Women's History Month
Since 1910, March 8th has been observed as International Women's Day by people around the World. In 1978, an education task force in Sonoma County, California, kicked off Women's History Week on this day. The goal was to draw attention to the fact that women's history wasn't really included in the K-12 school curriculum. In 1980, President Jimmy Carter declared the week of March 8 Women's History Week across the country. By 1986, 14 states declared the entire month of March as Women's History Month. The following year, Congress declared March Women's History Month.
Traditionally, history has focused on political, military, and economic leaders and events. This approach has often excluded women, both leaders and ordinary citizens, from the accounts. Women's history does not rewrite history, but rather provides a more complete picture of what the women were doing and experiencing during the well-known and less known moments in history.
Did You Know?
Feb. 28, 1909 marked the first Woman's History Day in New York City. It marked the one-year anniversary of the garment workers' strikes when 15,000 women marched through lower Manhattan. From 1909 to 1910, immigrant women who worked in garment factories held a strike to protest their working conditions.
The 19th amendment, which granted women the right to vote, was signed into law on Aug. 26, 1920. But at the time, a number of other laws prohibited Native American women, Black women, Asian American women, and Latinx women from voting. It wasn't until 1965, when President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into law, that discriminatory tactics such as literacy tests were outlawed, and all women could vote.
Women couldn’t get their own credit cards until 1974 when the Equal Credit Opportunity Act (ECOA), more formally known as Title VII of the Consumer Credit Protection Act, was finally passed by Congress.
Ibtihaj Muhammad became the first Muslim woman to represent the US at the Olympics in 2016 and was the first Olympian to wear a hijab.
