Early in the day, Jaclyn Friedman, the symposium’s mistress of ceremonies, explained her belief that women’s health activism moves in a spiral, not a circle, because while we are connected to our beginnings, we are also continually moving forward. The day’s discussions provided a perfect demonstration of that concept.

If you weren’t able to join us for those discussions, check out video from the event, including presentations from Byllye Avery, Loretta Ross, a welcome message from Governor Patrick Deval, panels with our global partners, and more.

If you haven’t checked out the NWHN site lately, go take a look – it has been redesigned to a spiffy new look, with news and blog posts, connections to social media, and lots of great information about the organization and the health issues they work on.

Everyone who has ever fallen in love has a story to tell. Kiki and Susan’s just happened to make the Weddings & Celebrations section of The New York Times. Here’s the best part, as written by Leann Wilcox:

The couple first met in the early 1980s, after being introduced by mutual friends. They did not reconnect until spring 2007, when Ms. Galereave’s daughter, Jasmine, then age 7, and Ms. Zeldes’s son, Jesse, then 6, began playing together at a potluck get-together for single lesbian mothers in Northampton. The moms and kids quickly became a foursome, sharing meals, games and adventures, but it was difficult for Ms. Galereave and Ms. Zeldes to find time alone, until the very last day of the year.

The couple had planned a holiday weekend getaway with the children to a friend’s house at Mount Sunapee in New Hampshire. On New Year’s Eve day, they took the children tubing in the snow for hours, with an ulterior motive to wear them out. Once back at their friend’s house for the evening, they set the clocks forward three hours, happily allowing Jasmine and Jesse to stay up until “midnight.”

Once the children fell asleep, Ms. Galereave and Ms. Zeldes celebrated New Year’s Eve with their first kiss.

“This New Year’s they’ll be staying up as late as they want,” Ms. Zeldes said of their children. Then she laughed and added, “We may not make it up till midnight.”

For the record, Kiki and Susan didn’t stay awake to ring in the New Year. And neither did Jesse and Jasmine.

- At Women’s eNews, Kate Kelly describes the work of Lillian Moller Gilbreth, also known as the Mother of Modern Management, who was an industrial engineer and a pioneer in creating work environments that met the needs of the disabled. This is the first I’ve heard of Gilbreth, a mother of 12, and continued to read more about her incredible life at Webster and Wikipedia. Gilbreth’s papers are at Smith College.

- From Plain Dealer columnist Connie Schultz: “Last week, in a 5-1 ruling, the highest court here ruled that an Ohio law that bans discrimination against pregnant women does not protect them from punishment for taking unauthorized breaks to use a breast pump after they birth those babies. And you thought we were a trendsetter only in presidential election years.” Read on.

- “Mad Men,” my favorite TV show of the moment, offers a poignant look at the trials of women in the workplace in the early 1960s. The series is set at a growing ad agency on Madison Avenue (that’s copywriter Peggy Olson, played by Elisabeth Moss, above), and it’s full of cringe-worthy moments. Seven of the show’s nine writers are women, which Amy Chozick notes is a rarity in Hollywood television.

Joan Wickersham, who worked as a copywriter in a Boston ad agency in the 1980s, writes in the Boston Globe that “long after the 1960s, the workplace was still stuck in the same cultural blind spot satirized in ‘Mad Men.’” She shares this story of a client presenting prototypes of two computer games — the one targeted to boys involved building a railway empire; the one targeted to girls involved deciding where to put furniture in a house.

I suggested to the client that maybe the girls’ game needed a little more substance. The boys’ game was ambitious, intellectually challenging – couldn’t something similar be devised for the girls? Or maybe they didn’t need their own game. Maybe they’d be just as excited as the boys about building a railway empire. Maybe . . .

One of the men I worked with gave me a look. A look that said: “You’re being a pest, and a troublemaker. Shut up.’’

And I did.

Fast forward another 25 years, and consider Wal-Mart’s gendered back-to-school commercials, as described by Claire Mysko:

Boy version with Mom voiceover: “I can’t go to class with him. I can’t do his history report for him, or show the teachers how curious he is. That’s his job. My job is to give him everything he needs to succeed while staying within a budget…I love my job.” Cut to boy with his new affordable laptop. He’s getting applause from his teacher and the students in the class as he delivers a report.

Girl version with Mom voiceover:“I can’t go to school with her. I can’t introduce her to new friends.” Cut to girl nervously asking “Can I sit here?” to a group of girls sitting together at lunch. “Sure, I like your top!” one of them answers. “Or tell everyone how amazing she is. But I can give her what she needs to feel good about herself without breaking my budget. All she has to do is be herself.” Cut to smiling girls walking arm-in-arm down the hallway.

It appears that much work still needs to be done.

“Maude,” an off-shoot of “All in the Family,” aired from  1972 to 1978. Calling it groundbreaking is not hyperbole, as this excerpt from the Museum of Broadcast Communications demonstrates:

Like many of [Norman] Lear’s productions, “Maude” was a character-centered sitcom. Maude Findlay was opinionated like Archie Bunker, but her politics and class position were completely different. Strong-willed, intelligent and articulate, the liberal progressive Maude spoke out on issues raised less openly on Lear’s highly successful “All in the Family.” While questions of race, class and gender politics reverberated throughout both, certain specific issues, like menopause, birth control and abortion were more openly confronted on “Maude.”

In a two-part episode that ran early in the series, the 47-year-old Maude finds out that she’s pregnant and decides, with her husband Walter, that she would have an abortion which, had just been made legal in New York state. Part two of the double episode also dealt with men and birth control as Walter considers getting a vasectomy. Thousands of viewers wrote letters in protest of the episode because of the abortion issue.

“It was a little slice of realism rarely seen today, when the option of abortion is so often pushed again into the virtual back room and rarely mentioned in pop culture; the movie ‘Knocked Up’, for example, uses the euphemism ‘rhymes with smashmortion’ rather than mention this — the most common women’s surgical procedure — by name,” writes Gloria Feldt.

Feldt adds that with her next television hit, “The Golden Girls,” “Arthur had a chance to open up for public discussion yet one more previously off-limits topic: aging, especially the issues women face aging in a youth-oriented culture.”

Jill Miller Zimon has a round-up of links and “Maude” lyrics. This scene from “Maude” gives you an idea of how television once dealt directly with abortion:

The viewers’ response surprised Arthur.

“The reaction really knocked me for a loop,” she told The New York Times in 1978. “I really hadn’t thought about the abortion issue one way or the other. The only thing we concerned ourselves with was: Was the show good? We thought we did it brilliantly; we were so very proud of not copping out with it.”

“I think we made television a little more adult,” Arthur also said. “I really do.”

While this is obviously a great time to think about all the resources libraries offer, for young people and adults, and to thank librarians for the services they provide, I’m going to turn the focus on a librarian who works right here: co-blogger Rachel Walden.

When Rachel isn’t breaking down the latest health study or policy statement for Our Bodies Ourselves, or offering smart, funny analysis at her own site, Women’s Health News, she’s a medical librarian at an academic medical center.

And, what’s more, she was recently named one of Library Journal’s Movers & Shakers, a “who’s who of creativity and library trends in the field.”

Rachel was spotlighted in the activist category. Here’s some of what Library Journal said:

Walden is best known for demanding answers and action in the POPLINE abortion controversy. In spring 2008, POPLINE, the major database on global reproductive health, limited researchers’ ability to search on “abortion” by making it a stopword. Its rationale: USAID funding put it under the global “gag rule” restricting discussion of abortion. “As a librarian,” says Walden, “I was angry that access to information was being quietly restricted based on a political agenda.”

Walden spread the word on her Women’s Health News blog, providing clear explanations and contacting reproductive rights and feminist activists. “This was not just an issue for librarians,” recalls Walden, but “for everybody who cares about reproductive rights and the effects of the global gag rule.”

The POPLINE controversy sums up Walden’s ongoing mission “to connect people with health-related information.” For Walden, librarianship and blogging boil down to one thing: “here’s some information, let me share it with you.”

Read the whole write-up. Seriously, she amazes me.

Plus: On a sadder note, Judith Krug, director of the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom and a tremendous advocate for free speech, died last Saturday. Krug helped found Banned Books Week in 1982, and, more recently, she stood up against internet and video game censorship. She also fought against the 2001 Patriot Act, which granted government officials access to confidential library records and visitors’ reading materials.

Jessamyn West and Cynthia Samuels have more. The New York Times ends with a story that nicely sums up Krug’s straightforward approach:

Ms. Krug credited her parents as inspiring her passion for free expression. In 2002, she told The Chicago Tribune about reading a sex-education book under the covers with a flashlight when she was 12.

“It was a hot book; I was just panting,” she said, when her mother suddenly threw back the bed covers and asked what she was doing. Judith timidly held up the book.

“She said, ‘For God’s sake, turn on your bedroom light so you don’t hurt your eyes.’ And that was that,” Ms. Krug said.

Yow died today in Cary, N.C. She was 66. Read The New York Times obituary of this truly amazing woman and one of the greatest coaches in women’s basketball history.

Wilza Merzeus, 18, feature editor of Teen Voices magazine, had the opportunity to do just that. The text of their conversation has been posted online.

In addition to discussing poetry and feminism during the spring 2008 interview, Alexander offers sound, healthy advice for young poets:

Read all the time; always have a book [with you]. Read widely and diversely; read more than you ever imagined you could. Keep learning and keep taking in examples of what good writing is. It’s very important to keep healthy, to attend to the health of your body. It’s difficult to listen to your distinct and magical voices if your body is not as it should be. That means fresh unpackaged foods, moving [your body] every day, and spending some time in a quiet space. [...]

I was at the inauguration, though so far back (as in: Lincoln-Memorial-far) that I enjoyed watching it all again. Here’s Alexander, reading what I though was an exquisite poem (text):

Pamela Morgan | b. 1949
In November, Our Bodies Ourselves lost one its founders, Pamela Morgan. A writer, editor and administrative manager of the organization in its early days, Morgan was “one of these extraordinarily multitalented individuals, and as a dancer, everything she did was with élan and flair,” said Judy Norsigian, executive director of OBOS.

Remembrances by other OBOS co-founders who had the privilege of working closely with Pamela can be read here.

Barbara Seaman | b. 1935
Barbara Seaman, a self-described muckraker, co-founded the National Women’s Health Network in 1975. A tireless advocate, she is credited with helping to create the concept of patients’ rights, particularly “informed consent,” and is well-known for her writings on women’s health. Her first book, “The Doctors’ Case Against the Pill” (1969), led to congressional hearings on the safety of oral contraceptives. “The Greatest Experiment Ever Performed on Women” (2003) was an expose of hormone replacement therapy.

OBOS co-founder Norma Swenson wrote wrote a rememberance of Barbara Seaman focusing on their involvement in the early women’s health movement.

Edwina Froelich | b. 1915
In the 1950s, Edwina Froelich was part of a group of suburban Chicago moms who met at each other’s homes to help new mothers with breastfeeding. The seven women, all Catholic housewives, founded the La Leche League.

“In those days you didn’t mention ‘breast’ in print,” Froehlich once said. “We knew that if we were ever going to get anything in the paper we would have to find a name that wouldn’t actually tell people what our organization was about.”

When we first wrote about her death in June, it sparked a discussion about La Leche and feminism. In an essay about Froelich published in The New York Times Magazine last week, Emily Bazelon addresses the history of the organization and its attitude toward working mothers.

Florence Wald | b. 1917
Here’s a hero we haven’t yet mentioned. In the 1960s, after attending a lecture by a British physician about opening the world’s first hospice, Florence Wald resigned her position as dean of the Yale School of Nursing to focus on developing a hospice care center in the United States.

“In those days, terminally ill patients went through hell, and the family was never involved,” she said. “No one accepted that life cannot go on ad infinitum.”

In 1974, Connecticut Hospice, the nation’s first home-care program for the terminally ill, opened its doors. A 44-patient hospice opened six years later. From The New York Times:

“This hospice became a model for hospice care in the United States and abroad,” the publication Yale Nursing Matters said this week, adding that Mrs. Wald’s role “in reshaping nursing education to focus on patients and their families has changed the perception of care for the dying in this country.”

There are now more than 3,000 hospice programs in the United States, serving about 900,000 patients a year.

In recent years, Mrs. Wald had concentrated on extending the hospice care model to dying prison inmates.

“People on the outside don’t understand this world at all,” Mrs. Wald told The New York Times in 1998. “Most people in prison have had a rough time in life and haven’t had any kind of education in how to take care of their health.”

Rosetta Reitz | b. 1924
Rosetta Reitz is best known for her support of women involved in early jazz and blues — stars who were overlooked in the shadow of male performers. With $10,000 borrowed from friends, Reitz created Rosetta Records, releasing 17 albums of lost music. But as The New York Times notes, music history was just one of Reitz’s accomplishments:

Ms. Reitz was at different times a stockbroker, a bookstore proprietor and the owner of a greeting card business. She was a food columnist for The Village Voice, a professor, a classified-advertising manager and author of a book on mushrooms. She was a founding member of Older Women’s Liberation. She reared three daughters as a single parent.

Ms. Reitz also wrote “Menopause: A Positive Approach” (1977), considered one of the first books to look at menopause from the viewpoint of women and not doctors. She listened to her recordings of women while she wrote the book, many of them celebrating the strength of women rather than treating them as victims.

“I was so alone and needed to be nurtured, and I found I was getting it from them,” she told The Los Angeles Times in 1992.

Over at OBOS, we’ve posted remembrances by other founders who had the privilege of working closely with Pamela.

The first, by Norma Swenson, beautifully captures how many will remember Pamela. The second remembrance, by Miriam Hawley, describes her experience training for and running the Bonnie Belle 10K race with Pamela. Judy Norsigian recalls a special event underscoring one of Pamela’s many talents. Additional reflections may be posted in the future.

Pamela had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer about a year ago. In an article published in the Newton Tab, Pamela’s husband, Jonathan Lilienfeld, describes her “special understanding of people,” and friends spoke of her drive to help others and her involvement in the lives of her sons, age 15 and 20. After learning of her diagnosis, Pamela got to work on home improvement projects.

“She wanted to make sure that if she wasn’t here, we’d be all set,” her husband said.

Pamela was a professional dancer and active in the First Unitarian Society in Newton. A memorial service will be held there at 2 p.m. Dec. 20.

The Boston Globe captures her role with OBOS:

Beginning in the late 1970s, Ms. Morgan worked for a decade with the collective whose book on women’s health has gone through multiple updated editions. Originally called the Boston Women’s Health Collective, the nonprofit changed its name several years ago to Our Bodies Ourselves – minus the comma that appears in the book’s title.

“In Our Body Ourselves, she wore many hats,” [Sally] Whelan said. “Pamela was a writer and editor of the book, and she was also our administrative manager.”

Judy Norsigian, executive director of Our Bodies Ourselves, recalled Ms. Morgan as “one of these extraordinarily multitalented individuals, and as a dancer, everything she did was with élan and flair.”

One of Ms. Morgan’s talents, Norsigian and Whelan said, was keeping things organized and helping the nonprofit grow beyond its early days.

“Along with the founders, she was absolutely key in moving Our Bodies Ourselves from its days as a collective with a groundbreaking book to a nonprofit organization with more infrastructure that would then be able to carry the work into the future,” Whelan said. “I think it often gets lost because everybody emphasizes the book – and rightfully so, because it was so groundbreaking. But Pamela helped it go forward.”

Said Norsigian: “She was a caring and attentive person and a great problem solver. We have a big name and a big footprint, but we’ve always had a tiny budget. Part of the reason for our success is because of people like Pamela.”

Ms. Morgan also helped the collective develop the women’s health and learning center, a program at MCI-Framingham that helped educate inmates at the women’s prison about nutrition, pregnancy, and other matters.

But for thousands of women who called the collective from other states and other countries, Ms. Morgan was the voice on the phone directing them to information and health resources.

“She was a terrific and easy communicator with women,” Whelan said. “Pamela was really genuinely interested in people and their stories and their issues. She would get on the line with someone and it was like she was talking with a friend.”

Inspired to act by Washington, D.C.’s infant mortality rate — twice that of the nation as a whole — Lubic and her team work to reduce that rate by providing education and healthcare to women and their families. The birth center provides prenatal care, childbirth education, education on preventing premature delivery, nurse-midwife care (at the Center or in a hospital), postpartum care, and other health services for women and children.

According to the CBS piece, “After 800 babies in eight years, they have never lost a child in childbirth, and has cut the rate of premature births — the biggest risk factor for infant mortality — in half.”

Check out the video from CBS, and don’t miss 81-year-old Lubic’s response to the mention of retirement.

After a brief conversation with Lubic, it’s clear that she keeps quite busy advocating for infant mortality improvements.

Among her many activities, she appeared before Congressman Steve Cohen’s (D-TN) briefing on infant mortality last fall (Cohen represents Memphis, Tenn., which also has a shockingly high infant mortality rate), and will participate in another Congressional briefing this week. She will be part of a panel and blog launch event, “Disruptive Women in Health Care,” on the 25th of this month at the National Press Club.

To find out more about Lubic and the Center’s work, check out this video, as well as the articles listed below.