We Should Get Rid of Women’s History Month

It is making things worse.

Photo by Rad Pozniakov on Unsplash

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.