For nearly 40 years, March has been Women’s History Month in the United States. This year there was some doubt about its continued existence. This is an opinion-editorial that I originally wrote for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch on why I think it’s still important. Don’t worry, next week I’ll be back with regular content.

I loved history even when there were hardly any women in it.

Then I had a professor who tried to include women, and I liked it a lot less. At the end of the Mesopotamia unit, he asked “What was the position of women in this society?”

The answer was: “Bad.”

He asked again after we covered Egypt, Greece, Rome, and China. Same question, same answer. It was both boring and depressing.

I wished we would just skip the token effort at DEI and get back to the good stuff.

It was years later before I realized my professor could have mentioned that the first named author in history was a Mesopotamian woman.

He could have explained that in ancient Egypt, pharaoh was not a gendered term. Women were pharaohs, sometimes jointly with a husband, and sometimes on their own.

He could have said that Rome crushed an enormous number of their neighbors, and some of their most famous opponents were women who led their people politically and militarily. These women have glorious movie-worthy plotlines. (See here, and here, and here.)

There was plenty of “good stuff” in women’s history. My professor just forgot to include that part.

It’s true that many people appreciate seeing themselves represented in history, and that’s a worthy goal. But most women (past and present) aren’t famous authors, pharaohs, or tragic heroes waiting to die in a blaze of glory. Any woman with a published biography was not normal by definition. The normal women lived and died without leaving so much as a birth record to mark their existence.

Seeing those ordinary woman in history is as important as seeing the extraordinary ones.

Ask yourself why laundry is scarcely mentioned in the historical record until the 19^th century. It’s not because laundry didn’t need to get done. It’s because the kind of people who wrote things down didn’t do their own laundry. They just sent the clothes out dirty, and they came back clean. It wasn’t worth mentioning.

This myopia allows us to complain about doing our laundry now. If you knew the history of laundry, you’d know how unbelievably easy you have it. (Your exact laundry situation may vary, but you have it easy unless you’re wading into a stream to pound the vermin out with a rock before lathering up with your own urine for soap.)

Historically, this same myopia also allowed the mistreatment of the ordinary women. Such as when the early 20^th century Chinese intellectual Liang Qichao wrote, “All 200 million of our women are consumers; not a single one has produced anything of profit… No wonder men keep them as dogs, horses, and slaves” (Ko, Dorothy, Cinderella’s Sisters : A Revisionist History of Footbinding, University of California Press, 2005, p. 21).

I wonder if Liang Qichao had the foggiest notion about who sewed and laundered his clothes, cooked his meals, cleaned his house, or cared for his nine children. If 200 million Chinese women had actually been nothing but consumers, he would have noticed in a hurry. But he is far from the only man who ever failed to appreciate what women did for him.

There are exceptions, of course. In the 1930s, economist Steven Kuznets was tasked with figuring out how to jumpstart the US economy. He was not the first to try to calculate a country’s GDP, but his methods were meticulous and ground-breaking. In particular, he thought his job was to promote the welfare of the nation, not just the production, so he argued that any meaningful GDP should include unpaid domestic labor.

It was a worthy battle, but Kuznets lost. GDP has never included housework. Generally, people say that is because it would be hard to measure. But GDP already includes many other things that are hard to measure. The economist Diane Coyle wrote, “[Housework] can be measured by surveys, like many other economic statistics, but generally official statistical agencies have never bothered—perhaps because it has been carried out mainly by women and seen as unimportant” (Coyle, Diane, GDP: A Brief but Affectionate History, Princeton University Press, 2015, p. 111).

The problem with housework and caregiving is that no one notices when it’s done well, but they still get shocked and judgmental when it isn’t done at all. If it doesn’t get an assigned monetary value, then monetary amounts are a flawed indicator of value. Surely we could learn something from that?

When the Department of Defense and Google cancel Women’s History Month, they are saying the answer is no, we have nothing more to learn from women’s history. Perhaps they are convinced by the arguments that that men will not find women’s history interesting or that they will feel guilty or ashamed.

My question is why?

As a female history student, I sat through a great many classes that were essentially men’s history. No one ever assumed that meant that I would not be interested. No one ever asked if it would hurt my feelings.

As a middle-class, straight, white woman, people like me were both victims and oppressors in history. I get to choose which side to identify with.

Or I could learn enough history to acknowledge that life was complicated then, and it is still complicated now. The only reason to feel guilt or shame when learning about past oppression is if you are planning to continue the oppression. If so, then you need women’s history more than anyone else.

Thank you for reading this long to this somewhat different episode from me. If you are up for supporting women’s history this month, please take a look at my Patreon page (where you can get ad-free episodes, bonus episodes, and more) or my Buy Me a Coffee page for a one-time donation. If you do any of the above before the end of Women’s History Month on March 31^st, you will be automatically entered into a prize drawing for a $30 gift certificate to the Her Half of History store. That’s more than you’ll be paying for any of these options right now, except maybe the one-time donation option. Feel free to make that as big as you like. No matter which option you choose you’ll have my undying gratitude for your support as I tell the stories of women in history.