By Donna J. Gough
Editor In Chief
Normally, I don't pay attention to the fact that March is Women's History Month. I know that when the idea was conceptualized, it was done without black women in mind. I have started to shift my thinking in recent years because I know that women's history didn't start with white women, just as ordinary history didn't begin with white people. Scientific fact proves that the black women predated white women by thousands of years. In Africa, the beauty, strenth, and ingenuity of black women have been revered since the dawn of time. Black women have assumed leadership roles as pharaohs, queens, and army commanders long before white folks were even known to exist...although that history has been obscured in history books.
Unfortunately, one of the greatest injustices caused by European colonialism and enslavement of African people was the disenfranchisement of the black woman. Kathleen Brown, author of Good Wives, Nasty Wenches and Anxious Patriarchs: Race and Class in Colonial Virginia, says the British applied their views of white women's lack of intellect to black women and took elaborate steps to assure that black women would never be regarded as more than manual laborers and future slave producers. Ironically, in Virginia, black women were regarded as men because of the amount of labor they performed while white women were considered half a person for tax purposes.
It's not surprising that the effects of enslavement play a big role in how black women are viewed by society and within our own communities. Sometimes our own men trivialize our struggles by claiming that it is "harder to be a Black man in America." Sometimes, we as black women engage in petty bickering and competition, which in turn makes it harder for us to unite and celebrate our lives, pains, and hopes.
I don't believe in making life easy for white people. White women were able to make gains in education, employment, and voting on the backs on black women. They enjoy privilege after privilege because they can put 'white' in front of your gender, but when it comes time to include us black women in the Women's History Month festivities, we get no respect.
It was only in recent years that black women were 'invited' to participate in Women's History Month programs when white folks realized that they couldn't ignore folks like Rosa Parks, Sojourner Truth, and Angela Davis. March is Women's History Month but it should be renamed Pan-African Women's Month, for, without black women, white women wouldn't have a damn thing to celebrate.