Eve Ensler’s personal monologue
Author and activist Eve Ensler read at Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute from her new memoir, “In the Body of the World,” and encouraged audience members to “live in the moment” and “always be present” in their bodies, lives, work, and relationships. Her presentation about her fight with cancer and her work in the Congo elicited laughter, tears, outrage, despair, and hope in — and a standing ovation from — the shoulder-to-shoulder crowd. Ensler opened the two-day (April 10-11) conference “Who Decides? Gender, Medicine, and the Public’s Health,” which brought together physicians, policymakers, journalists, and academics to examine topics such as how we care for our health and respond to disease. “To understand any health program today, we must have a biosocial view. A view that sees big forces — history, culture, political economy — coming right into the physiology of the person, into the meanings of the groups, into the responses of the...