Featured photo by Wendy Anderson
Story by Shauna Reynolds
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March is Women’s History Month here in the U.S. It’s okay if you didn’t know – it gets lost in a sea of the other months we use to focus on the triumphs and trials of any given group. As far as categories of people go, “women” is pretty broad… no pun intended. Slightly more than half the population in the US, and slightly less in the rest of the world, are women – you’ve probably met one. In March, we honor and celebrate the achievements of women because we can’t be bothered to do it the rest of the year.
Every year since 1988, the sitting US president has issued a proclamation to commemorate the occasion. This year, President Joe Biden used much of his statement to trumpet his own accomplishments. He let a woman be Vice President—this is where you gasp now. He said he and Vice President Kamala Harris are fighting to protect women’s reproductive freedom. He described abortion bans as dangerous and unacceptable but stopped short of explaining how they’ll turn things around.
However, Harris hasn’t cured our country of sexism. Neither has Greta Gerwig, Taylor Swift or whoever we are crediting for pop feminism this year. In fact, there are people out there in the cesspools of the internet asking why there isn’t a Men’s History Month. I guarantee you that the Venn diagram of those guys and the people demanding White History Month is nearly a perfect circle.
Focusing on the accomplishments of women obscures the problems we still face. In the words of civil rights activist—and woman—Fannie Lou Hamer, “Nobody’s free until everybody’s free.” Even if women in the U.S. were seen as equals to men, it would be trite to celebrate if women are still facing gender-based oppression elsewhere in the world.
Do we really need a Women’s History Month? If the goal is to bring awareness to inequality, maybe we do. Women still don’t make as much money as men. Eighteen states, including Tennessee, have never had a woman as governor. Conservatives deny the womanhood of transgender women, and non-binary people assigned female at birth are labeled as women whether they like it or not.
People, especially young people, should learn about women’s accomplishments, but separating them from the history taught the rest of the year doesn’t seem helpful—nor does leaving out Black women because didn’t we talk about them in February? Or Arab-American women because we’ll save them for April, right?
Does Women’s History Month accomplish anything? When we flip our calendars to April, I’ll say “yes,” and we can all feel good and pat each other on the backs. Then I’ll shout, “April fools,” and we can all have a good laugh and return to fearing for the future of girls in the US and beyond as the world settles into its male-centric ways until next March.
To contact Lifestyles Editor Destiny Mizell and Assistant Lifestyles Editor Shamani Salahuddin, email [email protected]. For more news, visit www.mtsusidelines.com, or follow us on Instagram at MTSUSidelines or on X at @MTSUSidelines.
