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First paragraph Claudia’s current project:
A Collaboration of Women
This article emerged from a conversation between two women and became a collaboration of women. It began as a list of female-identified practitioners, researchers, volunteers, organizational leaders etc. and became a discussion of female collaborations. As the conversation and collaboration grew, it became clear that 1. The list of female-identified individuals who have given their time and energy to the profession was immense, but not well-documented. 2. Many female-identified individuals had a propensity to work together, often behind the scenes, to strengthen and support the field at local and national levels. The authors also recognized that, reflecting the authors’ own origins, our knowledge base was skewed towards US individuals and organizations, and was limited as it pertained to the Asian community. We were able to name multiple wonderful female Asian teachers with whom many of us had worked or collaborated over the years, but we did not have the reach to be able to discuss Asian female-identified collaborations within the Asian community. We recognize our limitations and suggest that this initial article should become a greater collaboration: an opportunity, over time, to reach out and create a “biography of female leaders in Asian medicine”. We are unable to do that in this article and we apologize in advance to all of those who are not mentioned here. We hope to grow this collaboration so that we can document the history of female-identified collaborators in the profession of Acupuncture and Asian medicine.