We’re Proud to be Celebrating Women’s History Month — All Month Long!
Women’s History Month has a proud history that traces its way back to International Women’s Day, which was first established in 1911, but the idea of a full month came later. In 1978, the school district encompassing Sonoma, California spent a whole week celebrating women and their accomplishments. In 1980, Jimmy Carter decreed the whole month of March (International Women’s Day is March 8th) as a way to remember and honor the impact over half the world’s population has on science, culture, arts, technology, philanthropy and all other walks of life.
I think it’s important to reflect on who we are and what we’ve been able to accomplish. At the turn of the century, women couldn’t vote. In the 1940s and ’50s, most women would have to legally get their husbands’ permission to take out a credit card. It took a long time to make divorce easier to obtain, allowing women (and men as well sometimes to be fair) to leave difficult marriage situations. Women are now actually make up more of the undergraduate college population overall than men, and we may one day have a woman in the White House. With strides that both Ms. Fiorina and former Secretary of State Clinton have made in normalizing women as candidates, it feels not that it won’t ever happen but that it may happen and very soon.
Still, that’s far from enough. The Equal Rights Amendment continues to languish and never actually ratified, even decades of being proposed in the United States. Women make far less than men and it’s shameful how little we talk about how much more adversely affected women of color are affected by this gap. The Oscars had a moving moment in an otherwise abysmal and racist cavalcade where Lady Gaga and survivors of sexual abuse were recognized on stage as Gaga sang the title song from the documentary The Hunting Ground. Yet, we still ask “What was she wearing?” and suffer through a culture that blames women and teaches us not to get raped, when we should be teaching the more direct lesson of don’t rape.
Again, there’s so much inequality, and it gets worse when you’re a woman of color and/or with an LGTBQ identity. We have made great strides, but, and of course this shocks no one, we have so much further to go, especially in developing intersectionality and a type of feminism in which all voices are heard, that lifts everyone up.
For right now, however, as we continue to surge and fight forward, we honor those who came before us, the ones who made it possible for us to keep fighting and to do what we love currently. Thank you to our sisters for winning so much for us to start, and we promise to keep doing you proud.
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