Since 1987, the United States has celebrated Women’s History Month every March.
We have used this month to correct the record. To make sure that the women who built this nation—who are often systematically written out of history books and erased from the stories we tell ourselves about who we are—are named out loud and recognized. It is a national reminder that women are not a footnote to the American project. We are central to it.
But today, just shy of its 40th anniversary, Women’s History Month celebrations are quietly disappearing. Not because communities stopped caring—but because an administration decided that honoring women is a threat.
Harriet Tubman did not free herself and stop. Fannie Lou Hamer did not survive a Mississippi jail cell to just go home. Shirley Chisholm did not run for president, unbought and unbossed, so that we could sit down now.
It’s up to us now to saddle up and make sure that future generations of women and girls can not only know about the incredible shared history of the bad ass women that helped shape the world, but can feel the full freedom of it—which means we now have work to do.
We ride at dawn.
The post Could This Be the Last Women’s History Month? appeared first on Ms. Magazine.