We Should Get Rid of Women’s History Month
This is an essay born of deep frustration: an essay born of having spent a month languishing on LinkedIn with posts about how “my wife/mother/daughter is a true inspiration to women everywhere. #BreakTheBias #WomensMonth.” Sometimes, I’ve come across the even more selfish variety: “Look, friends, how much I’ve accomplished as a woman facing bucketloads of discrimination. I’m cool. #Standwithus.”
Oh, come on.
Women’s History Month seems to have become the unusual case where people start acting like corporations: all performative gestures and empty words with photoshopped snaps of the prettiest women in our lives because that’s what the algorithm wants. Not a single person says they’ll do better; they all are perfect paragons of feminism already.
As a woman who has been sexually harassed, discriminated against, and bullied since before I can remember (because boys will be boys, after all), I’m here to tell you that Women’s History Month is rubbish, ridiculous rubbish, and we need to stop celebrating it.
First, International Women’s Day/History Month has done a great job of implying that half of the world aren’t in fact women.
Half of the world are women. Much of the world is some form of democracy and everyone knows and interacts with women. We don’t need to highlight ourselves for a day or a month. We should be doing it all the time.
If we do half of all things, we should have half the space in history books. We should be more than half of leadership because we’re better at it. And we should never cede eleven months of the year, even by implication, to the status quo.
We should be talking about gender equality all the time and honestly, we largely are. In most big cities in America today (and Women’s History Month is an American creation), we consistently discuss women’s rights, the #MeToo movement, sexual harassment, and more. We don’t need a month.
Minorities should get a month. White women should have (and largely do have) all year.
