Every time a girl reads a womanless history she learns she is worth less.
‑‑ Myra and David Sadker, “Failing at Fairness: How America’s Schools Cheat Girls”

Welcome to another March of Women’s History Month! You’ll be delighted this month with full coverage of famous firsts by women like Mae Jemison who became the first black female astronaut and Toni Morrison, the first African-American woman to win the Nobel Prize for literature. You’ll be swamped by biographies of notable women like Bessie Coleman, the first black woman to receive a pilot’s license and the first woman to get an international pilot’s license. You’ll get your feel of stories about women’s suffrage, women’s rights, and the Women’s Movement. Television will bring you lots of women’s movies like “The Color Purple,” “Waiting to Exhale,” maybe even “She’s Gotta Have It.” And right away, you’ll see and hear commercials celebrating the lives and contributions of U.S. women and marveling at the strides and advances women have made throughout every genre of life.

What? You didn’t know there was a such thing as Women’s History Month?

And neither do our baby girls!

First, let’s be clear. A look at and celebration of the contributions of women to American life is in no way a slight to men or boys, just as Black History Month was not a slight to anybody who isn’t Black. It’s an opportunity to take a 31-day moment to look a little closer at how women have added to and starred in the breath and course of America. Women’s History Month gives room for women to see the larger picture of themselves and collectively pat one another on the back. And it would not be a celebration if it snubbed men who have stood side by side with women to make humanity as whole and healthy as possible.

Now, that said, our baby girls. When LaTika picks up her 5th grade American History book, she will read about explorers, the Colonial era, the Boston Tea Party, the American Revolution, the Constitution, and snippets of slavery and the Civil War. She will read about Columbus and the Pilgrams, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, and Harriet Tubman as she relates to the significance of the Underground Railroad and role of the abolitionist. For the most part, LaTika will study this history and without demur take it as the only history alive.

Until she one day needs to know with certainty who she is and where she came from, although by this time she has made some wrong choices and taken some bad turns.

If only Latika’d had an ancient hero to light her way, one who was built like her and looked like her. If only the textbook editors had cared enough about her psychoemotional development to include sections about how women fared and contributed during the making of America so that LaTika could use these stories as models for living and surviving. If only she could have heard feminine voices in the pages of her history book. If she and other girls and women had only been considered, perhaps LaTika’s search for self would not be so undeniably hard.

Today is our opportunity to make that change. Textbook publishers like Houghton-Mifflin or McMillan/McGraw Hill may never include the in-depth women’s material necessary for helping a girl find herself in history; it’s up to us, it’s our responsibility to help girls see themselves in the making of this world, this country, and our community. Our baby girls must know about Sacagawea, Phillis Weatley, the Salem Witch Trials, slave narratives, the Seneca Falls Convention, the 19th Amendment which gave women the right to vote, Ida B. Wells Barnett, Margaret Sanger, The Feminine Mystique, N.O.W. and the Coalition of 100 Black Women, Shirley Chisholm, Title IX which prohibited sex discrimination in federally-funded education programs, Ms. Magazine, Roe v. Wade, Sandra Day O’Connor, Geraldine Ferraro, Anita Hill, Condolezza Rice, the wage gap and the glass ceiling, and countless other women and issues that make this country what it is.

Certainly, like Black History Month, there’s more to learn and discuss about Women’s History than can be done in one month. For that reason and the fact that our girls deserve to be acknowledged in the history of America, we celebrate a life-long observance of the gifts women have provided us throughout history. This we do for the love, perpetuation, and sustenance of our girls and all humankind.

Sadiqqa © 2008