Women who have contributed to NM's history depicted above:
Top R to L: Satoye Ruth Hashimoto, Doña Jesusita Aragón, Asdzáá Tl'Ógí (Juanita), Carmen Romero-Velarde, We’wha, and Soledad Chávez Chacón.
Bottom R to L: Anita Scott Coleman, Lozen, Fabiola Cabeza de Baca, Dolores Huerta, María Concepción Ortiz y Pino de Kleven, Barbara Brown Simmons, and Pablita Velarde (Tse Tsan)
Women’s History Month was born of a gap in our education system and lack of equitable representation in our history books. March was declared Women’s History Month by Congress in 1980, on the heels of a 1970s teacher-led movement to institute a week devoted to women’s history. International Women’s Day, specifically, emerged from women’s struggle for labor rights and economic justice, beginning in 1907 with a protest against gender-based labor discrimination. There is value in understanding this history and how the efforts of mostly working-class women and women of color led the way to many of the rights afforded to us today. While we tend to honor individual heroines, lasting societal transformation is the result of enduring social movements and collective power building.

We are watching history in the making with Ketanji Brown Jackson, the first Black woman to be nominated to the Supreme Court, and the first to have served as a public defender representing low-income and working-class people. The deeply racialized and sexist partisan efforts to undermine Brown Jackson's character and distort her legal record are a strong reminder of why an intersectional analysis matters. Gender justice is racial justice, and economic justice, and much, much more. As always, our history and relationship to our past impacts how and who we are in the present.   
 
To honor the collective leadership of working class and women of color:

  • Check out this graphic article by Vox that describes the herstory of International Women’s Day, which is rooted in the struggle against gender-based labor discrimination and exploitation.

  • Support our powerful grantee partners, who are organizations statewide working toward gender justice and healing for self-identified women, girls, trans, and non-binary New Mexicans.

  • Support New Mexico-based abortion fund, Indigenous Women Rising (IWR), a resource for Indigenous and undocumented people seeking to have an abortion. We remain on the brink of a historical back-step in terms of reproductive justice and access to care, with this year seeing over 531 anti-abortion restrictions introduced across 40 states.

  • Follow us on social media, and visit our campaigns page to learn more about New Mexico’s historical sheroes and modern day adolescent girls of color who are making herstory!
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