Genevieve Howe is a political activist living in Boston. She works with the Women's Community Cancer Project. This article is reprinted from Sojourner: The Womens Forum, Dec. 1998.

Harvard Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is known for many things, including the oldest and richest college in America, bookstores galore, and plenty of new up-scale shops and chain stores. Thanks to a radical feminist muralist, it will now also be known for an artistic call to action against the cancer epidemic.

Somerville muralist Be Sargent and the Cambridge-based Women's Community Cancer Project collaborated to bring the artist's dream to life. The mural on Church Street memorializes women activists killed by cancer, celebrates political activism against cancer, condemns environmental carcinogens, and insists on the right to a clean environment.

Passersby who look up at the mural will not understand all of the symbolism immediately-and that is just the way the artist planned it. "I want people to take from it whatever they do," said Sargent. "Each time they look at it, they will see something new." She added, "I'm trying to get to all women with this mural and the only way you get to all women is slowly."

Sargent said she decided to approach the Women's Community Cancer Project (WCCP) with the idea of painting a mural for the project, when one more friend of hers was diagnosed with cancer. She wanted to create a work of art that would draw attention to cancer's murderous toll on women-not as a picture of doom and gloom, but as a celebration of movers and shakers for political and social justice, both those living and those killed by cancer. WCCP gladly accepted Sargent's offer and worked with her for a year to fundraise, obtain a wall, design the mural, seek nominations for women memorialized in the mural, develop publicity materials, and organize an "open house" when the mural was near completion.

To start, Sargent came up with a design that would memorialize and celebrate twelve women in the center of the mural in a pyramid formation. Each woman is shown as a caretaker or goddess of a different aspect of the environment: air, ocean, soil, minerals, water, fruits and vegetables, flowers and pollination, grasses, trees and birds, animals, night, and day. Brilliant rainbow colors spread across the women. These twelve stand in for the hundreds and thousands of activists among the 270,000 women who die every year in this country from cancer. The design easily won approval from WCCP-and the Cambridge Zoning Commission.

WCCP members set about to identify twelve women to memorialize. They chose three nationally known activists: Rachel Carson, Audre Lorde, and Myra Sadker: Carson, a biologist who called the pesticide industry to task in her 1962 ground-breaking book Silent Spring; Lorde, a poet, cancer activist, Black lesbian feminist, and author of The Cancer Journals, one of the first books to break the conspiracy of silence about women and breast cancer; Sadker, a nationally known advocate for gender equality in education and co-authored the book, Failing at Fairness: How Our Schools Cheat Girls.

WCCP selected nine local women for the pyramid of twelve by soliciting nominations from over 100 Boston community organizations. The women were chosen to represent a diversity of cultures and areas of activism.

A sea of political activists surrounds the pyramid of twelve. They are fighting the poisoning of homes and communities and demanding accessible, quality health care. Painted in soft hues of brown, blue, and white, fired-up women (and some children) are marching, speaking, writing, meeting, signing petitions, and holding a candlelight vigil in remembrance of loved ones killed by cancer. Although the artist prefers not to identify the background faces, each is based on a real person.

Bordering the political activists and rainbow pyramid are ominous examples of carcinogens. Painted only in black, red, and yellow, ten panels remind us that we are surrounded by air pollution, hazardous work places, water pollution, factory farming, pesticide spraying, nuclear radiation, electromagnetic fields, chemical proliferation, toxic household products, and toxic waste, among myriad other man-made dangers.

Sargent commented, "The powers that be are not going to quake in fear at seeing the carcinogens represented. But passersby may start to avoid and protest these carcinogens-and that might make the powers that be quake in fear." She hopes that people will see these carcinogens all together, "because we know what's really dangerous is the interaction of these substances."

Vera Cohen, who participates in WCCP's mural committee, said, "The kinds of carcinogens we're talking about are like the causes of global warming. They don't kill anyone instantly." Cohen hopes the mural will draw attention to the need to stop the build-up of carcinogens now, and move people to refuse to tolerate them, just as society has in many ways refused to tolerate the ill-effects of asbestos, lead poisoning, and smoking. She added that substitutes for carcinogens will be put into use "only if large groups of people insist on it. Otherwise, profits will continue to be much too high to allow changes to be made."

Sprouting from the edges of the carcinogenic border are four herbs and fruits symbolizing four schools of natural cancer treatment: honey suckle for eastern medicine, red clover for western herbal medicine, plantain for folk remedies, and garlic for nutritional healing.

Sargent's final touches will be words representing what is called "the precautionary principle"-"Indication of harm, not proof of harm, is our call to action," as synthesized by WCCP members. This call to action, initiated by several cancer activists, insists that even though we are lacking indisputable scientific proof of environmental causes of cancer, we have sufficient evidence of harm to take action. As WCCP member Sandra Steingraber wrote in her landmark 1997 book, Living Downstream: An Ecologist Looks at Cancer and the Environment, "I am now thirty-seven and can barely remember when I last breathed cigarette fumes in an airplane or hospital waiting room. For much of my life, I have been protected from a now-proven danger by those who had the courage to act on partial evidence."

WCCP's Cohen added that she hopes the public display of the mural will inspire more people to show that kind of courage and become activists. "Instead of just reading Rachel Carson and others, we can become these people."

By the time the fall '99 dedication comes around, WCCP will have erected a plaque describing the essential elements of the mural and will have completed a detailed booklet describing the life of each of the memorialized women and the mural's symbolism.

The mural was supported by the Boston Women's Fund, the Breast Cancer Fund in San Francisco, and individual donations. Loew's Cineplex donated the wall next to the Harvard Square Theatre on Church Street.

Sargent wants everyone to know that neither WCCP, nor Loew's, nor anyone owns this mural, "It is completely given away. It is public art." Be Sargent is an established Boston muralist who painted the "Wall of Respect for Women," the "Judith Sargent Murray of Gloucester" mural (she is considered the first feminist philosopher in the US), the "Somerville Gateway" mural, and a recent work to honor the immigrant presence in Somerville. She is already working on her next dream, an animal rights mural.

Since its creation in 1989, the Women's Community Cancer Project (WCCP) has advocated changes in medical, social, and political approaches to cancer, particularly as they affect women. The all-volunteer, grassroots group focuses on stopping cancer before it starts, not just on diagnosis and treatment.

For more information, contact: The Women's Community Cancer Project, 46 Pleasant Street, Cambridge MA 02139; 617/354-9888; Fax 617/497-6787; <102366,1506@compuserve.com>