Val Dumond

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Women's History Month
©2009 Val Dumond

I wish we didn't have to celebrate Women's History Month (or Black History Month or Latino History Month and such). To designate one month out of 12 to focus on a particular segment of the population implies there is something unusual or different about that segment's history.

Why can't we celebrate History Month or U.S. History Month? After all, doesn't the history of the United States include the history of Europe and Africa and Asia and South America? Doesn't our history reach back to ancient times and the Middle Ages and the Renaissance and all the other eras that have been set aside by historians?

Certainly, ancient history, the beginning of humans, has to include the history of women since women have always been the humans that bear the children who grow up to lead nations, fight wars, invent electricity, fly across oceans, climb mountains, discover medicine? Without women, none of us would be around today. The earth would have gone down that dusty road reflected in sci-fi thrillers, the civilization (if you can call it civilized) that builds robots to replace humans. As a girl, I had the choice of becoming a wife and mother or choosing a job as secretary, hairdresser, nurse, or queen. There wasn't much else that women were supposed to be capable of doing. Whoever could have imagined a woman doing much else? Certainly not the men who told us we didn't need education, that we belonged in the kitchen, that we mustn't worry our pretty little heads about such wicked things as "careers".

Just as certainly, the history of humans must include the history of people from all areas of the world, all cultures, all nations, and all races (if there really is such a thing). I question the existence of race because all humans belong to the human race. What has been perpetrated by those with something to gain is the distinction made about the depth of color of the skin, determined by the amount of melanin in it. Just how dark or light does one have to be to cross over to another "race"?

Okay, let's be reasonable! Since time began - or more likely, since humans began - humans have been leery of one another. At first it was "that band of hoodlums who want to take our food". Cave people (yes, there were cave women) huddled together in tribes that looked unfavorably at cave people from other tribes. We already know that the basic instinct of "flight or fight" remains as part of our genetic makeup. Why then, is it not reasonable that people today would still regard those who are not Us with the suspicion provoked by Them?

Women's History Month was fun as long as it brought the subject of the equality of men and women to the forefront. I now believe the time has come to recognize the equality of the genders by doing away with the annual trotting out of women's achievements, as if they were something unusual or surprising.

In the 21st century, women are expected to excel at what they do, whether it's bearing and raising children, teaching, nursing, managing a corporation, operating a road grader, arguing a case before a judge, or saving lives with their surgical skills. All one has to do is look at the array of women holding important positions in government: local, state and national. Women lead nations; women fight wars; women fly airplanes; women operate on brains; women make trips into outer space; women operate businesses; women … do everything. So do people of other cultures and people from other nations. The history of the human race is what is fascinating, isn't it!

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