As we close out 2023’s Women’s History Month in the United States, we wanted to take a moment to clarify some misconceptions about the month, what it’s meant to signify, the work of women’s history, and offer an invitation.

Three years ago, a few of AskHistorians women mods wrote a post where we introduced ourselves and shared some of our favorite questions and answers. At the time, we wrote:

…. when we envision the past as a place dominated by men, it’s that much harder to envision an equitable future. Since then, in ways big and small, historians of all genders have worked to push, prod, and encourage the field to approach the historical record in a more thoughtful, and more complete, way. With varying levels of success, they have helped their fellow historians move from framing women as someone’s wife, sister, mother, or daughter to attending to their full humanity, agency, and experiences.

The field of women's history reminds us that in order to tell the full story of the past, we need to consider the actions of all people. And the work truly means all - Women. Men. Nonbinary people. Girls. Trans women and men. Black, Indigenous, multiracial women. Women of color. White women. Women with developmental disabilities, women with physical disabilities. Women sex workers and women rulers. Everyone in between. All.

One of the themes we wanted to convey in the post was stated explicitly in a comment later by one of the mods as: “... as one of my professors put it: ‘Find the women. We did find the women, and it was wonderful. But we're beyond that now. We need to be beyond that.’”

The purpose of this post is to reiterate that the intention of Women’s History Month, and the branch of women’s history itself is to get beyond. In the 1960s, Black, Asian, Indigenous and Hispanic activists saw connections between their various efforts and coined the phrase “People of Color” as a linguistic and verbal marker (more context here) for cross-racial alliances with the shared goal of dismantling white supremacy. “People of color” took hold because it’s an affirmative description - it describes people as who they are, as opposed to what they’re not AKA not-white.

Unfortunately, a phrase that does the same for gender—for all the not-men that have move through the world—has not caught on in widespread usage. So, we often focus on the concept of women, when the work is more about not-men.

The recognized founder of women’s history as a stand-alone branch of history, Gerda Lerner, spoke to this idea in an interview towards the end of her career. The interviewer shared that his wife had asked him to consider going to school for twelve years and never hearing of a man who did anything notable beside get married or have babies. Dr. Lerner replied:

the effect [of only learning about men in history] has been very bad for men too … because men have been given the impression that they are more important in the world than they actually are and that's not a good way to become a human being. It has fostered illusions of grandeur in every man that are unwarranted. If you can think, as a man, that everything great in the world and in civilization was created by men then naturally you have to look down on women and naturally, you have to have different aspirations for your sons and for your daughters and I don't think that's good for men either.

Her point is that we all, especially men, lose when the histories we study include only men. In that same way, cis people - those whose gender identity matches the one they were given at birth - lose when the histories we study include only cis people or position men and women as two sides of a gender coin, which simply doesn’t reflect the complexity of the human experience from time immemorial.

This sentiment was recently expressed by Lisa Sasaki, the interim director of Smithsonian’s proposed American Women’s History Museum when Fox News ran a number of stories after she said that the museum would include all women. From an article about the channel’s response to her statements:

There is no monolithic experience of womanhood, and Sasaki emphasized that her museum would not attempt to create a singular narrative. The institution will include an oral history program for visitors to submit their own stories, for example. But Sasaki said that she plans to include transgender women, who have been subject to increasing harassment and violence at a time when there is a national discussion, and deep partisan divide, about the acceptance of transgender identities.

We hope that you will see this post as an invitation to embrace expansive thinking about the purpose of Women’s History Month and the questions you ask on AskHistorians. We encourage you to consider the impact of war, famine, technology, etc. - all the histories we think of as being dominated by men - on non-men and more importantly, to allow yourself to be curious about the roles non-men played in those histories. An invitation for us all to consistently go beyond seeing women and girls as victims or bystanders and create space for their stories in the questions we ask. An invitation to expand your thinking of women, girls, and non-binary people, to not just place them in a system of "history" or "women's history." Let us consider using the 11 months between now and the next women’s history month to shatter these illusions and send them to the dustbin of history.

In this thread, we’re happy to provide feedback on questions you have on how to reframe your question in more expansive ways so that the history of humanity’s non-men, be they cis or trans women or girls or non-binary people, can be told. We’re also happy to answer questions about the field of Women’s History itself, as well as how the field is related to concepts like intersectionality.