Albany Times-Union: Biancolli: It’s Past Time to Widen History’s Lens

Or — here’s an idea! — maybe we should channel Helen Reddy, holding hands around a bonfire and belting out “I Am Woman” while dousing each other with patchouli. (I actually own the record on vinyl, a gift from my late husband. I do not own patchouli.)

I don’t mean to mock the intent behind Women’s History Month, which aims to correct the long-standing and egregious oversight of slightly less than half the world’s population and 51 percent of the country’s. Speaking as a female of the species, I appreciate any gen-u-ine effort to look me in the eye, acknowledge my presence and listen to what I say — something no woman takes for granted. We’ve all been shouted down in enough conversations with men not to seize the podium when it’s wheeled in our direction.

But here’s the thing: And then it’s wheeled away. Once April 1 hits, and Women’s History Month skids to its anticipated halt, we all go back to same-old same-old order of things, where, OK, women are rising in politics and cultural prominence, but XX contributions to the forces that shaped the world are still fairly roundly ignored.

Women were invisible contributors to much of history, which is precisely the status quo that the official March celebration is trying to rectify. But in trying to rectify it, the month winds up creating an attention ghetto – an overlooked zone that only attracts notice when the wider populace swoops in for a day trip. Lest we forget, March follows February. Women’s History Month comes on the heels of Black History Month, itself designed to mark the significance of Africans and the diaspora over the march of time.

Between those two months, a solid majority of the American population is covered like a blanket. (More than 57 percent of us are black, female or both — and that doesn’t even take into account biracial Americans.) But there’s an elemental and patronizing weirdness behind this urge to parcel out the calendar demographically, and I won’t even begin to touch on international (fill-in-the-blank) days. I worry that zeroing in on the One Designated Month makes it easier to ignore certain constituencies and histories the remainder of the year.

I’m hardly the first to make this point. In the Philadelphia Inquirer just last month, Ernest Owens wrote: “Attending public school my entire life, February was the only time of the year when I didn’t only read about black people being enslaved. … It’s time to hold schools, government, media, and corporations accountable by urging them to stop the pandering in February and recognize black history — and its people — all year round.”

As a few commenters have wryly noted, Black History Month -— also called African-American History Month — is the shortest of the year. For that we can thank its founder, Carter G. Woodson, who created Negro History Week in 1926 around the birthdays of Abraham Lincoln (Feb. 12) and Frederick Douglass (Feb. 14). Women’s History Month traces its roots back to March 8, 1911, the inaugural International Women’s Day, which spawned Women’s History Week in 1980 and then, seven years later, the entire month.

These are all positive developments in the telling of history and the widening of its lens beyond the male, the white and the wealthy. But the thing about women — the thing about blacks — the thing about any group of people anywhere on the planet — is that we aren’t actually isolated from the rest of humanity. We aren’t things apart, our contributions separate from the whole. We’re a piece of history, not obligations dutifully checked off like Cheerios or toilet paper on some annual trip to the supermarket.

So last month, we recognized African-Americans. This month, women. The challenge, for the other 10 months in the year, lies in recognizing both blacks and women as contributors to society both past and present. We’re here now. Wheel the podium in our direction. To quote a certain ’70s pop song, hear us roar.