Why March is Women's History Month in the U.S.
As a graduate of one of the newly founded women's studies programs at California's Sonoma State University in the 1970s, educator Molly Murphy MacGregor asked the same question as Lerner and others. Administrators at the high school where she taught had tried to pressure her to cancel a class on women's history, arguing that there was simply not enough material to fill six weeks of instruction. Textbooks that did cover basic women's history buried it—for example, one text said Congress gave women the right to vote in 1920 without mentioning the work of pioneering suffragists who fought for that civil right.
Having created the first Women's History Week, the National Women's History Alliance lobbied Congress to recognize March as Women's History Month. Founders (right to left): Molly Murphy MacGregor, Paula Hammett, Mary Ruthsdotter, Maria Cuevas, and Bette Morgan.
Courtesy of the National Women's History Alliance
Where were the women? she wondered. 'The history of women in the United States seemed to be written in invisible ink,' MacGregor recalled in a 2020 PBS documentary.
The first Women's History Week
MacGregor was spurred to action. In the late 1970s, she put together a slideshow on the history of American women in areas like politics, environmental activism, and the abolitionist movement and was amazed at the response. Students came away from the presentations with newfound pride and an interest in the stories of women like Harriet Tubman and Rachel Carson.
But when MacGregor learned that students rarely checked out or were assigned the tiny assortment of women's history books available in local elementary schools, she took action by joining the Sonoma County Commission on the Status of Women.
The commission had been created in 1975 and tasked with eliminating gender discrimination and prejudice. One of its goals was to help Sonoma County schools comply with Title IX of the 1972 Education Amendments—a landmark law that protects people from discrimination based on sex in any educational program that receives funding from the federal government.
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