It is now 35 years since a small group of women historians proclaimed that there was a history of women, that it deserved to be legitimized as an academic field and that it should be taught and studied at all levels of education. Their message spread with spectacular speed.
The recognition of Women's History Week -- and later March as Women's History Month -- by the federal government came in 1979. With it, in gradual progression, came recognition of this topic as a subject of celebration by the media, educational institutions, libraries and community organizations.
What have we learned from Women's History? History Matters. Especially to those who have long been deceived into believing that they have had no place in history, Women's History is an affirmation. Learning about the past of women has also helped contemporary women evaluate their own position in society and aspire to higher goals. Becoming acquainted with heroines, female leaders and grassroots activists has raised self-esteem and opened wider horizons to girls and women. In learning of women's agency in the building of society and in learning of women's history of resistance to sexist oppression, women have been strengthened in their activities, in the assertion of their human rights and in their willingness to resist discrimination and oppression.
Women's History has also helped boys and men to overcome the distorted image of their own omnipotence. It has helped them close the gap between the world of abstractions, in which half the population is powerless and insignificant, and the world they know from their own experience, in which women, like men, are active, powerful and essential.
History teaches by analogy. The lessons of history are never simple. History is not a recipe book; past events are never replicated in the present in quite the same way. We can learn how women living long ago responded to problems that are similar to ours. While their situation will never be exactly like ours, we can learn by analogy from their example. Thus, we can observe that it took the organized women's movement of the 19th century 72 years of ceaseless activity to win the right to vote. We can also notice that it took more than 100 years to accomplish a basic reform, the outlawing of child labor. From this we can learn that reformers and those wanting to accomplish legal change must enlist for the long run. Reforms, in a democracy, are not made within a few years of effort; they take decades.
Women's History teaches coalition-building. To reach their goals, women had to build broad cross-class, interracial, multiethnic coalitions. Such conditions were crucial to the movements for the vote, the centuries-old campaign for giving women equal access to education, the movement to end family violence by enacting temperance, the women's peace movement (which began in the United States in the 1830s) and the 40-year-long movement to end the crime of lynching in the 20th century. These movements teach us to focus less on identity politics than on alliances across differences. They teach us how to focus on one common goal, while allowing each group to pursue its separate aims.
By studying these movements we learn that social change always starts at the grassroots and at the neighborhood level. While men held power in institutions and hierarchies, women have all along met urgent needs in communities by informal organization, by networking, by improvising and, finally, by focusing on crucial national issues.
What we can learn from Women's History is that societies are not an agglomeration of formal institutions -- corporations, churches, states, the military, schools. Rather, they are functioning organisms that respond to the work, activities and ideas of women and men. Up to quite recently, the historical record has ranked only the activities of men as significant, while the work and activities of women have been deemed to be trivial and unimportant. Women's History challenges that view and shows it up as being erroneous. In so doing, it helps men and women to see the world in a more realistic fashion and to better understand their own role in the shaping of society and the future.
Gerda Lerner is a pioneer in the field of Women's History. She has written 11 books and numerous articles on this subject. Her latest book is "Fireweed: a Political Autobiography" (Temple University Press, 2002).
This column was produced for the Progressive Media Project, which is run by The Progressive magazine, and distributed by the Tribune News Service.