perdita
PERDITA HUSTON (1936-2001), a native of Maine, obtained her university degrees in International Relations and Journalism in France; in her early career she was English Assistant to the Tunisian Minister of Information and then a medical social worker in rural Algeria during its war for independence.
Ms Huston worked for Time Inc. and LIFE Magazine in Paris and became Director of Public Affairs for Time Inc. in French-speaking countries. Following her return to the US in 1971, she directed national programs for the US Bicentennial Administration and became Regional Director of the US Peace Corps for North Africa, the Near East, Asia and the Pacific (1978-81). She has since directed programs at the World Conservation Union (IUCN) in Switzerland and at the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) in London and has been a consultant with UNDP, UNIFEM, UNFPA, UNICEF and the Secretariat for the 4th World Conference for Women. As the request of UNDP Administrator Bradford Morse, Ms Huston was Public Affairs Advisor to the InterAction Council of Former Heads of Government in the mid 1980s.
Her journalism interests have resulted in three books are based on conversations/ interviews : Message from the Village, UN Population Fund 1978; Third World Women Speak Out, Praeger and Overseas Development Council 1979 and Motherhood by Choice, Feminist Press 1992.
Her next book, published April 2001, is based on interviews with three generations of families in eleven countries. Entitled Families As We Are, Conversations from Around the World, the book received funding from five UN specialized agencies and the Secretariat for the UN Year of the Family. She has worked in films and produced African Recovery, documenting recovery efforts from the 1984 Sahelian drought, that was projected at the UN Special Session on African Recovery.
Ms Huston held two honorary doctorates and was a recipient of the Margaret Mead Award for "Contributions to International Understanding". She is a former board member of Amnesty International/USA, and was associated with the Center for Ethics in Action, the International Development Conference, Kumarian Press, Inc., the Union of International Associations, Brussels, and the United Nations Association of Washington, D.C.
Perdita's Writings
Families As We Are
Perdita Huston's new thought-provoking book offers an informed response to the policy makers and media pundits who have joined forces to bemoan the "decline of the family." Huston's fresh perspective-gained from several decades of working directly with families around the world-leads her to conclude that while the changes in families "may look like breakdown to those facing backwards, it looks like renovation to those facing the future."
Like the works of Studs Terkel, Families As We Are has at its core the words and ideas of ordinary people. Huston spent more than four years interviewing three and four generations of families of all socioeconomic backgrounds in eleven countries: Bangladesh, Brazil, China, Egypt, El Salvador, Japan, Jordan, Mali, Thailand, Uganda, and the United States. "Once again Perdita Huston has helped people speak for themselves. This time she has brought us proof that the value of kinship bonds and the dream of loving families are strong and enduring across continents, cultures and generations, " declared Dr. Dorothy Height, director of the National Council of Negro Women.
Motherhood by Choice: Pioneers in Women's Health and Family Planning
To honor the 40th anniversary of the International Planned Parenthood Federation, journalist Perdita Huston travelled the world to gather this remarkable collection of oral histories of and about the often unknown leaders of a worldwide movement to bring women their reproductive rights. Drawing on personal interviews, Huston delineates the motivations, strategies, and heartaches of twelve pioneers-eight women, four men-both from the developing world, before and after colonial rule, and from industrialized countries, who braved scorn and abuse to raise the issues of family planning, contraception, and sex education, and to fight for improved healthcare for women.
These moving testimonies reflect the personal leadership style of each pioneer from Dr. Evangelina Rodriquez, the first woman doctor in the Dominican Republic, who defied church policies and the corrupt dictator Trujillo to promote family planning and fight the spread of venereak disease; to Miyoski Ohba who contended with innumerable taboos in postwar Japan to introduce poor villagers to the use of condoms; to Elsie Ottsen-Jensen, born in 1886 to a poor Norwegian family of 17 children, who became acutely aware of the high rate of maternal mortality throughout turn-of-the-century Scandinavia and went on to found the Swedish Association of Sex Educators in 1933. Motherhood by Choice stands as a significant historical document tracing the development of public health services, sex education, and contraceptive services that will inspire and inform all who are concerned about women's health and reproductive rights.
Friends of Perdita
Richard C. Holbrooke, Former U. S. Ambassador to the United Nations
"she is, in her way, still the scribe of Constantinois, writing down the words and thoughts of the voiceless, helping give them shape and, above all, giving them to us."
David Roger Allen
"Perdita Huston is a new kind of feminist. Her communications style is refreshingly diplomatic and careful. It calls for solutions to problems without scapegoats or bromides. Implicitly, Huston invites non-Feminist females and sympathetic males to join Feminists concerned about the very subject of families, their survival, and resources they need. FAMILIES AS WE ARE (2001) sets a new standard in Feminist communications and polemics, and is bound to make friends for Feminism and its goals worldwide. Hopefully, other Feminists will notice her new style, and give us more of the same."
