March 21-27, 2024

Midway through Women’s History Month 2024, it is not difficult to find examples of significant achievements by women — in science, medicine, business, politics, sports, the arts, law, etc. — that should be celebrated.

For centuries, in this nation and in others, women were expected to “know their place” and conform to the traditional expectations of their fathers, brothers, and husbands. Formal education often was limited; girls might learn the basics of reading and writing, but anything beyond that was an opportunity reserved for their brothers, not their sisters. Girls expressed their lessons via hand-stitched samplers, a quaint representation of yesteryear, but those tiny cross-stitches on a blank fabric square (no pre-printed kits in those days) could be challenging.

Today, women know that their “place” can be in the Senate, the House, the boardroom, the C-suite, on the playing field, in the courtroom and, hopefully, the White House. When Congress established Women’s History Month in 1987, only two Senators were female — Barbara Mikulski of Maryland (D) and Nancy Kassebaum of Kansas (R), or two percent of the deliberative body. The House of Representatives had 23 female members, 12 Democrats and 11 Republicans, accounting for only 5.3 percent. Today, the numbers and the percentages are higher: 25 women in the Senate (25 percent); 126 in the House (29 percent), but still not reflective of the nation’s overall population.

Running for office means making difficult choices, taking risks, developing a “thick” skin, and separating the political from the personal. Fortitude and resilience can be elusive at first, but will develop quickly with a little experience on the campaign trail. The challenge is that voters view male and female candidates differently, often reflective of the gender biases that long have existed in our society.

I remember being asked, during my initial campaign, if I had “slept” with anyone to get my jobs on Capitol Hill. It was a shocking question that did not deserve an answer, demeaning not only me but the extraordinary senators I worked for. Such an outrageous question never would have been posed to a male candidate, but is an example of why women, especially, need to develop the thick skin mentioned above.

For women today, in and out of politics, there are many things that they need, or should develop, to be successful in whatever path chosen. A mid-1990s poem, attributed variously to Maya Angelou, Hillary Clinton, and others, but actually by writer Pamela Redmond, lists 30 things a woman should have by age 30. It’s a pretty hefty inventory and, looking back, I doubt I could have achieved even a fraction of the list by age 30.

Control is a major aspect of the list — having enough money to move out and rent a place of your own, knowing when to try harder and when to walk away, how to live alone even if you don’t like it, knowing what you can and can’t accomplish in a day, and a feeling of control over your own destiny.
To that I would add establishing credit in your own name, as I did when I first moved to this area for a Capitol Hill job. When I asked to change my birth name to my new married name on my credit card with a now-defunct national retailer, the store would reissue the card only in my husband’s name. It was with mixed feelings that I destroyed my card at the counter, saying “if you don’t need me, I don’t need you!” Fortunately, the Equal Credit Opportunity Act of 1974 rectified that demeaning practice.

If, as Shakespeare noted, “Past is Prologue,” Women’s History Month provides an opportunity to examine where we’ve been.

What’s more important, though, is where we are going, and how we will get there. Women are making history every day, and that should be celebrated, and encouraged, every day, not only in March.