Women’s History Month

For International Women’s Day and Women’s History Month, we offer a collection of resources, beginning with women in labor history. These women are often missing from textbooks and the media despite the diverse roles women have played to organize, unionize, rally, document, and inspire workers to fight for justice.

Recording: Lessons in Liberation

We think about all the many tactics that Black women have accessed and mobilized, from liberating themselves to all of the other approaches that I just laid out. That’s why I say if you look at that history, you have a blueprint for how to resist and how to continue to press, and to keep moving forward. — Kali Nicole Gross

Listen to our Teach the Black Freedom Struggle class with Daina Ramey Berry and Kali Nicole Gross, authors of A Black Women’s History of the United States.

Women & Gender Toolkit From the SNCC Legacy Project

As people look for strategies to challenge fascism today, we can learn a lot from the work of the youth-led Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in the 1960s.

The SNCC Legacy Project offers six free toolkits, including one on women & gender. Each toolkit includes primary documents, narrative history, photos, and discussion questions.

Teaching With Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All

Martha S. Jones’ Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All is a love letter to Black women’s organizing for justice. It includes profiles of more than two dozen remarkable women.

In this lesson by Ursula Wolfe-Rocca, students read excerpts from Jones’ book to learn about these and other women, and analyze Jones’ provocative title: In what sense were these women a “vanguard” and why?

Mural by Blake Chamberlain on an interior wall of the Women’s Rights National Historical Park Visitor Center depicting influential people of the women’s suffrage movement. Source: Victoria Stauffenberg, public domain

The first organized gathering of women to demand their rights as women took place over two days in July 1848 in Seneca Falls, New York.

This lesson by Bill Bigelow includes roles for the upper- and middle-class white women who organized the convention — but also for the many women whose voices were absent from the proceedings.

Send us a teaching story about using this lesson in the classroom and we’ll send you a book in appreciation!

March 2, 1955

Claudette Colvin, a 15-year-old inspired by her Black History Month school lessons, refused to give up her seat to a white woman while riding the bus in Montgomery, Alabama.

March 4, 1933

Frances Perkins was the first woman to hold a cabinet position in the United States. She became Secretary of Labor in 1933 and served through the Great Depression and WWII.

March 6, 1857

The U.S. Supreme Court delivered the infamous Dred Scott v. Sandford decision. Harriet Scott, Dred’s wife, filed her own petition for freedom at the same time as her husband.

March 8, 1975

The United Nations observed March 8, 1975, as the first official International Women’s Day as a celebration of women’s achievements, as well as a time to reflect on the exploitation and discrimination women experience.

March 12, 1990

Disability rights activists made the “Capitol Crawl,” and Jennifer Keelan, a young girl, became the face of their protest to organize for the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990.

March 12, 1912

Textile workers, many of them women, claimed victory at the end of the massive Bread and Roses strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts, when they pressured factories to meet their demands.

March 22, 1969

Sister Joann Malone and Catherine Melville were members of a group of Catholic anti-war activists arrested for destruction of a Dow Chemical office in D.C. to protest Dow’s production of napalm and nerve gas.

March 24, 1853

Mary Ann Shadd Cary, abolitionist and suffragist, published the first edition of The Provincial Freeman, Canada’s first anti-slavery paper, making her the first Black woman in North America to edit and publish a newspaper.