 Next, Faye Waddleton is renowned as a stalwart fighter for women's reproductive rights and women's health. In 1978 she became president and CEO of Planned Parenthood, which in spite of being under consistent attack, is still the nation's oldest and largest voluntary reproductive health provider. Can we hear it for Planned Parenthood? Faye was a nurse and a midwife during the time when birth control and abortion were illegal in this country. She knows firsthand what is at stake in her lifelong mission to ensure access to safe reproductive health care and birth control for, well, everyone. Her dedication to women's rights continues. In 1995 she co-founded the Center for the Advancement of Women and an organization dedicated to educating policymakers and opinion leaders about issues that impact women's lives. First woman, the first African American CEO of Planned Parenthood, Faye Waddleton. Thank you. It's really a very, very special and very moving occasion for me. In thinking about this evening, I sort of thought about this incredible place that we have come and have been gathered to be given this recognition. For really basically doing the work that we can't do, we can't live without doing. And I thought that really art is really rooted in the imagination of possibilities. And so I want to thank, first of all, Elizabeth Sackler, for imagining the possibilities of this evening. Thank you, Judy Chicago, for imagining the possibilities of the women who sit at the dinner table and the imagination to think about the most nourishing thing that women do and that is to feed others. And to thank you to my colleagues and my sisters who have been given this honor this evening. I am also very deeply humbled to be a part of this gathering and also to join the table at which Margaret Sanger's place has resided for the past 30 years. It's really hard to believe that almost a century has passed since the modern birth control movement was started right in the city of New York on the Lower East Side. In 1916, the first birth control clinic was opened after Margaret Sanger had gone to jail a number of times for distributing information, knowledge, education. But Margaret Sanger had an imagination that women truly could be liberated from sexual oppression and enforced reproduction. She had a notion that in so doing women could achieve the power of their humanity. She had a notion that through organizing her efforts, the efforts of many coming together with the world could truly be changed and can we imagine what the world would have been today a century later even though the struggle goes on had it not been for that imagination. I believe that we are called at moments in history, at a time in history. And so as Margaret Sanger was called at a time in history and she was a nurse also and the daughter of a mother who had experienced 18 pregnancies. And for those of you who may have heard the propaganda that suggested that Margaret Sanger was only interested in birth control so that she could limit the black race my leadership at the head of Planned Parenthood was proof to give voice that women of all races and ethnic backgrounds deserve the power to control their most fundamental rights and their most fundamental reproduction. And so when the voice came a knock at the door at a convention of Planned Parenthood and by the way Margaret Sanger did not like the word Planned Parenthood she formed the American birth control league because her movement was about birth control it wasn't about Planned Parenthood her movement was that women needed to enjoy their sexuality and that Planned Parenthood was a euphemism. And that's how I became the first president of Planned Parenthood because she left the organization very unhappy that the guys took over and for basically 30 or 40 years such was the case and it was led by one man after another. No slight intended I can't imagine a woman not being at the head of Planned Parenthood in the future. And so the struggle goes on. The hope for a future in which women will truly be in control of their lives is one that we can continue to imagine but it must be more than just an imagination. Let us this day imagine a day when women are valued, trusted and left in peace to make a future possible of infinite possibilities for our daughters and our sons. Thank you very much.