Women's History Month and the Stories We Still Struggle to Tell
Explore how Women's History Month can go beyond celebration to teach the truth about power, silencing and why women's voices are still fighting to be heard.
When the Epstein files started making headlines, the story inevitably found its way into my classroom. My students wanted to talk about it. And honestly? I had to figure out how to honor their questions without bringing NSFW (not safe for work) content into my classroom.
So I focused on one thing: how long it took for the voices of those young women to be taken seriously.
Women's History Month is often framed as a celebration of extraordinary women. And yes, we should celebrate them. I've spent years building lessons, writing articles and creating videos about women who refused to accept the limits that society placed on them. I will keep doing that.
But if we stop at celebrations and just do a greatest hits list of great women, we aren't teaching the full story.
A lot of the women I write about were not celebrated in their time. Sojourner Truth made people deeply uncomfortable. Ida B. Wells documented racial terror that powerful institutions wanted hidden. Shirley Chisholm was told repeatedly, by people in her own party, to wait for her turn. Mother Jones was called the most dangerous woman in America. Fannie Lou Hamer spoke a relatable truth, “I am sick and tired of being sick and tired.”
What connects these women isn't just courage. It's that every single one of them was fighting to be heard by systems that had already decided their voices didn't matter and worked overtime to suppress them.
That pattern didn't start with them. And it didn't end with them. Just look at the Epstein survivors today.
And long before the Epstein case was front-page news, there were young women saying exactly what had happened to them. For years, they weren't believed. That is a pattern that has a very long history.
And just recently, an article was published in the New York Times that the celebrated César Chávez of the United Farm Workers sexually assaulted young girls in the movement, including the trailblazer, Dolores Huerta. We thought we knew her whole inspiring story. Now at 96, she shared with the world another layer of her story. She kept the abuse quiet for the sake of the movement but at the expense of her own comfort and personal safety. This revelation makes one wonder about the other ways that women we celebrate have also navigated patriarchal systems and kept abuse in the shadows.
When we reduce Women's History Month to a highlight reel of famous names, we strip out the part that actually matters—the part where these women were ignored, dismissed, silenced and told to wait.
Just like the majority of the American people (and the world for that matter), my students know something is wrong. They scroll through these headlines all day. They are not confused about what's happening. They are asking real questions: about power, about who gets believed, about why institutions protect the powerful at the expense of everyone else.
Those are not new questions.
They are the same questions Sojourner Truth was asking. The same ones Ida B. Wells was asking. The same ones every woman I've ever built a lesson around was asking.
When we reduce Women's History Month to a highlight reel of famous names, we strip out the part that actually matters—the part where these women were ignored, dismissed, silenced and told to wait. We whitewash the past and then act surprised when students can't connect it to the present. That is why I continue to refuse to sugarcoat history and, instead, tell the full, unadulterated (but safe for the classroom!) version.
They're connecting it. We need to catch up.
Our job is not just to teach who these women were. It's to teach the systems they were up against—and to be really honest about the fact that the fight they were part of is not over.
But we don’t have to tell students that; they can see it with their own eyes.
History rhymes. Our students can already hear it.
The question is whether we are willing to teach it honestly.
This blog is part of our 2026 Women's History Month series. Read more from Megan Ortmeyer and Aayushi Doshi.
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Sari Beth Rosenberg is the co-founder of Teachers Unify to End Gun Violence and a member of the Board of Directors. She has been teaching U.S. History and AP U.S. History at a New York City public high school, the High School for Environmental Studies, for over 22 years and co-hosts the PBS... See More
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