The Problem with Women's History Month
Why we need to get beyond it
The problem with Women’s History Month is that we shouldn’t need a Women’s History Month.
If you’re a man, imagine what it would feel like to have a Men’s History Month. If you’re not a man, imagine what it would feel like.
We dedicate months to specific groups only when those groups are marginalized. Otherwise, dedicated months wouldn’t even make sense. We don’t have a Men’s History Month because the default for history is men’s history. We don’t have a White History Month because the default for history is white history.
No group, whatever its size, should be marginalized. But women make up half of the human population, yet we are discounted in countless ways. To me, Women’s History Month is a reminder of that.
The psychological effects of distorting history
As much as I dislike having a Women’s History Month, it does point to an issue we need to address. History as we tell it is distorted, leaving out whole groups of people. That’s significant not just because of some abstract desire to get at the truth. It also affects us on a psychological level.
I was a child during “Women’s Lib.” My mother made a point of telling me and my sister that when we grew up, we didn’t have to get married or have children. Although she was happy having done both, she’d never considered that she had a choice; getting married and having children was simply the default that was expected of women of her generation. She was not particularly expected to get a Ph.D. after having said children, though she did. We, in contrast, were expected to go to college and get jobs.
Feminism was in the air. The radio played “I am woman, hear me roar,” with its fierce proclamation, “No one’s ever gonna keep me down again.” As cringeworthy as the song was, it spoke to what so many of us were feeling. Women were burning their bras. Colleges were offering women’s studies programs. Everyone was talking about the Equal Rights Amendment and reading Ms. Magazine.
The message I got from all of this: Women had been oppressed for all eternity until the 1960s. As a result, with a few notable exceptions like Harriet Tubman and Marie Curie, women had never done much — till that moment in history. Now, all that was going to change.
While it felt like a positive development that would result in real progress, this distorted message affected me, and I’m sure many others, on a deep psychological level. It limited our ideas of what women could do — what we could do.
Whose history?
It was well after my formal education, and the feminist movement of the ’60s and ’70s, that I started learning, here and there, about the remarkable things that more than just a few women had been doing all along.
I learned that women might have been some of the first writers and artists. I learned that some women had been pharaohs in ancient Egypt. I learned that Gudrid the Far-Traveled, a viking woman born around 985 AD in western Iceland, undertook eight Atlantic sea voyages and was featured prominently in Icelandic sagas.
They didn’t teach us this in school.
I learned that even feminism wasn’t new — that Christine de Pizan, an Italian woman born 600 years before me, was a well-paid feminist writer in the French court during the Middle Ages. Among her works was “The Book of the City of Ladies,” as gloriously tedious as any tome of its time, about an allegorical city built to defend women against misogyny and celebrate their achievements.
They didn’t teach us this in school.
Although Christine de Pizan apparently didn’t merit being included in the standard school curriculum, she was well known during her time — as were other prominent women through the ages. But many more women achieved great things in obscurity.
Recently, I’ve learned about a few of the women who made history in the shadows in the twentieth century: Josephine Baker, the performer who risked her life to spy for the Allies during World War II. Heddy Lamar, the brilliant actress who practically invented Wi-Fi, in addition to her many other accomplishments. Katherine Johnson and the other Black women who were integral to the success of the U.S. space program but didn’t show up on our TV screens during space missions. There are so many more.
They didn’t teach us this in school.
Rewriting history: Seek and ye shall find
To be fair, Women’s History Month seeks to remedy this situation by bringing to light the previously ignored history of women. And I appreciate the stories that are shared during this month.
But women’s history should not be relegated to just one month. Women’s history should not be separate from men’s history. We must take a broader perspective as we rewrite history to better reflect reality.
That will mean continuing to rewrite it as we keep learning more, because new shit keeps coming to light.
The new shit goes back way beyond the twentieth century. The story of humans started long before recorded history and tells us a lot about who we are now. It also tells us about who we have the potential to be, as individuals and as a society.
Of course, prehistory is tricky to learn about and takes a lot of digging — literally. The evidence that’s dug up is often subject to interpretation. But at least it gives us a starting place for some understanding — and that understanding keeps evolving as new shit comes to light.
We’re learning more as more sites are excavated and archeological techniques become more sophisticated. In the past, a lot of excavation was done where there was interest and money. That was often in Europe. As exploration expands, so does our knowledge.
But it’s not just that new evidence is coming in. We see what we look for — and what we want to see. Some of the evidence is new, and some is simply being seen from a new perspective: that of women, who are now doing more of the studying. To uncover a more comprehensive and accurate history, we must seek it.
As we seek, we’re learning new things about society as a whole and about the role of women. We’re learning that prehistoric women were artists and hunters — even successful big-game hunters. We’re finding evidence, both archeological and anthropological, that hunter-gatherer societies were much more egalitarian than we’d imagined. We’re starting to build a foundation for a more inclusive history. Growing up with that history will help girls internalize a more empowering message. And an accurately rewritten history will help people of any gender to see new possibilities for how to organize our current society.
Girls today at least have the advantage of seeing many more examples in their world than before (though still not nearly enough) of women scientists, doctors, lawyers, judges, politicians, CEOs, fire fighters, movie directors — the list goes on. That makes it easier for them to imagine themselves in these roles.
When they look at the past, they should also be able to see women there. And they should be able to do that without needing a Women’s History Month.
A woman’s work is never done, and rewriting history is no exception. While that’s happening, what can you do right now? How about giving up the patriarchy for Lent! Because it certainly does still exist.
I always take off my shirt when I write history, don't you?
Great column, thank you!
Outstanding post, Rosana. Shared on FB. And I agree with Adam about your caption.