Women’s History Month 2025
March 1 - March 31
Women's History Month has been celebrated every March since the late 1980s to honor and recognize the ongoing achievements and contributions of women. The National Women's History Alliance, formerly the National Women's History Project, is credited with persuading congressional leaders and White House officials to extend the celebration of Women's History Week to an entire month.
The National Women's History Alliance selects and publishes their yearly theme. The theme for 2025 is "Moving Forward Together! Women Educating & Inspiring Generations."
The Importance of Women's History Month
- Perseverance: We use this month to acknowledge the continuous fight for equal rights, visibility, and respect for women across the globe. The struggle is continuous, so we cultivate a culture of understanding the effort it takes to persevere in today's climate.
- Empowerment: Women have made significant and all too often unrecognized contributions to every area of academic study, research, and the arts. This month honors those contributions while educating others about the impact women have had on the of humanity.
- Creating Change: Women of all backgrounds have been at the forefront of social movements regarding civil and equal rights, working toward positive change. Women's History Month encourages us to remember the sacrifice and dedication women have made to make change around the world and in their own communities.
Explore
- Read and Learn
- The Trouble of Color: An American Family Memoir by Martha S. Jones Martha S. Jones grew up feeling her Black identity was obvious to all who saw her. But weeks into college, a Black Studies classmate challenged Jones’s right to speak. Suspicious of the color of her skin and the texture of her hair, he confronted her with a question that inspired a lifetime of introspection: “Who do you think you are?” Now a prizewinning scholar of Black history, Jones delves into her family’s past for answers. In every generation since her great-great-great-grandmother survived enslavement to raise a free family, color determined her ancestors’ lives. But the color line was shifting and jagged, not fixed and straight. Some backed away from it, others skipped along it, and others still were cut deep by its sharp teeth. Journeying across centuries, from rural Kentucky and small-town North Carolina to New York City and its suburbs, The Trouble of Color is a lyrical, deeply felt meditation on the most fundamental matters of identity, belonging, and family.
- Guerrilla Girls: the Art of Behaving Badly by Guerrilla Girls In 1985, a group of masked feminist avengers—known as the Guerrilla Girls—papered downtown Manhattan with posters calling out the Museum of Modern Art for its lack of representation of female artists. They quickly became a global phenomenon, and the fearless activists have produced hundreds of posters, stickers, and billboards ever since. This is the first book to catalog the entire career of the Guerrilla Girls from 1985 to present.
- Watch
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- Daring Women Doctors: Physicians in the 19th Century At this crucial time when women physicians and nurses are contributing significantly to our community's health, this documentary provides a look at the challenging and illuminating history of 19th century women doctors. Hidden in American history, all-women's medical schools began to appear in the mid-19th century long before women had the right to vote or own property.
- Even the Women Must Fight Rare interviews with five female veterans of Ho Chi Minh's volunteer youth brigades, backed by archival footage from Northern Vietnamese combat cameraman, bring to life a new view of a long-contested war. These women's oral histories challenge images of Vietnamese women as passive objects of a male media and military machine. Proud of their service under fire, honest about their post war suffering, they add unique insights to ongoing debates about women in the military, and why their stories are so often overlooked when the memory work begins.
- Not Done: Women Remaking America The women's movement has gone mainstream: from the Women's March to Black Lives Matter to #MeToo. Premiering amid a pandemic and widespread social upheaval, Not Done shines a light on today's feminists paving the way for true equality.
- Return: Native American Women Reclaim Foodways for Health & Spirit Return features charismatic Roxanne Swentzell from Santa Clara Pueblo in New Mexico whose efforts to reclaim ancient foodways are echoed across the continent by Tlingit, Muckleshoot, Oglala Sioux, Menominee, and Seneca women. At its heart this film is about empowering people to overcome their current circumstances through eating as their ancestors did - nutritiously and locally. Return offers an approach to confronting the diabetes epidemic now rampant in Native American communities.
- Listen
- Alaska Native Resilience: Voices from World War II Holly Miowak Guise is an Iñupiaq writer and historian who was a postdoctoral scholar at UC Irvine. This podcast texamines Alaska Native elders’ memories of wartime invasion, relocation, and land reclamation. The U.S. government justified its World War II occupation of Alaska as a defense against Japan's invasion of the Aleutian Islands, but it equally served to advance colonial expansion in relation to the geographically and culturally diverse Indigenous communities affected. Holly Miowak Guise has drawn on a wealth of oral histories and interviews with Indigenous elders to explore the multidimensional relationship between Alaska Natives and the U.S. military during the Pacific War. The forced relocation and internment of Unanga in 1942 proved a harbinger of Indigenous loss and suffering in Alaska. Violence against Native women, assimilation and Jim Crow segregation, and discrimination against Native servicemen followed the colonial blueprint. Yet Alaska Native peoples took steps to enact their sovereignty and restore equilibrium to their lives by resisting violence and disrupting attempts at US control. Their subversive actions altered the colonial structures imposed upon them by maintaining Indigenous spaces and asserting sovereignty over their homelands.
Engage
- Womxn’s Month 2025 - https://womxnscenter.uci.edu/signature-events/womxns-month/