Why Do We Need A Man’s Permission To Celebrate Women’s History?

Women’s month doesn’t mean what you think it means.

I should be ashamed of myself. Truly. Ashamed. I run a publication called History of Women but on March 8 I was silent. International Women’s Day and I was dead silent. Not a single word out of me.

It’s not that I didn’t write.

It’s that I didn’t publish. And I don’t even know if I’m sorry or not, or even if I should be sorry. But I need to unburden.

Can I tell you something?

But wait. One other thing first.

Back in 1869, people were buzzing about a story in The New York Times. Here’s what made people mad. The USA government had five hundred women working in the Treasury. Know what the pay was?

$1800/year for men. $900/year for women.

Time Magazine poured oil on the fire. Called those women “widows and orphans of the war.” And they were.

All those women working in the Treasury were women whose husbands and fathers died in the war. So the government gave them jobs. At half what men earned. Two women for the price of one man. Woohoo.

Nevermind they didn’t have men to support them. Nevermind their men died for their country. Paid half. Because they were women.

That was a hundred and fifty five years ago. Today we don’t earn fifty cents on the male dollar. We earn 84 cents. On the male dollar.

One hundred and fifty years. To get a thirty four cent raise.

And I know what some people say. Nuh-uh, not true. Always someone to say that. Well, those numbers come from the USA Census Bureau. You don’t believe it’s real, go take it up with them. Not me.

I think of all those women. Grieving their men. Grieving fathers dead and husbands who won’t get to raise up their kids. Dead on battlefields. Their women working for half the pay. Struggling to make ends meet.

I’ve struggled to make ends meet. I know what that’s like. Wondering which thing to pay. Which to do without. It hurts my heart. Knowing people live that way. Knowing the government did that to them. On purpose.

Sometimes it’s exhausting. Knowing women’s history.

Okay, so back around to the beginning.

Me sitting here on March 8. Angry and silent.

Not silent for any shortage of stories. I can tell stories real easy. The ghosts are everywhere. Haunting me, more than a little. Don’t even need to talk about suffragettes or fighting for equality, there’s plenty other ghosts calling to be heard. Ghosts to make the hair rise up on your arms.

Ghost of Eleanor Riese, died because of drugs forced into her body while she screamed please, stop. Didn’t know Helena Bonham Carter would play her in a movie. Didn’t know anything but this. She had to win the court case. So what happened to her didn’t happen to any other woman. Twitching from the drugs while she testified. But she won.

Ghost of Clara Lemlich who got six ribs broken for protesting men locking women into factories. Ghost of her friend Theresa Serber who organized the first women’s day, in 1909. Ghosts of 2000 women who showed up.

Ghost of Mary Hadley who survived being hanged as a witch and inspired Margaret Atwood to write The Handmaid’s Tale and ghost of Martha Corey hung for having a son out of wedlock while her boy watched her swing.

Ghost of Rosalind Franklin who discovered the double-helix structure of DNA only to have two men win the Nobel Prize for her work.

Ghosts of seventy two women who invented central heat, chemotherapy, refrigerators, Kevlar, VoIP, computer algorithms and a bunch more stuff we didn’t bother to teach in school. Because yay men built the world. No.

No shortage of ghosts. No shortage of stories that deserve telling.

That’s not why I was silent on International Women’s Day.

Maybe you didn’t know this. Do you know why we have Women’s History month in March in the first place? Because President Biden sat down at his big desk in the Oval Office and signed a proclamation saying we can.

Ladies, we have a man’s permission!

Pardon my sarcasm. Or don’t.

Trump signed it when he was in office, too. All that crap about grabbing women by the hoo-haw, tee hee just a joke you know, and then he gets to grant us permission to honor Women’s History and the irony is so bitter I can hardly bear the taste of those words on my tongue.

Obama signed it, George Dubya signed it and every president going back to Jimmy Stewart signed that same paper. Giving us permission.

President Carter started it. Issued a Presidential Proclamation in 1980 saying the week of March 8 would be National Women’s History Week.

It was not a celebration of women so you understand. It was not about women’s rights or equality. Wasn’t about equal rights or equal pay.

It was a presidential apology. For writing women out of history.

Here’s what he said. Verbatim.

…men and women have worked together to build this nation. Too often, women were unsung… their contributions 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…” — President Carter, 1980

Men and women worked together. Side by side. Like we should. And then powerful men erased women and only put men in the history books. Taught our children that men built the world as we know it.

We’re going to acknowledge that, President Carter said.

And rightly so. From the president’s mouth to a nation and for seven years, Women’s History Week was one week every year. So far, so good.

But then, in 1987, Congress passed Public Law 100–9, designating every March as Women’s History Month. Not a week. A whole month.

But there was a caveat. Isn’t there always a caveat? The big print giveth and the small print taketh away.

The President has to sanction it. Every year.

He doesn’t have to sanction Mother’s Day, Father’s Day or Veteran’s Day. Doesn’t have to sanction Christmas or Easter. But celebrating a public apology to women? Ladies, we need a man’s permission for that.

Every year. Doesn’t happen unless the big man in the big office signs that paper. Giving us permission. Keep that door open to being closed.

I don’t know why I have such trouble with that. But I do.

Because let me tell you something.

The man who can tell me when I get to speak hasn’t been born yet.

I will speak when I have something to say. Something a lot of little girls still need to learn. We don’t need permission. To speak. You got something to say, push that story out your gut screaming. Don’t care if you’re a man or woman, boy or girl. You got something to say, say it.

Not because some man signed a paper giving us permission to speak. Not because some man gave permission to step up to the mic today.

Because we have something worth saying. It’s all we ever needed.

“Lock up your libraries if you like but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.” ―Virginia Woolf