Herstory

Could This Be the Last Women’s History Month?

PUBLISHED 3/27/2026 by

Since 1987, the United States has celebrated Women’s History Month every March.

We have used this month to correct the record. To make sure that the women who built this nation—who are often systematically written out of history books and erased from the stories we tell ourselves about who we are—are named out loud and recognized. It is a national reminder that women are not a footnote to the American project. We are central to it.

But today, just shy of its 40th anniversary, Women’s History Month celebrations are quietly disappearing. Not because communities stopped caring—but because an administration decided that honoring women is a threat.

Harriet Tubman did not free herself and stop. Fannie Lou Hamer did not survive a Mississippi jail cell to just go home. Shirley Chisholm did not run for president, unbought and unbossed, so that we could sit down now.

It’s up to us now to saddle up and make sure that future generations of women and girls can not only know about the incredible shared history of the bad ass women that helped shape the world, but can feel the full freedom of it—which means we now have work to do. 

We ride at dawn.

She Wanted to Be Free: Black Women’s Revolutionary Resistance

PUBLISHED 3/26/2026 by

Ona Judge was one of at least nine enslaved people owned by George and Martha Washington. At the end of Washington’s presidency, the first family prepared to return to Mount Vernon, their Virginia plantation. Ona Judge prepared to flee and live free.  

She was not alone. Black women made clear, daily, that remaining in bondage was not their preferred state. And enslavers knew and acknowledged this readily apparent fact. Enslavers throughout Britain’s North American colonies passed laws and slave codes that instituted severe physical punishment for resistance and rebellion.

Still, Black women sued enslavers for their freedom. Sometimes, they poisoned, set ablaze, or found other means to murder their enslavers. They fled from their households and plantations, even if for only a short time. Black women slowed down work. They grew their own gardens. They helped sustain their communities despite the ever-looming prospect of sale. They raised children, their own and their enslavers’.  

(This essay is part of the FEMINIST 250: Founding Feminists series, marking the 250th anniversary of America by reclaiming the revolution through the women and gender-expansive people whose ideas, labor and resistance shaped U.S. democracy.)

Living in the Archive: How the Trump Administration Is Forcing Women’s Rights Back Into History

PUBLISHED 3/24/2026 by and

Every March, we look back to honor the lineage of feminist progress. But in the wake of the Trump administration’s sustained assault on women’s rights, “history” has taken on a darker meaning. This Women’s History Month, the celebration is overshadowed by an ominous reality: The rights we assumed were permanent have become dangerously historical.

True freedom is predicated on the right to full civic participation, bodily autonomy and equitable access to healthcare and economic security. While generations of feminist struggle have successfully expanded these freedoms to strengthen the fabric of our democracy, the Trump administration is rolling back the clock on the hard-fought progress we have made in these areas over decades.

Sinead O’Connor Was Right: It’s Time to Revisit Some of Pop Culture’s Most Maligned Women

PUBLISHED 3/24/2026 by

An excerpt from Allison T. Butler’s The Judgment of Gender: How Women Are Centered and Silenced in Pop Culture, published March 8, 2026:

While Sinead O’Connor was roundly criticized for ripping up the picture of the pope, the passage of time has revealed: She was right.

O’Connor was labeled a pop star, but she never saw herself that way. From Rememberings: “Everyone wants a pop star, see? But I’m a protest singer. I just had stuff to get off my chest. I had no desire for fame.”

On the Road, One Conversation at a Time: The Case for the ERA Is Landing

PUBLISHED 3/23/2026 by

From Georgia to Tennessee to Alabama to Louisiana, the Golden Flyer II carried the legacy of the 1916 suffrage journey into direct conversation with the present-day push for constitutional equality. At each stop, the approach remained consistent: Meet people where they are, explain the stakes and invite them to take action.

The responses were often immediate and unscripted. A restaurant owner in rural Georgia signed on the spot. A mayor in Knoxville, Tenn. issued a proclamation and added her name. Visitors at civil rights sites in Montgomery, Ala. stopped to ask questions and sign. In Baton Rouge and Lafayette, La., passersby—from veterans to pedestrians on their daily routines—engaged with the campaign, many expressing surprise that gender equality is still not explicitly guaranteed in the Constitution.

Queer Possibilities in Revolutionary America

PUBLISHED 3/23/2026 by

The revolutionary era was one of surprising possibilities to express same-sex attraction and gender nonconformity.

At the time, gender was widely understood not as an inner truth but as a social practice: something one did, not something one was. That understanding made gender surprisingly flexible.

In a moment when LGBTQ+ people are again being told that they do not belong in the nation’s story, Revolutionary America offers a different lesson.

(This essay is part of the FEMINIST 250: Founding Feminists series, marking the 250th anniversary of America by reclaiming the revolution through the women and gender-expansive people whose ideas, labor and resistance shaped U.S. democracy.)

Juliana Stratton’s Big Senate Win, Kristi Noem’s Next Steps and the Origins of Women’s History Month

PUBLISHED 3/21/2026 by

Weekend Reading on Women’s Representation is a compilation of stories about women’s representation in politics, on boards, in sports and entertainment, in judicial offices and in the private sector in the U.S. and around the world—with a little gardening and goodwill mixed in for refreshment!

This week:
—Illinois primaries feature a big U.S. Senate win for Juliana Stratton.
—The IPU/U.N. Women Report on Women in Politics presents a sobering global snapshot.
—Mississippi will remain the only state that has never sent a woman to the U.S. House.
—Ranked-choice voting is being used for student elections at over 100 colleges and universities.

… and more.

They Dare, They Can, They Will: The History of Iceland’s Decades-Strong Women’s Strike Movement

PUBLISHED 3/21/2026 by

On Oct. 24, 1975, 90 percent of the women in Iceland refused to go to work, care for their children or cook for their families. Instead, thousands gathered in Reykjavík and villages nationwide to demand gender equality.

Schools closed. Flights were canceled. Businesses shuttered. Factories came to a standstill. Phone service was off.

Men called it “The Long Friday.” Organizers called it Kvennafrídagurinn: Women’s Day Off.

The Radical Potential of Traditional Femininity 

PUBLISHED 3/19/2026 by

In the 1700s and 1800s in the U.S., women were presumed to be subordinate to men: naturally helpless, emotional, vulnerable.

Reading through the thousands of petitions submitted by revolutionary-era women to the state, one might get the impression that all women accepted their subordinate status to men with humility and grace.

But what if they didn’t? What if their engagement with the discourse of feminine dependence was merely a shrewd tool, effectively deployed to cater to precisely what their readers—white, male elites—wanted to hear? What if the radical act of seeking a divorce in the 18th century contradicted the conservative language they employed? 

In most cases, we’ll never be able to deduce these women petitioners’ true feelings on their social and legal status. Many women petitioners in the revolutionary era left no trail for the historian to follow. 

What we can know is that the employment of this discourse of dependence, cunningly constructed in a sympathetic narrative neatly packaged for a patriarchal audience, was immensely effective. For the most part, women who engaged with these tropes of feminine subordination saw their petitions granted. Those that did not—including those who rebuked men—largely saw their pleas rejected or ignored. 

(This essay is part of the FEMINIST 250: Founding Feminists series, marking the 250th anniversary of America by reclaiming the revolution through the women and gender-expansive people whose ideas, labor and resistance shaped U.S. democracy.)