Why don’t we learn about so many historically important women? The answer is as old as patriarchy itself: It’s easier to dismiss women if we forget what they’ve done.
The erasure of women under President Trump’s new administration isn’t subtle. It’s sweeping, strategic, and dangerous. This is more than censorship. It’s a political act—a rewriting of who gets to count in America’s story. The names, faces, and accomplishments once proudly displayed on military websites and federal pages are now reduced to blank screens and broken links.
I’ve spent decades studying how women are silenced, sidelined, and sold short. Still, I didn’t expect to see their very names vanish from our national memory—almost overnight.
But this is how erasure works—not with a bang, but with a quiet deletion. It’s not an accident. It’s an agenda.
Women are being unceremoniously removed from critical leadership positions in government. Women like Admiral Linda Fagan, the first woman in American history to lead a branch of the armed forces, and Dr. Carla D. Hayden, the first woman and African American to serve as the head of the Library of Congress.
Mentions of women’s contributions have been removed from dozens of federal websites. The National Institutes of Health has received guidance discouraging the use of words like “women,” “female,” and “feminism.” NASA and the Arlington National Cemetery have reportedly erased web content celebrating women in leadership. Even President Biden’s 2024 executive order directing the National Park Service to elevate women’s stories at historical sites has been scrubbed from public view.
This is how erasure works—not with a bang, but with a quiet deletion. It’s not an accident. It’s an agenda.
In a dystopian twist, these actions are framed as “defending women.” At a rally, Trump claimed he would “protect” women, “whether the women like it or not”—a statement made even more chilling by his history of being found liable for sexual assault and credibly accused by over two dozen women.
The deeper danger here isn’t only censorship—it’s invisibility. Erasure. A nation in which girls grow up seeing fewer examples of women in power, and boys are taught to devalue them accordingly.
“If you erase the memory, we really forget the people,” said historian Alessio Ponzio. “It’s an act of violence that is very subtle but can really destroy the psychology of people.”
Stories matter. They shape our sense of what’s possible. Author Lydia Millet once wrote, “Action depends on a perception of possibility.” If women are missing from the narrative, how can the next generation imagine themselves in it?
That’s why we must fight back—not just through protest or policy, but through storytelling.
The National Women’s History Museum and the National Women’s Hall of Fame are leading that resistance. Independent from federal funding, these institutions are preserving and sharing the stories of women who helped build this country. The Hall’s mission is to advance gender equity—yes, the very phrase stripped from federal websites—through action, education, and narrative.
Many of the more than 300 women inducted into the Hall are names the history books left out. Women like Janet Rowley, a geneticist who established that cancer is a genetic disease. Mae Jemison, the first Black woman astronaut in space. Jacqueline Cochran, who led the Women’s Air Force Service Pilots during World War II. And Matilda Josyln Gage, a suffragist and scholar who identified the systemic erasure of women in science as early as 1870—a phenomenon now called the Matilda Effect.
Why don’t we learn about Sarah Deer, a college professor and activist for Indigenous women? Or Faye Glenn Abdellah, a pioneer in nursing research? Or Gerty Theresa Radnitz Cori, the first American woman to receive the Nobel Prize in science? Or Crystal Eastman, co-founder of the ACLU and an author of the Equal Rights Amendment? Or Frances Perkins, the first woman to hold a Presidential Cabinet office and advisor to FDR?
The answer is as old as patriarchy itself: it’s easier to dismiss women if we forget what they’ve done.
Today, fewer than seven percent of national monuments honor women. As Rebecca Solnit observed in City of Women, “A horde of dead men… haunt New York City and almost every city in the Western world.” The silencing is systemic—and intentional.
But history doesn’t belong to those in power. It belongs to those who insist on telling the truth.
As the late Cecile Richards once said, “Stories, told and retold, are the key to igniting change.”
So let’s tell them. Loudly. Relentlessly. Let’s amplify the women who’ve shaped our world—those we know and those we’ve yet to discover. Let’s support the institutions that fight to preserve their legacies. And let’s refuse to be erased.
Because we were here. We are here. And we’re not going anywhere.
