Ten years ago, a group of women in a San Francisco breast cancer support group—frustrated by the lack of information about their disease and by the complacency of scientists and government agencies—sought a way to bring attention to breast cancer, which at the time was rarely even talked about in public. Led by Elenore Pred, a real estate agent and divorced mother of two daughters, they came together to create an organization that would help transform breast cancer from a private medical crisis to a public health emergency.
At the first meeting, which was held in Pred’s living room, the activists elected a board of directors, formulated strategy, and decided on a name for themselves: Breast Cancer Action.
Belle Shayer, BCA’s only surviving founder and currently a member of the board, recalls the drive behind those early meetings. “We were seeking ways to make changes in public attitudes toward breast cancer,” she says, “to educate people, to draw attention to the disease—to move things forward to where people spoke about breast cancer, were willing to make demands for its recognition and work toward ending it.” (Shayer was first diagnosed with breast cancer in 1984 and had a mastectomy in 1997 after her second local recurrence.)
Pred had been diagnosed with breast cancer in 1981, and had a mastectomy and chemotherapy. Her doctor told her that she was cured, but nearly seven years later, while working with the Peace Corps in Morocco, she found a lump on her collarbone that signaled a recurrence. A veteran of the civil rights and antiwar movements of the 1960s, she quickly set out to thoroughly educate herself about the political and social as well as medical aspects of the disease, immersing herself in medical literature and learning about the inner workings of federal health and research agencies.
She and BCA’s other founders—including Susan Claymon, who died earlier this year after a 15-year battle with the disease—took a cue from leaders in the AIDS advocacy movement, which had succeeded in securing billions of dollars for research, treatment, and education and in revolutionizing the testing, release, and financing of AIDS drugs.
BCA was run out of an office set up in Pred’s bedroom until the San Francisco Junior League chose the organization among nine others (selected from an applicant pool of about 110) to receive funds and volunteers. The Junior League’s three years of support gave BCA the means to rent its first office, hire administrative staff, and work toward professionalizing its operations.
Pred died of metastatic disease in October 1991, but BCA has both grown and evolved tremendously. Today the organization has thousands of members around the world, and its board of directors has changed from a small group of white, mostly middle-class women to one of 12 women from diverse backgrounds, more than half of whom are women of color. Hundreds of activists are working through BCA’s campaigns. The organization’s newsletter, which started as a two-page photocopied sheet, is now widely regarded as a leading source of information about breast cancer issues. In the past five years alone BCA’s staff and budget have tripled.
The organization’s ultimate goal, of course, is to put itself out of business—by ending the breast cancer epidemic—though its leaders are well aware of how much work remains to be done and the structural changes in our society that are necessary to accomplish that goal.
“I wish for a retirement that is free of my need to be a health warrioress—for a government that will listen to women, and a world in which we don’t have to ‘body-part’ women in order to address health education, prevention, and treatment,” says Renetia Martin, a BCA board member and director of the Women’s Health Collaborative, an organization focused on leadership development, public policy, and community projects designed to improve the status of women’s health in California. “I hope that women will find a way to address our whole selves, and that we can join forces across race, color, class, sexual preference, and ethnicity—altering the course of science, disease, death, research, and policy.” In other words, changing the course of history.
© 2010, Breast Cancer Action
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