Hello everyone, I would have posted earlier, but I took a fall and broke my big toe and pulled a ligament in my ankle. At least that’s what my friend who is pre-med is telling me. I have been making my way around my house with crutches and can’t bear to put a shoe on my left foot let alone put weight on it. So, since my dad, who normally would be the one inspecting my injuries, doesn’t know about the tattoo on that same ankle, I’m going to be hobbling my way around the house sans crutches with a smile on my face when he gets home (him and my mom are out of town this weekend with some friends).
Well, this month is Women’s History Month. This month is very important to me, because I am… a woman. Not sure if you all knew 😉
I used to be one of those people who was like “Why is there a Black History month?” or “Why do we have a Women’s History month?” etc. etc. Now, before you start firing comments my way about much of a racist and meninist I am, at the time I thought I was being quite the opposite. I always felt that by having a Women’s history month or a Black History month, we were excluding ourselves and other minorities. If There is no White History month or Men’s History Month, why do we (women and other minorities) get one. I felt that minorities were already ostracized enough and that by dedicating a month to us we would be outcasted even more than we already were. Plus, I didn’t really think we needed them because I thought we learned all the history we needed in school.
A few years ago, I came to the realization that there were so many things that had happened in our country and around the world that I did not know about. I didn’t know about how women got the right to vote, that women helped astronauts get to the moon. I had always thought that men had discovered the double helix in DNA, nuclear fission, and so many more world-altering inventions now matter how small.
I never realized this in school but the history we learn about isn’t the full story. We don’t learn both sides, we learn the rich white man’s story. For years I thought Christopher Columbus was a great guy because he ‘discovered America’ and I thought that the white man was always correct and could never do wrong because that’s what we learn. We don’t learn about the millions of Native Americans who died when the white man took over the ‘new country.’ We don’t learn that slavery was always wrong, not just when the North decided it was. We don’t learn that women couldn’t go to school because they were forced to stay home and their sole purpose was reproducing and cleaning. We don’t learn so many things in school because not everything is about white men in history, but in schools and media it is.
Now I realize. I realize that we need months for people who aren’t white, straight men. We need them because I learned more about Black History during February commercials on Disney channel as a kid than I ever did in school. There are still so many historical facts that I don’t know about because of this, but if I have learned one thing since Trump’s presidency, or my time of realization for the need of these months, it’s that we shouldn’t need these months, but until our history books are rewritten with the whole truth, and people begin to realize that white men are not the only influential people on this Earth, these months are so important for everyone, because without them, I wouldn’t know who Alice Paul were, Ada Lovelace, and so many other women and men alike who changed the world for the better.
Living off Leesh 