The actual celebration of Women’s History Month grew out of a weeklong celebration of women’s contributions to culture, history, and the society organized by the school district of Sonoma, California, in 1978. A few years later, the idea had caught on within communities across the country. In 1980, President Jimmy Carter issued the first presidential proclamation declaring the week of March 8 as National Women’s History Week. The U.S. Congress followed suit the next year, passing a resolution establishing a national celebration. Six years later, the National Women’s History Project successfully petitioned Congress to expand the event to the entire month of March.
Women’s History Month Theme
The National Women’s History Alliance designates a yearly theme for Women’s History Month. The 2021 theme is a continuation of 2020s: “Valiant Women of the Vote: Refusing to Be Silenced.” This theme recognizes the battle for women’s suffrage, which was gained with the passage of the 19th amendment in 1920.
What is silence?
“‘To sin by silence when they should protest makes cowards of men.” — Ella Wheeler Wilcox
Silence is not always the quiet solace you find in your home or your mind. Silence can be keeping a secret, upholding your obligations, or silence can be compliance.
Many children from the baby boomer to the millennial age bracket were raised with values such as “speech is silver but silence is golden” or my personal favorite “children are seen and not heard”. We are raised to believe outbursts of anger, sadness, and even joy should be reserved for close family members or spouses, things that happen behind closed doors. We do not make a scene. While I understand the sentiment trying to navigate a congested grocery store with twenty people having nervous breakdowns would be tedious at best. However, what if they are having a breakdown because something horrible and traumatic just happened, a call over the airwaves, emergency notices on our cell phones. Then those strong feelings are understandable we are all reeling, all emotionally drained our voices carry our sadness without a sneer or judgment insight.
We care when it affects us, we care when it could affect us. A child being abducted from their parents, make nearby parents freeze with terror. “That could have been my baby.” A person without children may feel strong empathy for the parent but are still able to disassociate. This is called the circle of empathy.
Circles of Empathy
We often like to believe that we possess universal empathy toward everyone, without any discrimination or judgment, or preference. Every human life is equally valuable to us, and there’s no reason to prefer any one person over any other.
The truth is: you don’t care about everyone equally. This may seem like plain commonsense to some people – but to others, this can be a frightening and uncomfortable realization.
Here is a rough illustration of how our “circles of empathy” work.
It begins with love for yourself, your family, and your friends, and then extends to bigger groups of people like your neighbors, your coworkers, your community, and your nation:
Naturally, you can empathize with anyone if given the chance. Anyone can become a friend. If push comes to shove – and you have to choose between saving the life of a family member vs. the life of a random stranger – you’re going to show a clear preference toward your family member. This is natural, right? Yes, humans will always defend their tribe, first.
Defending the Tribe
Life for the earliest humans was a constant battle between, the environment, resources, predators, and other tribes. We depended on our families and tribes for survival. We knew we could trust our families, and we shared everything with them. Their struggles were our struggles. When a family member felt pain or joy, so did we.
This family group, according to philosopher Peter Singer, was the first “circle of ethics:” a hypothetical group with you at its center. You then have altruistic feelings toward everyone else in the circle, and a desire to care for them as much as, if not more than, you care about yourself. We see everyone in our circle as a full-fledged person, with thoughts, goals, fears, and passions not too different from our own.
However, in most early societies, the circle of empathy stopped at the family, or not much farther than it. Friends, neighbors and other tribe members were sometimes important to survival, so when necessary, the circle of empathy expanded to include them. But when resources were scarce and two separate tribes needed a specific resource in order to survive, they fought to the death, because they saw each other as inhuman rivals. This was true especially after the dawn of agriculture, which threw humanity into more frequent violent conflicts.
Progress, but no progress
We’ve come a long way since the time of the early humans. Advancing technology, ethics, and reason have made our world much less harsh. Resources—at least the most essential ones—are plentiful. Yet, our empathy circles are still very similar. It is far easier to empathize with people who we can personally identify, rather than if they are some abstraction, like a number or a statistic.
Once you start thinking about large groups of people, you’re thinking about something abstract and numerical, not something you can empathize with on any real personal level. This doesn’t mean that you can’t care about random people suffering or that you can’t take active measures to help those people. We need to realize that we are using silence to make a conscious choice to keep our empathy within our carefully defined circles.
When I Help You, I Also Help Myself
“If you want happiness for an hour, take a nap. If you want happiness for a day, go fishing. If you want happiness for a year, inherit a fortune. If you want happiness for a lifetime, help somebody.”
The more we focus our attention, energy, and resources outward the results help humanity at large, and conversely, helping others helps us as well. We can try to work on expanding our empathy circles, meaning that we should aim at enlarging our concerns to encompass more and more people, thus overcoming our natural selfishness. However, if we aim at contracting the circles, bringing other people closer to us, we realize that they are our own kin. The closer we get them to us, the more the self/other dichotomy dissolves and the more our interests align with those of our community. We expand our empathy but contracting the circles. A simple step to take ensuring that you are not turning a blind eye and using silence as compliance, remember just because something is not happening to you… doesn’t mean it’s not happening to others.
Just Because It Doesn’t Affect You Personally Doesn’t Mean It’s Not Oppressive
When someone confesses a struggle, a problem, or an injustice, the appropriate response is to:
– Shut your mouth and listen, and…
– Try to HELP in any way you can. Even if all you can do is offer a compassionate, non-judgmental, safe place for fellow human being to express their pain.
The appropriate response is NOT to:
– Brush it off with, “You’re crazy” or “You’re imagining things” or “You’re just overreacting.”
NO, people. NO.
Rather than trying to convince yourself that you’re not part of the problem or your issues are more important than those at hand and hijacking conversations, take a step back and let others be heard.
“How can we expect righteousness to prevail when there is hardly anyone willing to give himself up individually to a righteous cause? Such a fine sunny day and I have to go, but what does my death matter, if through us thousands of people are awakened and stirred to action?” – Sophia Magdalena Scholl (May 9th, 1921 – February 22nd, 1943) was a German student and anti-Nazi political [non-violent]activist. She was convicted of high treason after having been found distributing anti-war leaflets. She was executed by guillotine.
Silence is complicity. Speak out. Do not allow injustice to go unanswered.
- Speak out against any and all injustice, both large and small.
- Share the voices of those committed to exposing injustice.
- Analyze areas of your organization and life to see where you have remained neutral, in order to decide how you will become active against oppression.
- Agitate for increasing how your organization (and even yourself) encourages an environment of active responses to injustice.
Manifest in the Midwest
