I found my voice as I neared 50. It was shaky and wobbly and I stumbled around badly, but I had it. My book, Lake Effect, about the pollution in my hometown of Waukegan, Illinois had just been published and I was about to address 1000 women gathered in Pittsburgh at the behest of Mrs. Heinz Kerry. We were going to talk about the links between women’s health and the environment and I was the keynote speaker. No matter that I hadn’t given a speech since high school. Terrified is the only word that could describe what I felt when I thought about what I had agreed to do.
I wrote my speech and rented a podium to rehearse that sat in my living room for a month before my appearance in Pittsburgh. I required that friends and family sit in the big soft chair in my living room as I practiced and they did so more or less willingly until my big day arrived.
Moments before I climbed the podium to make my speech, I texted my husband my mantra and the only reason that I felt it possible to climb those steps. The topic I was going to address—pollution, the Great Lakes, the escalating rates of cancers that women must endure—those things were much bigger than me. MCH BGGER THN ME. I had found my voice and was willing to deal with my fears only because I had something to say. I needed to be heard, and I am not alone.
Despite our obvious experience and stake in multiple issues of national importance, women are still underrepresented in the debate around the most important issues of the day. Unfortunately, taking a public stand on an issue of national importance is not something women do with great regularity or ease—especially women like me. Moms, women with laundry to do and grey hair and husbands whose jobs seem to grow with the same lightning speed as our children.
The best barometer we have of this is the publication rates in op-ed pages of national newspapers. An op-ed, or opinion-editorial, is a short form evidenced based argument on a public topic. Usually it is around 750 words.
Women simply don’t submit these to newspapers with the same regularity as men. At the Washington Post in 2008, nine out of ten submissions came from men and 88 percent of the pieces published were by men. Perhaps because they draw their guests from those pages, 84 percent of the pundits on Sunday morning public affairs television program are men.
In an effort to hone my voice and get heard on those same pages, I recently took a workshop hosted by Catherine Orenstein, founder of the Op-Ed project, a non-profit that has taken on the task of getting more women represented on the opinion pages.
About 20 women assembled in New York early one Saturday, and Catherine asked us each to say what we were expert in. There was much throat clearing and understatement in the group.
As a group we failed to state credentials that included stints at the White House, the Louvre, Goldman Sachs and degrees from Columbia and Johns Hopkins as experiences that made us expert in one area or another. We edited ourselves so as not to seem as though we were “bragging” or too “opinionated.” Orenstein had to drag it out of us.
Not only did we overlook our professional credentials, we also overlooked the power of our personal experiences. When I listed my credentials as a journalist and someone familiar with the links between environment and health, I failed to mention my own powerful story of losing my sister to cancer and my personal battle with pancreatic cancer. I was a survivor with a story writ large; an expert in my own experience with my polluted hometown and the illnesses it created. Orenstein, who studied fairy tales and myth at Harvard, reminded me gently, “A story is a powerful credential.”
She is right. We have told stories about the links between disease and their environment for decades using age-old narratives as a potent form of public health policy. Shepherds knew instinctively that certain types of clover caused their sheep to be infertile and kept them from the fields where it grew—alerting us to the power of naturally occurring estrogens. The phrase “mad as a hatter,” made famous by Lewis Carroll in Alice in Wonderland, comes from the mercury poisoning that those in the hat trade suffered during the manufacturing process. Moreover, Japanese women routinely fed their families ginger with their sushi to help ward off parasites.
Stories matter. So do the experiences of women. Yet, as a group that day, we consistently failed to count our own experience as relevant and reliable. One woman mentioned that she couldn’t possibly be an expert on breast-feeding since she had only had 2 children, as if there was some unwritten rule that only those who had had 5 or more children were the “real” experts. Another woman who had passionately collected community cookbooks since childhood feared people would see her as obsessive or creepy if she let on—even though one Harvard library boasts a whole collection of regional cookbooks and that the historic combination of foods into cuisines has been shown to promote health in myriad ways. Her passion was simply another form of scholarship; there is nothing creepy about that.
When Orenstein asked how many of us had been uncomfortable during this exercise, we all raised our hands. She says that this exercise creates an almost universal expression of discomfort among women, but only rarely does it disturb men.
Simply stating our expertise and listing our credentials was an almost overwhelming first step to taking our position as thought leaders and women capable of joining the national conversation.
I had my own issues with this. Although a long time editor and writer I had ventured into the scientific arena with my book, an arena that I felt too technical and way over my head. There were hundreds of chemicals in my hometown capable of causing disease, alone or in combination, lurking in three toxic waste sites in my hometown. It was a veritable chemical cocktail. I soldiered on, however, enlisting a cadre of experts to check and recheck my material.
My fears of inadequacy proved unfounded when after my book was published the head of toxicology at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta praised my work on National Public Radio. But here is the rub. What if I had let those fears keep me from writing my book or taking a stand on that podium before 1,000 women? I would have silenced myself.
We live in a country where women are allowed to air their views without fear of retribution and believe me that is not the case throughout the world. In America men and women alike have a great responsibility to act as citizens and join the debate about issues of importance and yet half of us are unwittingly opting out because we don’t see ourselves as important enough or “expert” enough.
Some things, however, are just too important to keep quiet about. The Great Lakes near where I grew up, for example, represents 20 percent of the world’s fresh water. Yet they face an almost unending list of environmental threats.
The rates of learning disabilities and deficits are skyrocketing among children and many scientists fear that toxins like the ones in my hometown are the cause. Some even believe that chemicals in certain plastics could be one cause of the current rise in obesity. And those are just three things on the long list of things I really care about.
I bet you have a list too and if you are like most women in America that list might as well be your grocery list lying crumbled inside your handbag. Until and unless women choose to make themselves heard, the national debate will belong to those whose experience is not our own.
So here is what we must do. Pick up a pencil and begin. I know this is difficult, but I did it, and I gained a voice for myself in a debate I care about. In September on the very day I turn fifty years old, I will address a group of 300 people whose life work revolves around saving the Great Lakes at a conference hosted by the National Wildlife Federation and others. I couldn’t be prouder, I am still terrified, and, you know what, I can’t think of a better way to spend the day. This is, after all, about something much bigger than me. MCH BGGR THN ME.