A Women's Advocate
Teresa Heinz Kerry has been an advocate for women and at the forefront of women's issues for more than 30 years. She attended the first meeting of the Pennsylvania Women's Political Caucus in 1972. In 1974, she was a co-founder of the Women's Campaign Fund, a bipartisan effort to generate financial support for women who run for public office.
Teresa Heinz Kerry has helped to educate women on the vital importance of pensions and savings to their retirement security. To further this work, in 1996, she established the Women's Institute for a Secure Retirement (WISER), a Washington-based think tank. She underwrote both the publication of a nationally acclaimed book, Pensions in Crisis and the creation and production of a magazine supplement ----What Every Woman Needs to Know About Money and Retirement---- that was published in Good Housekeeping and in US Airway's Attaché magazine, and has been translated into Chinese, Portuguese, and Spanish. In March 1999, she testified before a House Ways and Means Committee in Washington on the circumstances and needs of poor elderly women in America.
Since 1995, she has sponsored and hosted annual conferences open to the public on Women's Health and the Environment in Boston, bringing women together with health, environmental, and policy experts. She believes that the conventional concept of the environment -- involving only the traditional "green" issues such as air and water quality -- is no longer adequate to the lives that people (and especially women) live today. The design of office equipment and work systems, the architecture of the built environment, and the extent of chemical and pesticide exposure all have significant implications for women's health and well being. The Women's Health and the Environment conferences (the eighth will be held in October in Boston) examine key health issues confronting women in the workplace and the home, including sick building syndrome, ergonomics, and the significance of the workplace as a public health issue. Attended by more than a thousand women annually, these conferences have increased public understanding of the special health risks facing women from the physical and cultural environment, of the diverse sources of disease, and of the need for public policies that protect women's health.
