National Women’s History Month

National Women’s History Month, honorary observance of the month of March in the United States, as designated in 1987 by the U.S. Congress, in recognition of women’s many accomplishments throughout history. A variety of agencies, schools, and organizations observe the month by focusing on the “consistently overlooked and undervalued” role of American women in history. Libraries and communities promote special events that emphasize the achievements of women. Similar monthlong observances occur in other countries.

A common myth holds that the significance of the month of March for women’s history dates to the mid-19th century, when a group of female garment workers in New York City staged a protest on March 8, 1857, to demand better working conditions and pay. According to this story, the police aggressively halted the demonstration, but several years later the determined women formed their own union. However, no record of this demonstration exists in contemporary newspapers. The myth was likely created to soothe concerns regarding the observance’s actual origin.

In 1908 a branch of the New York City Social Democratic Women’s Society declared that the last Sunday in February would be celebrated as National Woman’s Day. The observance was first held on February 28, 1909, in New York City. However, the better-known precursor to Women’s History Month was International Women’s Day, which was created in 1910 at the Second International Socialist Women’s Conference and first observed on March 19, 1911. Led by German social democratic activist Clara Zetkin, the women of the conference intended International Women’s Day to focus on the struggles of working women—in contrast to the mainstream feminist movement, which the socialists associated with the bourgeoisie. The March 8 date became official in 1921 when Zetkin, by then a communist, proposed it in honour of a strike led by women workers in Petrograd (now St. Petersburg) on March 8 (February 23, Old Style), 1917, that marked the beginning of the Russian Revolution. The myth of the U.S.-based garment workers’ protest originated in a 1955 issue of the French daily newspaper L’Humanité. It was readily embraced, in part because it allowed American women living amid Cold War tensions to celebrate International Women’s Day without acknowledging its socialist and communist associations.

In 1978 the schools of Sonoma county, California, designated March as Women’s History Month as a means of examining women’s history, issues, and contributions. The idea gained momentum, and in 1981 a U.S. congressional resolution proclaimed the week including March 8 to be National Women’s History Week. In 1986 the National Women’s History Project (later known as the National Women’s History Alliance) played a significant role in expanding the observance to the entire month of March.

Other countries soon adopted similar monthlong events. In 1992 Canada began celebrating Women’s History Month, which had been set for October to commemorate the resolution of the so-called Persons Case. That month in 1929 the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council of Great Britain (then Canada’s highest court of appeal) ruled that the meaning of the term “qualified persons” in Canadian constitutional law had never been explicitly limited to “men.” That decision, which reversed an earlier ruling of the Supreme Court of Canada, meant that the dominion’s governor-general was legally entitled to appoint female senators. In March 2000 Australia began holding its own Women’s History Month.