Good evening dear friends and I would first like to thank you for attending tonight’s remarks and I would remiss if I did not thank Stacy Creel and the good people at the Committee for Services and Resources for Women and Dean Ellen Weinauer and her folks from the Honor’s College. I am so very pleased to be able to speak with you this evening. As you may have already heard, after working in undergraduate and graduate classrooms as a historian and gender and women’s scholar and educator for twenty years, I made the jump from a tenured job and position as a chair a few times over to dedicate my time educator/activist work. Currently, I work at the William Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation where our mission is “Ending all discrimination based on difference…wait for it…in our lifetime.” In that capacity I work in collaboration with the University of Mississippi campus and campuses across the Deep South including Delta State, Tulane, University of Alabama and your campus. I have also worked with liberal arts colleges across the northeast and west to discuss and implement programming that addresses privilege, bias, discrimination, and inclusivity. Most recently, I have been on Bowdoin and Colgate campuses to discuss the work that must be done to ensure that not only our spaces of higher learning are safe and productive learning, living, and working environments but also that we have trained our graduates to be democratic community members, professionals, and personally dedicated to the project of equity.
As you know, The National Women’s History Project 2015 theme is “Weaving the Stories of Women’s Lives.” This year’s theme recognizes the continued importance of lifting up women’s stories, both famous, infamous, and those whose stories who are not yet known. Recent political and cultural shifts have caused academics and the American public to challenge the necessity of women’s history as a separate discipline, to argue that the discipline perpetuates sexist thinking, and perhaps that the focus exaggerates women’s contributions in the nation’s history. This address challenges these notions and instead identifies the reasons why the project of women’s history is still necessary because these narratives accurately portrays United States history and knowledge of women’s history allows us to see where we need to go with respect to goals of justice, equality and equity.
Like many academics and activists over the past several years, I have noted that the concept of women’s empowerment or feminism has suffered tremendous hits. For many years, I began each of my women’s history courses or lectures that addressed women’s history with the question “Who in this class is a feminist?” Countless times I ask the question and countless times I have been shocked by the blank stares, the occasionally weakly raised hand, or the nervous twitter for fear of what being a feminist means. Upon further inquiry, I asked the students what they think identifying as a feminist means. Responses still almost always include, male bashers, male haters, anti-lesbian comments. At that point, I routinely ask students to pull out their smart phones or hop on their computers to look up the definition of feminism. And while there are variations, here is a typical definition: “the advocacy of women’s rights on the grounds of political, social, and economic equality to men.” Equality to men, not above, not meaning to dismiss, injure or eliminate. Equality people not world domination.
Moving to more recent news, actress Patricia Arquette’s recent remarks backstage at the Oscars caused quite a stir. On stage, she received accolades for calling for gender wage equality but took tremendous heat for her comments backstage. In addition to the problems of inter-sectionality, the concept that one can maintain more than one identity, Arquette has been taken to task for reductively understanding the history of the fight for women’s equality and has been accused of being racist and homophobic. Those dedicated to issues of equality were in the minority as most major media outlets were confused about what the kerfuffle was all about. Many reported this story as a curiosity, baffled by the uproar, and slotted this story under entertainment instead of their “news” segment. Mixing in the problems that social media creates when trying to have intelligent conversations about such important issues, like my teaching anecdote, the discussion around Arquette’s comments illuminates the continued importance of women’s history.
So, how are these stories related to the title of my address, “Endangering Equality Through Perceived Equity: Women’s History and Its Crucial Role in Contemporary Fights for Justice?” What do people mean when they say equality vs. equity? When, or how, will we know when we have achieved both?
“Equality” is “the state of being equal in status, rights, and opportunities. “Equity” refers to the quality of being fair or impartial. While equality and equity are often connected these are too very different terms often incorrectly used interchangeably. Lets think about those two terms. Equality does not appear to take into consideration historical pasts and its relationship to current contexts. While our national values, constitutional amendments, and legislative acts might espouse equality, we know that historical and contemporary ideologies, systems, infrastructures, and relationships suffer deeply from inequality. And what about equity? For me because equity is about fairness, the concept of fairness lends itself to historical and contemporary contexts. To render or sustain fairness, one has to have an understanding of past unfairness. Understanding equity involves accepting the presence of past hierarchies and how those past hierarchies uphold inequality in later and current American systems. We absolutely cannot achieve equality without attention to equity.
Through my work as an educator activist, I have noticed a strange relationship developing between the two terms. Many folks believe that while residual inequality among genders, most believe strongly in the myth of meritocracy and that existing difference or bias can be overcome through individual effort and resilience. Additionally, utilizing the lens of post racial or post any other oppressive paradigm categorizing individuals as either superior or inferior, many continue to operate under the misconception that continued racism, homophobia, ethnocentrism, religio-centrism no longer intersect with gender to sustain both inequality and inequity.
And what could be the cause of such massive and destructive blindness? Well, I would argue that we are seeing the fruits of the labor of individuals who argued for narrowing K-12 education. The state of Mississippi through its ridiculously named “Mississippi Adequate Education Program” has underfunded its education by approximately $1.5 billion over the past 5 years and another $200 million next year’s budget. There has also been a new push to resist following Common Core standards. This and standardized testing has encouraged educators and those in charge of curriculum, to narrow or eliminate history excluding American exceptionalism, male dominated, aspirational, and minority invisibility narratives.
In addition to budget cutting and dismissing important educational standards, over the past five years and longer, our country is participating in the very anti-intellectual debate regarding the worthiness of college degrees. National and state legislators, certain public intellectuals argue that students exit college with a mountain of debt and are left without the skills to get the “good jobs.” Suggesting that the humanities requirements be dropped or decreased in favor of the “hard” sciences or more technical educations, we are witnessing the deemphasizing of the importance of history. I would submit that such moves are not about politicians or public intellectuals looking out for public welfare. No, I would argue that it is much more insidious and its relationship to power is obvious. Reductive though effective, the phrase “knowledge is power” has real currency in this discussion. I do not believe reducing education in history and in particular women’s history is about helping in the harvesting or recovering of individuals’ economic power. Quite the contrary, I believe that narrowing or eliminating history and again specifically, women’s history is one strategy to rob individuals across races, classes, genders, sexualities, ethnicities, and religions of their power. Doing so prevents us from knowing the past crucial contributions and historical realities as it relates to women. This allows us to continue to assume women as historical actors were unimportant and did not progressively alter history. This allows power structures based on gender to exist and be sustained. This allows the inferiorization of women and girls to continue.
To not know women’s history is to blithely assume that if someone says regardless of your minority identity positions and despite the fact that structural, systemic and interpersonal oppression still exists, you have equal opportunity that they are correct. To not know women’s history is to commit a colossal failure to place all prior social justice efforts within its proper historical contexts. The impact is astonishing. Social justice advocates are left “reinventing the wheel” regarding strategies and methods. They are hampered in understanding what has worked and what hasn’t in galvanizing members of the impacted group, their allies and converting resisters. Social justice advocates believe they are on new ground when in fact the historical footsteps are many and loud.
To not know women’s history is to be ignorant of the ways in which women pushed for political, social, and economic power. Over the course of this address, I am going to draw the links between the importance of knowing women’s history and current justice movements related to women and as a consequence to everybody. In America, we must understand that if one population is kept down, then we all are disadvantaged. First, I ‘d like to make a distinction between the early years of modern American women’s history and current women’s history. The field has changed over the past four decades. Of late, women’s history has become very localized—current scholars of American women’s history are meticulously researching individual and collective papers related to women and place. This work is hard and draining as private and public papers must be carefully researched as these hard working and often overlooked scholars conduct the work of filling in what the 1970s-1990s historians achieved in their sweeping historical narratives. For purposes of achieving today’s petitions and actions for justice, I would like us to travel back to the early days of women’s history. Again, let me be clear, I am so very pleased with the current state of women’s history, the new discoveries and recoveries that are taking place, the ways in which they are using theory and discoveries from other disciplines to uncover women’s histories and to draw links and boundaries between and among women and across the genders. But I think in times like these where anti-intellectualism prevails, where education about one’s self or group identity history is either denied, devalued or eroded and when we persist in insisting that equality for women has mostly been achieved, it is desperately crucial that we return to the women’s stories that provide the historical arch by which we as educator/activists must rely on for knowledge, skills, strength, collaborations, and empowerment. We will discover that yes, we have come a long way and no we are not there yet.
And so as a corrective let us revisit the important connections between historical events and contemporary actions discovered, uncovered, and recovered by women’s historians. According to the great historian Joan Wallach Scott in her 1986 seminal article “Gender: A Useful Category for Historical Analysis” for centuries, scholars have been writing women’s history. We must remember that the term “women’s history” proclaimed its politics by asserting that women were and continue to be valid historical subjects. Later in the historiography, some historians began using gender as a substitute for the term women’s history to reject the idea that men and women exist in separate spheres, to designate the relations between the sexes, to counter biological explanations and subsequently reasons for female subordination, and instead, to denote that gender is culturally constructed. The field of gender and often interchangeably women’s history explain the origins of patriarchy and constructions of identity and subjectivity in social and historical specificity and contexts. Most importantly, she argues that gender is a primary way of signifying relationships of power. We would do well to pay attention to Scott’s summarization. Central to the understanding of equality and equity is recognizing how through language and constructions of gender role continues to contribute to inequality and inequity. American ignorance regarding the social construction of gender and in particular, women renders inequity so invisible that we think it doesn’t exist and yet it simultaneously sustains and fortifies inequity and inequality. Women’s and gender history alerts us to this. To deny inequality and inequity is to reveal our historical ignorance and most important obstructs our justice efforts at achieving equality and pointing out discrimination. While my time is limited, I thought that I would recount just a few instances where our knowledge of women’s history can be put into service for today’s justice efforts related to women’s issues. Please keep in mind that pushing for women’s equality ensures everyone’s equality. Two axioms are understood: A) Women’s history is American history and B) Equality is not reserved for only a few. Where inequality exists, there is not equality.
Let us begin with African-American women’s history. One of this year’s honorees and recent winner in 2013 Humanities Medal as well as one of my own Ph.D. advisors, Professor Darlene Clark Hine for the past forty years has worked to push black women’s history to the forefront of our minds. The author of countless books, articles, encyclopedias on black women’s history, Hine’s work demonstrates several crucial conclusions that relate to current justice movements: that black women possess a history, that they worked together and apart from women, with men, across racial, class, sexuality, ethnicity and religious lines to fight for the lives and advancement of black men, women, and children. Famous for sweeping yet meticulously researched historical narratives, Hine and other black women’s historians research reveals that black women’s achievements in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries did not grow out of degradation but out of a legacy of courage, resourcefulness, initiative, and dignity that goes back to 1619. A history of over four centuries, Hine suggests that certain themes run through the history of American black women. These include an emphasis by black women on community, priorities placed on education, truth that is, each individual’s sense of work and dignity must live inside that person. It must be nurtured and made strong, apart from the valuation of the world. Another primary theme is triumph. Doesn’t this sound familiar in today’s context? Cast in such a way can energize our anti-discrimination and anti-racist efforts. Black women history represents more than a story of oppression and struggle. It is story of hope.
Likewise, Glenda Gilmore’s Gender and Jim Crow describes the ways in which during Jane and Jim Crow, black women assumed the position of ambassadors of their race. From their churches, they loudly protested against the physical, emotional, political, social, and economic violence wrought on black men, women, and children. Today, there are scores of histories of black women illuminating their contributions to both black and American history. I would argue that our ignorance of such history tremendously impacts the strategies and success of our current social justice efforts. I am troubled by the way in which current justice movements related to #blacklivesmatter seem to ignore the historical contributions made by black women. Led principally by younger generations or folks denied history educations, I see protesters often confused on how to maximize their protests and make their concerns heard. Understanding how black women effectively utilized churches, media, their own individual and collective presentations, and their organizations to galvanize community members and allies toward issues of civil rights would greatly advance the recent protests and goals of #blacklives matter. Situating the murders of Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, Renisha Mcbride, police bias and brutality, the school to prison pipeline leading to the disgusting disproportionate rates of black men and women incarcerated in our prison systems within the historical context better equips justice advocates to lean on historical memory and utilize previously successful strategies to more effectively and efficiently achieve their goals. The historical ignorance these events have historical pasts and legacies means that folks are crucially less well-equipped to currently deal with the violence, working across racial and class lines, working in collaboration and contestation with groups.
To not know women’s history is to absent yourself from historical women’s international efforts to bring about world peace and an end to wars. Leila J. Rupp’s magnificent effort, World of Women “explores the complex process at work as women from far-flung countries came together in transnational women’s organizations and constructed an international collective identity. They were divided by nationality and often fiercely loyal to different organizations, women committed to internationalism forged bonds not only despite but in fact through conflict over nearly every aspect of organizing.” Rupp researches several international groups and one of most interest is the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom that grew from the International Congress of Women at the Hague met during the Great War in 1915. While group membership often existed exclusively along race and class lines and definitions of developed and colonized worlds, Rupp argues against the notion that sisterhood must occur in the push for equality and equity. Instead, she found that women’s progress on international scales occurred because of the important activist/justice processes involved both conflict and community. This is so crucial for today’s equality efforts. Additionally, she discovered that definitions of equality and equity differed across historic time and space contexts. I would argue that such knowledge could help today’s activists over the bumps of disagreement. Today’s justice movements often explode and disintegrate because of dissension and conflict. Rupp’s work reveals the strategies that historical women utilized to move with and through conflicts. We would do well to conduct some reading.
Rupp illuminates the concept that “collective identities” are ever-fluid, constantly emerge, disintegrate, and emerge again in different forms.
Rupp’s book effectively analyzes the boundaries drawn between members and non-members, the processes of inclusion and exclusion that shaped membership of these organizations, the bonds of womanhood as they identified themselves as fundamentally different from men, the development of an international women’s consciousness, the concept and expressions of internationalism, and personalized politics. I find these histories of women especially important and useful given the massive recent violence happening against women and others across the globe. The world’s current and glacial emergency life-saving responses have been by and large useless, protests against violence muted or ignored, and reconciliations of the genocides of the past century and two decades into this one have been sporadic, often ill-organized, run out of energy and therefore, left millions displaced, traumatized, and forgotten. UN Ambassador Samantha Powers in her effort A Problem from Hell, Harvard Law Professor Martha Minow’s, Between Vengeance and Forgiveness and University of the Free State’s Professor Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela work on South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission and countless publications, heavily relied on histories of women’s international peace movements to address current issues and carve out new pathways for peace and an end to wars. In their work, these scholars/activists/ambassadors demonstrate that genocide and violence are not axioms within the human experience. Rather, peace and reconciliation movements can and must be goals and achieved in order to make equal and equitable the millions of individuals displaced and devastated by endless wars and genocides. Those of us in the audience who are dedicated peace activists must understand the history and ramifications of war and the benefits of peace. We can only know this if we study the historical contexts of inequality, its relationship to massive violence and the past efforts of folks including women to end war as an option and bring about world peace.
To not know women’s history is to be ignorant to the ways that women have persistently fought for reproductive rights and body sovereignty. Since the beginning of our nation’s history and beforehand, all American women always worked to stop ownership of and violence on women’s bodies. With respect to birth control, historian Linda Gordon’s work “The Moral Property of Women” explores the history of the intense controversies related to reproductive rights for the past 150 years. She argues that the reproductive rights movement went through four stages. First, during the last half of the nineteenth century came “voluntary motherhood” with its emphasis on choice, freedom, and autonomy for women around which the women’s rights movement was unified. The second stage from 1910-1920, produced the term “birth control.” New birth control leagues were formed and stood for women’s autonomy but also for transforming the gender and class order through empowering the powerless, primarily identified as the poor and the female sex. The third stage from 1920 through 1970 the movement transitioned to the new slogan, “planned parenthood” and then from then until today the concept of “reproductive rights.” Additionally, scholar Rickie Solinger’s pivotal work “Wake Up Little Susie” alerted us to the fact that single women and mothers were viewed and treated differently along lines of race and class. Racially-specific ideas shaped policies, practices and views of pregnant women and mothers. We must understand and accept that and how this impacts how we view women’s bodies today. We are still having conversations about women’s bodies. Unlike the tacit acceptance of men’s sovereignty over their own bodies, the debate over women’s bodies continues to rage on. Most thought the Supreme Court settled the debate regarding women’s sovereignty over their own bodies under the 1973 decision Roe v. Wade where the High Court relied on the 14th amendment a woman’s right to choose. Unfortunately, this is not the case and the debate over equality and equity takes place squarely on women’s bodies. For example, under the narratives of religious freedom, medical insurance companies and corporations are refusing to pay for contraception or pregnancy terminations while still funding erectile dysfunction medications and vasectomies. Friends, regardless of how you feel about the debate, abortions are still constitutionally protected and yet we see state legislatures steadily erode this constitutionally sanctioned right with innovative and twisted legislation regarding what constitutes legal clinic, circumstances of pregnancies, permissions, mandatory wait times and information. This bypassing constitutional law might suit your religious tenets now but we should be cautious in these matters especially if we value equity and equality as human and civil rights. Whichever side you fall on this issue, this is an equality and equity issue because predominantly male legislators are dictating what can and cannot be done to women’s bodies over the wishes and opinions of women. The guise of “protecting” women actually ensures inequality as it assumes that women cannot protect and decide for themselves. The pressing issue at hand is not about when life begins, but rather who has control over women’s bodies. Think about it, our Constitution does not extend its body politic onto men’s bodies because our nation trusts that men know what is best for their bodies and would not dare encroach on them. A very basic understanding about rights and free will, equality and equity, starts with control over our own bodies. Women do not have this right. Planned Parenthood, National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League, National Right to Life organization would do well to examine the histories of women who have been working on these issues across their ideological differences to avoid having women’s bodies under the control of the public and being pawned by patriarchies and male hegemony. Acknowledging and exploring women’s history on this issue provides a wealth of historical context and information related to successful reproductive rights strategies that bridge race, class, and ethnicity. In my opinion, discussion of these issues about women’s bodies should be led principally by women. Why not find common ground to solve these issues together? Open a women’s history book on this matter.
To not know women’s history is to not recognize and acknowledge that violence against and through women’s bodies has occurred for centuries. The acceptable practice of overpowering women’s bodies continues to be devastating examples of both inequality and inequity literally acted out on women’s bodies. According to RAINN (Rape, Abuse, Incest, National Network), in America, a rape occurs every 107 seconds. Today, one simply cannot avoid news about violence against in our media and our entertainment. Consequently, we are socially conditioned to understand that violence against women’s bodies is natural. I ask you, while we have this phenomena, how can we possibly argue that women have achieved equality and for that matter, how is this fair to women, to little girls who will be raised and live in a world where violence against women is sanctioned and often a platform for entertainment? Closer to home and specifically, currently on campuses, police departments, and society as a whole have absolutely no effective methods for eliminated rape. Instead, we default to ridiculous arguments about male essentialism or “boys will be boys,” blame women for their clothing choices, presence in public spaces and their beauty. Women are both judged by and raped because of their power be it physical, mental, and spiritual. Women’s historians tracked violence against women’s bodies to historical notions of women’s bodies as the properties of husband and other men and as an effective weapon against other men and to silence and dis-empower women. If women were and are continued to be constructed in some ways as objects, how can they be equal? Where is the fairness here?
Additionally problematic are the national historically and socially constructed notions that rape is something that women cannot “recover from” that they will forever remain “survivors” and can somehow never escape the stigma of a violent act committed against their will. These narratives still wield great power in American society. I would argue that such narratives serve to weaken and keep women subordinate. Fear of being raped or the unwillingness of allowing women to recover from rape keeps women forever feeling threatened, worth less, afraid and of course, unequal. Behaviors and spaces that are off limits to women demonstrate that despite the veil of equality, if women must alter their behaviors to stay safe because of men’s “natural “ tendencies then equity does not exist. Knowledge of the history of rape and these narratives allows social justice advocates to identity, call out, and dismantle these narratives to actually achieve equality and equity.
To not know women’s history is to be ill-informed about how women have fought for wage equity and the valuing of women’s labor. Scholars like Jeanne Boydston in her work Home & Work analyzing housework, wages, and the ideology of labor in the Early Republic and Eileen Boris’ Home to Work on motherhood, and industrial homework demonstrate that at the earliest moments in our nation’s history, individually and collectively, women across and discretely within race, class, ethnic, and religious groups worked for fair and safe working conditions, equal pay for equal work, and value for women’s labor. Barbara Ehrenreich’s work, Nickel and Dimed demonstrates that wage equity and equality remains an aspiration and not an actuality. This is yet another justice issue plagued by the false assumption that wage equality exists with no account for equity. Many are still astonished when they hear that a woman is paid on average women are paid 72 cents for a dollar earned by men. Recently, pubic commentators challenge this statistic stating that the different forms of employment are responsible for the heavy gap and that in actuality, the gap is only about 5 cents. This is a particularly specious argument because it assumes that women have achieved equal employment opportunity. It fails to take into account the historical inequity that has occurred regarding women’s potential, abilities, capabilities, access to education, sexism in hiring, and how pregnancy and child rearing negatively impact women in hiring and promotion. Systems built on the professional and personal life cycles and rhythms of men and ones that do not take into account the still gendered expectations for women account for the wage gaps. Op/eds, think tanks, and public commentators who continue to argue that the wage gap does not exist are at best, ignorant to historical and contemporary contexts or at worst, in fact are counting that the American public will remain historically uninformed. Thus, these same folks can liberally fabricate the current state of women’s economic empowerment. This perpetuates the myth of equality and masks the reality of inequality. This is fundamentally even more insidious because under the guise of equality, inequity not only persists but is fortified and women are forced to navigate the sexism and misogyny of American economic systems or perhaps resort to self-blame for their lack of success. Knowing the racialized, classed, and regionalized history women’s relationship to paid and unpaid labor provides everyone with a more accurate reality and enables justice advocates to more effectively challenge, fight, and alter systems into ones that are more equal. As we all know, gender wage equality would make this country more economically productive for individuals, communities, and advances our country’s national and international output.
To not know women’s history is to falsely imagine that marriage equality and rights for LGBTQQIA community is a new human rights focus. Estelle Freedman and John D’Emilio’s Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America work highlights that over the last three and a half centuries, the meaning and place of sexuality in American life has changed: from a family-centered, reproductive sexual system in the colonial era; to a romantic, intimate, yet conflicted sexuality in nineteenth century marriage; to a commercialized sexuality in the modern period, when sexual relationships are expected to provide personal identity and individual happiness, apart from reproduction. Additionally, historian, Lillian Faderman’s work that is race, class, regional and sexual role inclusive “Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers traces the evolution of love between women in America from the late nineteenth through the twentieth century beginning with the institution of romantic friendship that reached a zenith at the end of the nineteenth century when middle class women in large numbers were able to support themselves, to the sexologists and psychiatrists who worked to define normal and abnormal sexuality under sickness, to twilight loves to women-identified women, and the destigmatizing of the love between women to its movement to becoming socially neutral. Such history reveals that our society debated these issues for centuries. Today, marriage and civil rights equality exists as a pressing national, state, local, and deeply personal issue right now. Sexuality and its expressions are bound to our religious ideologies, civil and human rights, privacy, and love. Love and desire are complex and complicated issues. These emotions have wrought such pleasure and pain and across the centuries, we have worked to control passion and desire, we have understood them as gifts from God or as handmaidens of the Devil. As a country with its love/hate relationship with these issues, we deal with sexuality quite poorly. We are threatened by our own pleasure clearly evidenced by how we educate ourselves and our children and how we rigidly dictate and legislate which forms of pleasure are appropriate and which forms repulsive. Scholars of women’s history and sexuality have taught us that sexuality, desire, and pleasure are constructed according to social, economic, and political contexts, our nations needs, and communal and individual anxieties. A great deal of this history has been conducted on women’s historical bodies, explored through women’s psyches, and historically, our nation’s morals have been written on women’s bodies. Such historical knowledge and particularly through the lens of women’s can be liberating, can calm our anxieties and fears, and can allow us to more rationally and in emotionally healthy manners, understand and deal with these issues. Fear and irrationality guarantee pain and stagnation. Knowledge of our national history of sexuality can more comfortably move us through these difficult conversations.
Knowing women’s history is crucial for moving forward with justice issues. Knowing women’s history enables girls, teenage girls, and women about their abilities, possibilities, the importance of identity and identities, collaborative and network potential. Women’s history is not solely about drawing links between past, current, and future potential, it serves many more efforts. Women’s history is American history. The trend to not teach, understand, and value women’s history leaves us locally, nationally and internationally at a disadvantage in our ability to accomplish our fights for equity and justice. Principally, through the knowledge of women’s history across and between identity lines, we discover that women are currently neither equal nor exist in an equitable America. This myth is perpetuated because we deliberately keep American children, teenagers, and adults in the dark about women’s crucial historical contributions. To not know women’s history incorrectly allows us to write off women’s potential as social, economic, and political justice advocates, full contributing and valuable members of American and international societies. Instead of building bridges across gender, race, class, ethnic, sexual identity lines we fracture and greatly underestimate our ability to work together. We negatively essentialize each other, assume that no common ground exists and thus our siloed groups fail to achieve as much as they might have if they came together. Without women’s history knowledge, we assume fault lines instead of family. Without a knowledge of women’s history, we fail to understand that we stand on the shoulders of giants—women who gave their energies and in some cases, their lives to fight for, to preserve and protect the very rights that we cherish and the equality and equity we assume exists. Women’s history embodies the very challenges and strengths faced by our nation, that values and aspirations held by our nation. To situate ourselves among these women’s voices, lives, hopes, dreams and failures allows us to more accurately understand our justice journeys and exactly where we are in these pushes for equality and equity.
And so I will conclude my remarks issuing a charge to those of you in the audience and especially to the students and those individuals who mentor these students. Women’s history month is an excellent time to ask a series of questions like: “What kind of world do we want to live in?” In quiet and public spaces, we should ask “ Do I believe in equality and equity?” “Am I empowered by the myth that we have achieved both equality and equity?” “What do I want for my mothers and fathers, sons and daughters, sisters and brothers?” Do I believe in what it takes to understand that to achieve equality requires that we understand, accept, and realize the role of fairness in equality? We cannot just “say” that we are equal without understanding when and where we have historically been unfair. We must take into account how past unfairness prevents fully equality as women.
Remember, the project of equality requires everyone because if one American population exists as unequal then we are all unequal. Under today’s mouthing of supposed women’s equality we mask inequity. Our desire for this project of equality to be achieved also leaves us blind to exisiting and pervasive inequity. We must take history into account how inequity continues to impact our systems of equality before equality truly materializes.
So as you move forward personally, professionally, as a member of the community, and as a member of this nation remember that we have not quite reached equality because we have not dealt with inequity. Acknowledging the women existed in the historical record and that their contributions were crucial in this effort is the first step. Resist dismissing women’s history as auxiliary. Understand its crucial role in today’s push for equality. When it comes to equality, recognize the difference between a wish and a reality and then work towards the actualization of equality. Also, enjoy and revel in these individual women’s stories. Lean into these women joys and pains. Draw strength and knowledge from their stories. These are our grandmothers, mothers, aunts, and sisters and daughters. Through their stories they have much to teach us. Our own success, our own comfort, and our own freedom rests on their historical efforts and successes. But now they have passed the baton of equality and equity to us and we must take it and begin running. You my dear friends have the power to do so. You can do it through your language by eliminating thoughts and phrases that allow women’s inequality to exits. You can do it through your actions and by continuing the legacy of our historical female ancestors Become involved in a women’s equality. This is not a project just for women it is project for everyone.
So as we commemorate women’s history month, make sure equip yourself with women’s history knowledge. Take full advantage of those events on campus to learn up. Take a women’s history class to fill in your knowledge gap. You will be enriched and empower by the knowledge of those women who have come and gone before us. In doing so remember that fulfilling those historical women’s goals of equality AND equity means creating a society that maximizes our freedom and our humanity. Thank you and have a great night.