Happy International Women's Day!

What better way to celebrate it than by making my entry back into the interwebs? I am both a woman and a historian, so this is something I can get behind. There are a few local women that I would like to highlight throughout the month, but first a little background on International Women's Day and it's bigger cousin Women's History Month!

To begin with, we have come a looooong way. More often we see and hear the perspective of women when engaging with history. But we have a long way yet to go. For a very long time (think millennia here), outside of some very famous exceptions, the historical record was often silent on what most of the population was up to on the daily. Women's roles in Western society have been traditionally seen as being inconsequential or banal. History books have focused mainly on the pursuits of the affluent, white males of the West. This has inevitably left women, people of color, and other minority groups misrepresented in the traditional historical narrative, sigh.

Clara Zetkin, during a conference in 1897

Women's History Month began as Women's History Week and was organized and celebrated by The Education Task Force of the Sonoma County on the Status of Women. It was held the week of March 8th, 1978 to align with International Women's Day. This banger of a holiday was first celebrated on February 28, 1909 in New York City and was organized by the American Socialist Party. It became more widespread the following year when Clara Zetkin proposed it at the 2nd International Conference of Working Women. The official date was changed in 1914 to March 8th to align with the Gregorian calendar. International Women's Day continued to be celebrated, although mainly as a Communist holiday. It was not until the late 1960s and second-wave feminism that the event was embraced by a broader audience.

It was sanctioned by the United Nations in 1977.

Three years later, through the leadership of National Women's Project, a conglomerate of women's groups and historians got together and successfully lobbied President Jimmy Carter (such a gem, RIP) to officially recognize Women's History Week in March of 1980. So when, pray tell, did the week become a whole dang month? 1988 people. 1988 was when we began celebrating it all month and it was not until 1994 that it was officially recognized by Congress.

The Montana Standard, March 20, 1994

Women's History Month is now celebrated all over the world for the entire month of March. In America the month is annually themed; this year the theme is "Leading the Change: Women Shaping a Sustainable Future." The National Women's History Alliance provides a downloadable toolkit to assist educators and others in creating lesson plans and presentations to forward this year's theme. I encourage you to check it out and find ways to celebrate Women's History Month in your own area! And be sure to stay tuned for some highlights about some amazing Bozeman women...