USA (WVDN) – Women’s History Month, celebrated each March, began not with a sweeping act of Congress but with a small California school district determined to rewrite the story of who gets remembered.
In 1978, the Education Task Force of the Sonoma County Commission on the Status of Women in Santa Rosa, California, organized the first Women’s History Week. They chose the week of March 8 to align with International Women’s Day, a date already tied to women’s labor and suffrage struggles around the globe.
The idea spread quickly. Community groups, schools, and women’s organizations across the country adopted their own observances. In 1980, a coalition led by the National Women’s History Project, now the National Women’s History Alliance, successfully lobbied the White House. That year, President Jimmy Carter issued the first presidential proclamation declaring the week of March 8 as National Women’s History Week.
Persistent advocacy followed. In 1987, after continued lobbying by the National Women’s History Project, Congress passed a law designating March as Women’s History Month, transforming a local experiment into a national tradition.
The month invites Americans to reflect on the women whose efforts reshaped law, politics, and culture.
Suffrage leaders Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton spent decades lecturing, organizing, and lobbying for what became the 19th Amendment, which granted many women the right to vote in 1920. Alice Paul, a more radical strategist, led marches and hunger strikes and introduced the Equal Rights Amendment in 1923, seeking constitutional guarantees of gender equality.
Other figures challenged both racism and sexism at once. Sojourner Truth, a formerly enslaved woman turned abolitionist and women’s rights advocate, used her famous “Ain’t I a Woman?” speech to confront the notion that womanhood meant only white womanhood. Journalist Ida B. Wells Barnett led an anti-lynching crusade and fought to ensure that Black women were not pushed to the margins of the suffrage movement.
Legal and political pioneers in the 20th century carried that work into courtrooms and Congress. Before joining the U.S. Supreme Court, Ruth Bader Ginsburg built a career as a lawyer strategically dismantling laws that allowed gender discrimination. In 1968,
Shirley Chisholm became the first Black woman elected to Congress and later the first woman to seek the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination, running under the slogan “Unbought and Unbossed.”
March 8, the anchor of Women’s History Month, traces back to mass demonstrations in 1908, when 15,000 women marched through New York City for shorter hours, better pay, and voting rights. In 1917, women in Russia went on strike for “bread and peace” on a February date that corresponded to March 8 on the Gregorian calendar, helping spark political change and earning women the right to vote there.
Today, Women’s History Month underscores how recent many basic rights are, from opening a bank account without a husband’s permission to legal protections against workplace harassment. As historian Gerda Lerner wrote, women’s history is not a niche interest but “an essential, indispensable heritage from which we can draw pride, comfort, courage, and long-range vision.”
