By Marian Wright Edelman
Forty-five years ago, President Jimmy Carter issued the first presidential proclamation designating March 2-8, 1980, as National Women’s History Week. The final day of that period was International Women’s Day, which had already been celebrated in many countries for much of the 20th century and recognized by the United Nations as a day to acknowledge women’s contributions and call for women’s economic, political, and civil rights. American women historians, community leaders, and advocates believed it was past time for the United States to participate in a national commemoration too. It would be seven more years before the week-long observance expanded to the full month of March, but this was a milestone and victory for American women’s history.
President Carter’s proclamation read: “From the first settlers who came to our shores, from the first American Indian families who befriended them, men and women have worked together to build this nation. Too often the women were unsung and sometimes their contributions went unnoticed. But the achievements, leadership, courage, strength and love of the women who built America was as vital as that of the men whose names we know so well. As Dr. Gerda Lerner has noted, ‘Women’s History is Women’s Right.’—It is an essential and indispensable heritage from which we can draw pride, comfort, courage, and long-range vision.”
The proclamation continued: “I urge libraries, schools, and community organizations to focus their observances on the leaders who struggled for equality—Susan B. Anthony, Sojourner Truth, Lucy Stone, Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Harriet Tubman, and Alice Paul. Understanding the true history of our country will help us to comprehend the need for full equality under the law for all our people. This goal can be achieved by ratifying the 27th Amendment to the United States Constitution, which states that ‘Equality of Rights under the Law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.’”
Of course, the measure that President Carter then hoped would become the 27th Amendment, the Equal Rights Amendment, has still not been enshrined into the Constitution. To the contrary, women’s rights are now under a dangerous onslaught of new attacks, along with the nation’s larger commitment to protecting equal rights for all people and the basic ability to acknowledge, study, and honor American women’s specific history and contributions at all. Just as with February’s commemorations of Black History Month, our nation is marking these observances in perilous times. But prohibitions on talking about or teaching the truth about history in any culture only serve to underscore that history’s importance and value, and once again the long thread of women’s history in America provides examples and light for the current struggle.
To quote the proclamation’s words again, this history should give all of us not only pride but “comfort, courage, and long-range vision.” When President Carter urged the nation to study specific women leaders who fought for equality in the past as a path to understanding America’s true history and ongoing need for equality today, he gave seven names as examples from a list that includes a constellation. Remember these words attributed to one of them and one of my own lanterns, Sojourner Truth: I will not allow my life’s light to be determined by the darkness around me.