Loud & Proud

RWHP’s Women’s History Month Mission

As the founder of something called the Radical Women’s History Project, I love Women’s History Month. It’s a socially sanctioned excuse to talk even more endlessly about how women have built, changed, and bettered the world!

But as the founder of something called the Radical Women’s History Project, I also hate Women’s History Month. Why? Because it’s too often used as an excuse by too many organizations and individuals to reiterate the myth that the women whose history is worth celebrating — thereby, the women whose contributions and lives have mattered — are white, cisgender, straight, able-bodied, Western women. This is marginalization and erasure in the guise of celebrating women all the while defining “woman” as a specific set of privileged identities.

So, I’m asking for your help. My mission — I will not call it a challenge because it shouldn’t be one! — this month is to, for one post per day, step outside of the RWHP model of date specific facts and histories of radical women and simply profile a radical woman each day that should be known to history but is not. The goal is to populate Tumblr, Facebook and Twitter with radical histories that must be seen. And I need your help!

Please respond to this post — I am working on accessing the ask or submit function but Tumblr isn’t cooperating so you can also post them on the Facebook wall or by tagging them #RWHPmission on Twitter— with suggestions for women you would like to see uplifted in this space, as well as on the RWHP Facebook and Tumblr. I will privilege suggestions of women of color, trans* and queer women, women with disabilities and non-Western women — and any of the identity intersections thereof. Each suggestion and individual profiled will also be added to the date specific lists.

I can’t wait to discover which radical women YOU want the world to know more about. Check back later today for the first #RWHPmission post and every day this month to see your submissions and share with the world the radical women of history!