Womens History Month
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Photo shows women suffrage hikers General Rosalie Jones, Jessie Stubbs, and Colonel Ida Craft, who is wearing a bag labeled “Votes for Women pilgrim leaflets” and carrying a banner with a notice for a “Woman Suffrage Party. Mass meeting. Opera House. Brooklyn Academy of Music. January 9th at 8:15 p.m.”
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March is National Women’s History Month. First column (left to right): Maj. Gen Marcelite J. Harris, first African-American female general officer of the U.S. Air Force; Susan B. Anthony, American social reformer and women’s right activist; Admiral Grace Hopper, American computer scientist and U.S. Navy rear admiral; Madeleine Albright, first female U.S. secretary of state; and Maj. Gen. Jeannie M. Leavitt, U.S. Air Force’s first female fighter pilot. Second column: Trixie Friganza (immediately behind the sign), who inspired the song “Take Me Out to the Ballgame,” was a women’s suffrage advocate; Janet C. Wolfenbarger, eighth commander of Air Force Materiel Command and first woman to achieve the rank of four-star general in the U.S. Air Force; Clara Barton, nurse who founded the American Red Cross; Eleanor Roosevelt, longest serving First Lady of the United States from 1933-1945; and Loretta Walsh, first American active-duty Navy woman, the first woman to enlist in the U.S. Navy, and the first woman allowed to serve as a woman in any of the United States armed forces, as anything other than as a nurse. Third column: Sandra Day O’Connor, first woman associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States; Mae Jemison, American engineer, physician, and former NASA astronaut who became the first black woman to travel into space; Kamala Harris, the United States’ first female vice president, the highest-ranking female official in U.S. history, and the first African-American and first Asian-American vice president; Ruth Ginsburg, second woman to serve as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States; and Amelia Earhart, American aviation pioneer and first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean.
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Throughout the month of March, from the 1st to the 31st, we celebrate women. Women’s History Month is the one month out of the whole year where women are celebrated for their accomplishments throughout different cultures, societies, and history. These accomplishments range all throughout a spectrum of topics. As well as reflect on women that have led the way for change.
Each year Women’s History Month is given a certain theme by The National Women’s History Alliance. This year’s theme is Valiant Women of the Vote: Refusing to Be Silenced, expanding on the 2020 theme, Valiant Women of the Vote, honoring “women from the original suffrage movement as well as 20th and 21st-century women who have continued the struggle to ensure voting rights for all”.
This celebration of women began with a single week, known as Women’s History Week. Celebrated by local groups and municipalities in the 1970s. In 1978, one of the most notable celebrations organized was here in Santa Rosa, California, by the Education Task Force of the Sonoma County Commission on the Status of Women.
In 1980, the first presidential proclamation declaring the week of March 8 as National Women’s History Week was made by President Jimmy Carter. The next year the U.S. Congress passed a resolution that established the national celebration. The National Women’s History Project was then successfully petitioned to Congress to expand the event to the entire month of March only six years later. March 1987 was then declared the first official Women’s History Month by Congress.
Today, women are celebrated through books, documentaries, films, places to donate, gifts, parades, and events. These events and actions are centered around certain women or a group of women that have helped shape the world we live in. As we now celebrate Women’s History Month for 40 years, we can look back on all the wonderful, helpful, and life-changing things women in our world have done and are doing.
