in a labor room as long as things were going well. When I started, there couldn’t be any family members or others present, along with the women who was in labor. And so that changed, really in response to demand by women and their families. And it started to be permissible for members of family or even friends or whoever the birthing woman wanted to have in the room to be there to provide support and encouragement, if it wasn’t too many.

There was really a sea change in the approach to labor and delivery. And that really was in response to the pressure that had been applied because of the women’s movement, the women’s health movement. And I availed myself of those services that became available because I wanted to deliver that way. So I went to Planned Parenthood for my reproductive care, and I thought it was terrific.

JW:  Where were you then?

MS:  I was in San Francisco part of the time, and then we moved to DC in 1982. In 1982, I went to Planned Parenthood in DC, maybe in Tacoma Park.  My attitude about that, which I just took for granted, was recently emphasized to me because a good friend was taking her daughter for some of her first reproductive care. And I suggested going to Planned Parenthood. There’s some really good Planned Parenthoods around. And she said, “Oh, no, we’re going to a private doctor.”  

I got some attitude there that suggested to me that private medicine was better, and so she was not going to take her daughter to Planned Parenthood, which was maybe substandard in some way. And I was so surprised by that way of speaking about it. But I didn’t say anything, because these decisions are very personal.

When I got pregnant in 1983, I registered with a midwifery practice and fully planned to have the delivery with a midwife practice that was here in North Bethesda. That didn’t work out that way because I had an arrest of labor and I ended up in the hospital. But I was convinced not only as a provider, but as a patient as well, that this was really a better approach.

This was all possible because these services were available, entirely because of the women’s health movement. The other thing that changed is that women slowly got to the point of taking over obstetrics. Now there are more women graduates in OB/GYN than there are men. And there are only two specialties where that’s the case: OB/GYN is one, and pediatrics is the other. I thought that was really interesting because that was far from the case when I was in medical school. Only a small percentage of the OB/GYNs were women back then.

JW:  At some point, you stopped practicing, right?

MS:   Yes. We moved to DC in 1982, and I continued to be an activist throughout medical school. We were working at the big city hospital, San Francisco General, which was very poorly resourced by the city and county of San Francisco as a public hospital. City and county were responsible for it and for its budget. And it was poorly resourced. We as residents were impacted by that in numerous ways. Their supplies were sometimes lacking. You’d look for a blanket to wrap a baby in, and there would be no blankets, so you’d pull a sheet or a towel or whatever you could find. And there was no staff to be able to carry anything to the lab or to take patients to X-ray. All of that was done by the house staff.

There were some real security problems in the parking lot, and there weren’t enough security personnel to be able to walk you to your car. I think somebody was attacked in the parking lot. It was an international population, and there often weren’t translators. They later developed one of the better translator systems in the country, I think. I don’t know if they still have it. Then they translated all the signs into at least Spanish and Chinese, so it would be a little bit more responsive.

Anyway, resources were lacking. We had a House Staff Association, and we were meeting and trying to figure out what we could do about all this. An organizer, who represented a union of physicians, approached us and asked whether we would like to try to bargain for a contract so that we could put some of these quality issues into the contract, that there had to be a certain baseline of supplies and staffing and so forth so that it would be easier to offer the quality care that we wanted to be able to offer. So, we said, “Okay, we’ll do that.”  We drafted a contract, and we took it to the city. And of course, the city wanted no part of it. I was the President of the House Staff Association, and we went on strike.

JW:  What happened then?

MS:  The strike went on for several days, and it was heavily covered by the press. I remember really well the lesson of solidarity between unions because we were on strike, and at some point, the Teamsters decided that they were not going to cross the picket line. When they refused to cross the picket line, it went to a whole other level. We ended up in the mayor’s office. The mayor at the time was Diane Feinstein.

A small group of us, as the negotiating team, ended up in the mayor’s office, staying up all night and trying to negotiate something with her so that we could end the strike. It was a big story in the town, as you could imagine, and it was quite an experience. And we had pretty good participation of the house staff because people really did feel that the public hospital was not being properly supplied and staffed. Eventually, they agreed to some of our demands, which were put into a contract. And San Francisco now has a pretty good public system. I think, in part, that was one event in a series of events that pushed the city in that direction.

In any case, I had gotten very politically involved in trying to defend and protect the hospital. One of the Supervisors in San Francisco, who later became President of the Board of Supervisors, was responsible for the Health Committee of the Board. She asked me if I wanted to be on her advisory committee, which, of course, I said I’d be happy to. Her name was Nancy Walker.

So, I got involved in the local politics of healthcare in the city of San Francisco. I ended up chairing a public hearing on whether a new hospital was going to be able to add certain equipment. These were years in which the health planning program had been passed by Congress. There was a big hearing, and I chaired that hearing. I was thinking of myself as somebody who was very involved in healthcare politics.

I moved to DC and got a job at Georgetown University on the faculty there. But my clinical work was out in Fort Lincoln, which is in a neighborhood which has a very large Black population. At that health center, there was another family doctor from Utah who used to come as a preceptor once a week. He and I ended up being in the same precepting room together over many weeks. And we used to talk about healthcare policy and politics. It turned out that he worked for Senator Orrin Hatch, who was the ranking member on the Health Committee in the U.S. Senate.

JW:   The ranking Republican.

MS:   Yes, a committee that was chaired by Senator Ted Kennedy. A position came open on Kennedy’s staff, and he recommended me to Kennedy’s staff. He was a very beloved guy, David Sundwall is his name. He always said his father was the most beloved family doctor in Utah, and he also was just this incredibly lovable storytelling guy. They really liked him, and he recommended me.

They thought they would give me a chance, and I went in there and they asked me to write something about policy, which I did. And then I ended up being a part of Kennedy’s staff, for what ended up being seven years. I learned more than I thought I would ever know about the organization of health delivery in the US, and all the federal agencies, and how all of that operated at the federal level, and the interaction between the federal level and the state level, and so on.

I also think about that time I was becoming much more aware of public health.  I think my awareness of public health started when I was at San Francisco General, because we took care of people who came from some very depressed neighborhoods, as well as people who came from any neighborhood because it was the trauma center. It was a mix of people who came from anywhere and people who came from poor neighborhoods.

I don’t know that I had given it a lot of thought before, but it became really obvious that your health status was greatly impacted by where you lived. So, I started to get interested in public health. And then when I left Kennedy’s office in 1992, I went to work for George Washington University, and I was doing my clinical work in Rockville.

Because of my experience on Kennedy staff as a health adviser, I started teaching one of the public health courses at George Washington University. I was still doing clinical work, but I started teaching public health because now I had all this policy knowledge. While I was there, I kept getting pulled more and more into the public health realm.

I became more of a public health practitioner. In 2003, we moved to Philadelphia, and I joined the Department of Family and Community Medicine at Thomas Jefferson. I was part of the clinical practice, but I didn’t actually see patients. I was doing quality work, which was more administrative, and looking at our numbers and quality improvement, and how could we improve the management of chronic disease. I was between public health and improving medical practice at that point, which was in the 2000s.

JW:  Through those years as Kennedy’s staff, were there women’s health issues considered?

MS:  Women’s health issues were always a part. They just got factored into the baseline for me. At some point, we had the Women’s Health Initiative at the NIH. I was handling a biometric research issue. Senator Barbara Mikulski was one of the people who was really taking the lead on that, and she was on our committee. I worked on that with her staff.  Senator Kennedy was supportive, and so I totally took a supportive role in getting all of that moving. A lot of that actually did happen.

There was a lot of concern about menopause, about menopause not being well-researched, and needing more attention from the biomedical research community. Breast cancer, obviously, which is such a common cancer for women, and the feeling it didn’t get its share of attention either, as it should have. So there were assorted women’s health issues which I worked on and was very interested in. Some of women’s health really has to do with access to care. There’s a big, broad swath of the population for whom women’s healthcare is healthcare.

I worked on community health center issues. We increased the number of community health centers and tried to get longer authorizations for the Community Health Center Act, for that part of Section 330 of the Public Health Service Act, so that it didn’t have to be reauthorized every two or three years but could go to five years or more. Those were all women’s issues, but also were class issues, basically, when I get down to it. There were class issues that greatly affected women who were poor or low-income women.

Over the years, we increased our incomes and we accumulated more assets. We have been supporters of Planned Parenthood and NARAL since, I don’t know, 30 years or something. We make a substantial donation every year to Planned Parenthood and NARAL.

JW:  Where do you live now?

MS: We moved back to the DC area in 2013, and I started working on climate change. That was with that public health lens.  In about 2007 and 2008, the International UN Report on Climate Change pointed out that health was already being impacted around the world and that things were going to get worse on a regular basis. I began to wonder whether doctors were seeing the impacts of climate change in their practices.

I got together with Ed Maybach, who runs the Center for Climate Change Communication at George Mason, and we did some surveys of physician societies.  We found out that, yes, physicians were seeing in their own offices and examining rooms more of the conditions related to climate change. With that, I worked with some societies and we started a coalition called the Medical Society Coalition on Climate and Health, which now is a national organization with 30 state-based groups and has really tried to get as many people in the health sector involved in the climate change issue as possible.

That has been happening little by little. Right now, a lot of the stuff you see about heat, the heat education or whatever, is because of the outreach of all of these health groups around the country, trying to raise consciousness about it and help people to protect themselves, in addition to making that connection between the increasing days, weeks, and months of extreme heat. The education includes the fact that the underlying climate change is really playing the major role, and the that’s connected to fossil fuels, and health could be much better.

Everybody’s health could improve if we could stop this worsening of climate change. I got quite involved in that, and it turns out that that’s a big women’s issue, too, because it turns out that pregnancy is endangered by heat, by extreme heat. Premature labor rises with extreme heat.

There are several groups that are at greater risk because of extreme heat. Children are one of those groups because they spend a lot of time outside. Age is another one, and chronic diseases also make people more vulnerable to extreme heat if they have underlying heart disease or lung disease or kidney disease. So they have been working with the health folks who focus on pregnancy. They have the networks that work on pregnancy issues. The coalitions with them can focus on pregnancy issues but also focus on how climate impacts pregnancy issues.

JW:  It does seem like your childhood as really independent and being able to be who you were impacted your life in a major way. Would you say that?

MS:  Yes, I would. I feel like there wasn’t anything that I was ever told was off limits, unless it was dangerous. So, I definitely got that message. Probably that message reflects the era, growing up during a relatively peaceful time, a time of economic growth with parents who had daughters and wanted them to thrive and didn’t think about their limitations but thought about their possibilities. History is my interest, so to really focus on the era, the conditions, the social background milieu and how that really made it possible to grow as a young woman, to grow up into a young woman who could realize her interests without feeling terribly limited by gender-based prejudices.

I guess I would add that, like many girls, I underappreciated my mother when I was growing up. I don’t think that’s true for all girls, but I think many girls do, in part because of the limitations that our mothers faced in their ambitions and in their interests. As I have gotten older, I have come to realize just how much her outlook and even encouragement to me as a girl made a difference in my life and I’ve come to appreciate that. And I also appreciate that she accepted some limitations as a woman to allow her family to thrive. I saw that differently as a girl than how I see them as an older woman. Sometimes both men and women must accept certain limitations for the sake of their children and grandchildren and society in general.