How Rita Arditti, radical scientist and activist, fought for health and science justice
In May 1974, 39-year-old geneticist Rita Arditti was starting over. After ending an intense and complicated romantic relationship, she had secured a new teaching position and founded a feminist bookstore in Somerville, Massachusetts. Arditti was ready to settle down into an interesting life of academia and activism with her 13-year-old son, Federico.
An appointment with a doctor changed everything, however. She had found a lump in her breast and was concerned. Soon after, Arditti was in an operating room under general anesthetic, rushed into making a treatment choice. She did not know whether she would wake up with both breasts. This appointment began a battle with breast cancer that would span three decades. Yet, it was also the beginning of over 35 years of health justice activism for women with cancer, as well as work developing feminist perspectives on radical science and human rights.
“Rita’s guiding light was social justice,” says Federico in an email to Lady Science. This passion developed years before her diagnosis, when Arditti began thinking about the social implications and technological consequences of scientific research. In 1969, her concerns led her and others to form Science for the People, a radical science organization born out of the anti-war movement. Through grassroots organizing, research, discussion groups, and a member-led magazine, Science for the People united those who believed in social justice and wanted to challenge the scientific establishment.
Although Science for the People viewed science as inherently political, sexism and racism were initially not well-considered in the largely Marxist theoretical framework of radical science, according to sociologist Hilary Rose. The idea of a “second (patriarchal) system of domination” in the sciences was conceptualized by Arditti and other women scientists involved in the organization. Despite their efforts, developing an activist network among isolated women in science was intractable work, writes Rose.
“Women faced a lot of challenges in the sciences in those days navigating the world of largely male scientists,” says Terri Goldberg, who managed Science for the People’s magazine in the late 70’s, in an email interview with Lady Science. “For that person to become visibly involved in politics was very risky and took time away from their scientific work, which was all-consuming and demanding.”
Even Arditti wasn’t initially convinced about why scientists should think about “women’s issues.” While she was a postdoctoral scientist at Harvard, Arditti had been introduced to feminist groups on campus by a Science for the People member. She attended a meeting, but was skeptical about how relevant feminism was for the privileged American women who made up the scientific community. “I was totally taken aback,” Arditti explained in an interview for the film A Moment in Her Story, which documents Boston’s feminist movement in the 70’s. “Although I am a leftist, this issue of women per se had never been addressed so directly, so I had a lot of resistance towards it. It took me a year to go to a meeting after that,” she said. “I felt that I am a scientist, and they are only talking about poor women.”
Yet, Rita related strongly to the “personal is political” slogan of second-wave feminism, as she had her own complex intersectional identity. Her childhood in Argentina had made her sensitive to the subtle and complex effects of marginalization. A Sephardic Jew in Buenos Aires, she had been a minority within a minority. As Federico explains in an email to Lady Science, the larger Ashkenazi Jewish community was itself outnumbered by the city’s Protestant and Catholic populations. “The patronizing attitudes from men and the lack of support and recognition all felt very familiar[;] it felt like being a Sephardic Jew as a child again,” Rita herself said in A Moment in Her Story. Articles in Science for the People magazine archives show that Arditti was instrumental in centering women’s issues such as birth control, abortion, and child care in the radical science movement.
These experiences paved the way for her later work on women and cancer. Arditti’s own experience with cancer cemented her radical views on science and healthcare, and her research interests shifted from microbes to environmental determinants of health. She initially felt a personal blame for her diagnosis. Grounded in the concepts of Silent Spring, however, Rita began a woman’s community cancer group in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which held the slogan “Rachel Carson was right.” In A Moment in Her Story, Arditti said, “We feel that cancer is a feminist issue that hasn’t been acknowledged.” According to Barbara Ley in From Pink to Green: Disease Prevention and the Environmental Breast Cancer Movement, the group emphasized direct support, political education, and cancer prevention rather than cure itself.
Arditti’s long-time partner, Estelle Disch, met her at a cancer counselling workshop in 1980 and was with her until Arditti’s death from complications related to her illness in 2009. Disch created and continues to manage an online archive of Arditti’s work, and she has a deep insight into the future plans that Arditti had. As Disch explained in the introduction to Rita’s unpublished notes, she had planned to write a book entitled Not Dead Yet: Living with Stage IV Breast Cancer, which would have discussed the economics and discriminatory nature of the healthcare system. Arditti was also outraged at the pink campaigns that commodify cancer and solely emphasize survivorship, and felt that the experiences of women who live with incurable cancer are obscured.
It is clear that Arditti’s work provided a sense of control in an uncertain time, and that her radical roots were never forgotten. “I was elated that I could use some of my science background to discuss issues regarding power and oppression in plain terms, and it represented a step forward in bringing together my knowledge and my political belief,” Arditti reflected in the notes written for her book. “In the midst of my anxiety and fears, the work that I was doing helped me to keep going.”
Image credit: “Science for the People” taken from Science for the People, International Discussion Bulletin, 1975-1978 via Internet Archive | Public Domain
