PAST, PRESENT CONVERGE IN WOMEN’S HISTORY
Don’t be surprised that I love March, Women’s History Month. I was in the first Women’s Liberation March that took place on Manhattan’s 5th Avenue in 1970. Betty Friedan led the march with New York City providing a permit for using just one lane of traffic. The 50,000-person turnout was massive. I remember tripping over traffic cones meant as barricades.
Unfortunately, some barricades seem to last forever.
We waited 17 years for Congress to officially proclaim March as Women’s History Month in 1987. But the wait had been much longer. It was 1909 when the first International Women’s Day March was held by female labor organizers in New York City who advocated on behalf of sweatshop workers: female garment and textile workers. It took more than half a century for the United Nations to proclaim March 8 as the official International Women’s Day. With the UN proclamation in 1975, the Education Task Force of the Sonoma County Commission on the Status of Women in California turned the “day” into a whole week. It took another five years before President Jimmy Carter signed the 1980 proclamation for Women’s History Week. And it was another seven years before Congress approved Women’s History Month.
By the first Women’s History Month in 1987, there were plenty of women to honor with its theme “Generations of Courage, Compassion, and Conviction.” We celebrated women’s movement icons of earlier generations, including Susan B. Anthony, Eleanor Roosevelt and Sojourner Truth. As the annual celebration progressed, each year had a different theme, such as the one in 2001: “Celebrating Women of Courage and Vision.” We honored more recent leaders of the movement, including Shirley Chisholm, Bella Abzug and Gloria Steinem, who some say is the world’s most famous women’s liberation movement activist.
When I received an email last week inviting me to a “Gloria” discussion between Gloria Steinem and Gloria Feldt, another feminist pioneer, how could I resist? The 2 Glorias were obviously long time friends and discussed how the controversy surrounding the recent Alabama Supreme Court decision about human embryos goes back 30 years. Today’s intense debate over the moral and legal status of human embryos and the political implications are not new. They also talked about the longtime efforts to boost the number of women in powerful positions, both corporate and political. There’s been improvement, but the percentage of women in power remains modest, reminding me of that quote, “everything old is new again.”
Inspired to do more research on Women’s History Month, I looked up this year’s theme and was astounded by what I discovered. It turns out that the 2024 Women’s History Month’s theme celebrates “Women Who Advocate for Equity, Diversity and Inclusion.” I smiled all day, celebrating how past and the present came together.
I didn’t know this when I planned a panel discussion for this year’s Women’s History Month. This month’s event, held at East Ridge Local Coffee, featured Chattanooga women who serve our diverse communities: Lulu Copeland, consultant at Regional Economic and Workforce Development; Gail Dawson, director of diversity and inclusion at the UTC Rollins College of Business; Vanessa Jackson, program specialist for Chattanooga’s Office of Multicultural Affairs; and Teletha McJunkin, coordinator of international, multicultural and multi-lingual teams.
The event was a project that emerged from the Women’s Council on Diversity that I founded more than 20 years ago. Which just goes to show that the past and the present do converge to make a difference. Let’s celebrate! Happy International Women’s Day!