My mother taught me everything from how to tie my shoes to how to read court litigation documents. She taught me how to pray and she taught me how to hold an intelligent conversation. Although she was known throughout our community as a State Assemblywoman, she always insisted that her most important job was being my mother. My mom was the first in a long line of women who I was blessed to learn from and love. These women, from art teachers to neighbors to C-suite executives, are all living testimonies to the strength and grace of women. Which is exactly why it bothers me that Women’s History Month, as it currently exists, doesn’t actually celebrate them.
A true celebration of women should be a celebration of femininity. A woman’s feminine attributes—grace, beauty, care—are distinct from masculine ones, and that distinction matters. Women possess unique abilities, from deep emotional intelligence to the capacity to create life itself. A real celebration would center those qualities. Women’s History Month does the opposite. It argues that women are great because they’re equivalent to men, erasing the very things that make womanhood worth honoring in the first place.
To understand what Women’s History Month is actually doing, it helps to know where it came from. International Women’s Day, its predecessor, was established by socialists who chose March 8 to align with the start of the 1917 Russian Revolution. Several key architects of Women’s History celebrations in the U.S., including Gerda Lerner, were outspoken members of the Communist Party USA. When those origins proved inconvenient, advocates quietly rewrote the history to obscure the ideological roots. That pattern of obscuring intent behind celebration has continued ever since.
When those origins proved inconvenient, advocates quietly rewrote the history to obscure the ideological roots.
In the 1970s, the Women’s Action Alliance pushed to make Women’s History nationally recognized, partnering with Planned Parenthood, the National Abortion Rights Action League, and the Mattachine Society—a gay rights organization founded by a communist activist. The WAA’s publications encouraged women to work “across traditional boundaries of class, race, age, and ethnic group.” It was standard Marxist class-erasure language dressed up as empowerment. They also promoted “Non-sexist child rearing,” which called on parents to raise sons and daughters as though biology made no difference between them. The goal wasn’t to celebrate women. It was to dismantle the distinctions that define womanhood.
Their lies worked. The WAA and affiliated organizations lobbied until Congress designated March as Women’s History Month in 1987. The Marxist talking points didn’t disappear, though. They just got a new coat of paint. Class erasure became “equity.” Dismantling gender distinctions became “empowerment.” The ideology was the same. The language was just softer.
Marxism demands that women work and act like men, because in a classless society, any distinction between the sexes becomes a class division to be eliminated. We’ve seen what that looks like in practice. Women who lived under communist regimes described abandoning their families to work full-time jobs that wrecked their health. They felt overworked, depleted, and stripped of the roles that gave their lives meaning. Many in the USSR resisted by quietly returning home. When Women’s History Month insists that women and men are of the same class, it is recycling an ideology that has already proven itself harmful to the very women it claims to champion.
The month is less about honoring women than about advancing a specific political vision of what women should be.
The modern version of Women’s History Month makes the ideological agenda impossible to miss. Recent annual themes from the National Women’s History Alliance have centered DEI initiatives and climate change, which are political causes, not celebrations of womanhood. In workplaces, the month typically means gender equity panels. In classrooms, it means curated resources that memorialize the past in name while spotlighting contemporary left-wing figures like Stacey Abrams and Justice Sonia Sotomayor in practice. The month is less about honoring women than about advancing a specific political vision of what women should be.
For a movement that claims to be pro-woman, Women’s History celebrations are remarkably selective about which women count. Women like Susie Wiles, the first female White House Chief of Staff, and Karoline Leavitt are routinely dismissed or slandered rather than celebrated. First Lady Melania Trump has used her platform to support foster families, aid disaster relief efforts, and fight nonconsensual AI-generated explicit imagery, and yet she is met with relentless ridicule. The pattern is consistent: women who embrace their femininity, hold conservative values, or prioritize family are excluded from the celebration. That’s not a movement that loves women. It’s a movement that loves compliance.
This is the scam in its simplest form: Women’s History Month presents itself as a celebration while punishing women who don’t conform to its ideology. Mothers who leave careers to raise their children are mocked. Women who prioritize marriage and homemaking are treated as cautionary tales. If the movement genuinely celebrated women, it wouldn’t reserve its harshest treatment for the women living out the roles feminists claim to honor. The “celebration” comes with conditions.
The founders of Women’s History Month were not interested in celebrating a woman’s unique biology. They wanted to neutralize it, and that intent has never changed. Only the packaging has.
The pattern is consistent: women who embrace their femininity, hold conservative values, or prioritize family are excluded from the celebration.
In 2026, the question of what it means to be a woman is more contested than ever. The ideology embedded in Women’s History Month has helped fuel that confusion—normalizing abortion, insisting that biological sex is irrelevant, and pushing the idea that men can become women. Equity, as defined by this movement, doesn’t elevate women. It erases them. Women’s History Month exists, in large part, to perpetuate that erasure under the cover of celebration.
Words like “empowerment” and “equality” are doing a lot of heavy lifting here. They sound like celebration. But when the movement that uses them consistently diminishes marriage, devalues motherhood, and treats homemaking as a failure of ambition, the words stop meaning what they appear to mean. Call it what it is: a bait-and-switch.
Women’s History Month is a scam, but it doesn’t have to be. We can reframe the conversation. For years it has been used to elevate figures like Margaret Sanger while ignoring the women who actually shaped the lives around them: the mothers, the teachers, the neighbors, the friends. A real celebration of women’s history would look like that. It would honor what women uniquely are, not insist they become something else. It would celebrate the families they build and the lives they transform. That’s a Women’s History Month worth having.