How did March become Womens History Month?
In 1911 in Europe, March 8 was first celebrated as International Women’s Day. In many European nations, as well as in the United States, women’s rights was a political hot topic. Woman suffrage – winning the vote -was a priority of many women’s organizations. Women (and men) wrote books on the contributions of women to history. But with the economic depression of the 1930s which hit on both sides of the Atlantic, and then World War II, women’s rights went out of fashion. In the 1950s and 1960s, after Betty Friedan pointed to the “problem that has no name” -the boredom and isolation of the middle-class housewife who often gave up intellectual and professional aspirations -the women’s movement began to revive. With “women’s liberation” in the 1960s, interest in women’s issues and women’s history blossomed. By the 1970s, there was a growing sense by many women that “history” as taught in school -and especially in grade school and high school -was incomplete with attending to “her story” a
