Why Do We Still Need Women’s History Month?
Why do we still need Women’s History Month? Because history has never told the whole truth about the power of us.
When President Jimmy Carter declared March 8, 1980, as National Women’s History Week, the country was at a moment of inflection. Progress was being named, but not fully realized. Black women were already exercising philanthropic power, organizing, funding movements, leading change, and addressing the intersection of race, class, and gender long before it became academic and national language.
President Carter acknowledged that “too often women were unsung and sometimes their contributions went unnoticed.” He was right. But for Black women, being unsung was not an oversight. It was structural.
In 1980, Black women earned 56% of what White men earned. That gap was not about merit. It was justified through negative evaluations, stalled promotions, and confinement to low-wage roles. In male-dominated industries, Black women were required to prove themselves over and over again, often with credentials twice as strong for opportunities half as accessible.
The questioning of our competence was never accidental. It was rooted in othering, in a refusal to see the full value of our rights, our intellect, and our power.
When others exercised their First Amendment rights, they were patriots. When Mary Turner spoke out against racial terror in 1918, she was lynched, and her unborn child was brutally taken from her body. When Sojourner Truth delivered her speech in Akron, Ohio, her sharp New York diction was later rewritten into a broken Southern dialect to make her brilliance more palatable to well-meaning others.
Our voices, image, and value have often been edited to fit someone else’s comfort. Our history is often told from a place of shallow contentment, as if we just stood still.
So yes, we still need this month. Not for flowers. Not for slogans. Not for curated celebration.
We need Women’s History Month to interrogate the past and examine how it still shapes our present. We need it to ask why educated Black women are being pushed out of workplaces at higher rates than any other socio-racial group. We need it to understand why our leadership is still questioned, why our philanthropy is still underestimated, and why our intellectual contributions are still reframed through someone else’s lens.
At Give Black Alliance, we talk about shifting from deficit to asset. Women’s History Month is an opportunity to apply that same paradigm shift to Black women. We are not marginal footnotes to American history. We are the central authors of it.
As my friend Dr. Kellie Carter Jackson writes in We Refuse: A Forceful History of Black Resistance, even the “smallest” act of resistance by a Black woman can alter the course of history. Her work reminds us that Black women have never simply endured America; we have shaped it. We have financed freedom movements, built institutions, raised generations of organizers, and imagined futures this country had not yet dared to see.
We are not new to resistance. We are not new to leadership. And we are certainly not new to philanthropy.
Our philanthropic power is braided into our DNA, hope, heroism, strategy, and vision. It lives in our mothers, our grandmothers, and our great-grandmothers. We take it with us to work, to boardrooms, to our communities, whether we are volunteering, protesting, teaching or preaching, and around kitchen tables where budgets and dreams are being made and stewarded.
And here is what we must remember:
We are tomorrow’s history.
They will read about our days. They will study how we responded to backlash, to erasure, to economic inequity. They will analyze our movements. They will quote our words. They will measure our courage.
Women’s History Month is not just about honoring who we were. It is about deciding who we will be.
We are women’s history, today.
