I once found myself in a heated discussion with a former teacher about why women’s accomplishments were rarely taught in school and he snapped, “Well, nearly every major achievement for mankind was developed by a man. Think about it.”

As a budding feminist I understood what he said was sexist, what left me speechless was my inability to determine what constituted as a women’s achievement for humankind. Women’s History Month had been a recent addition to education when I graduated from high school so the only women I knew enough about to speak on were the two that Black History Month taught me, Harriet Tubman and Rosa Parks and the one female poet I could remember Emily Dickenson. And how a poet contributed to the success of a society, I had no idea.

My educational hierarchy was the use of wars as a framework for history, artists without muses, founding fathers, male inventors, pilgrims and Indians, men without children and presidents. The only mother I heard anything about was mommy dearest and I believed that the only political role a woman could achieve was best dressed First Lady or be a virginal teenager with serious monarchial connections. I was taught to grammatically default to the masculine form. So councilman, fireman, policeman were all considered gender neutral despite the illogicality of it. When I did find myself praying for a miracle, I even prayed to a male deity.

Thankfully feminism came to the rescue and rewarded me with Maria Celeste Galilei, Eleanor Roosevelt, Temple Grandin, Shirley Chisholm, the Cone sisters,Abigail Adams and Clara Barton. But typing the words US History into Google tonight revealed not much has changed in the teaching of history in schools over the last 20 years. Much more needs to be done if our children are going to recognize that Camille Claudel is synonymous with Auguste Rodin, Marie and Irene Curie are mother-daughter Nobel Prize winners and Hedy Lamarr was more than just a great beauty.

Women’s History Month gives children the right to their maternalistic inheritance and is a reminder to the world that women are invaluable to humankind.