While the meanings are many, several matters come to the forefront for me as I think about this question. Here are a few of my own reflections:

Celebrating Women’s History Month means recognizing women participate in history. While this statement may seem uncontroversial, it is, on occasion and in some contexts, a revolutionary notion. In some contexts, women—both as individuals and the term itself—have been understood as outside of history or culture, as universal or possessing essential characteristics that transcend time. Celebrating Women’s History Month challenges this. It reminds us that we celebrate women’s histories rather than a unitary history.

Moreover, asking what it means to celebrate can help us move beyond “celebratory history” per se to a more engaged, critical reflection on those histories. Doing so calls us to recognize the flaws as well as the successes of historical figures. To remember that recognizing women’s role in history asks us to move not just from a “great men” approach to history to a “great women” approach, but beyond that, it asks us to rethink what is worthy of celebration or counts as greatness, and to move toward a more inclusive approach to understanding our past, present, and future.

And, such an approach pushes us to what Kimberle Crenshaw taught us to call an intersectional approach. While we have come to use her term to refer to ways particular axes of diversity meet in lives and thus to re-emphasize the immense variety of women’s histories, Crenshaw reminds us to look to the structures that shape lives as also part of women’s history.

So, as I write this I think of Crenshaw and Gerda Lerner, and many more. I think of two quotations on which I often ruminate:

Anonymous was a Woman. (a modification of Virginia Woolf’s point)

and

One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman. (Simone de Beauvoir)

Across a lifetime, the meaning of these quotations, for me, has changed. So, too, has the meaning of Women’s History Month.

Yes, as we celebrate, we ask questions. We always will. We continue to learn, to build, to move forward grounded in critical inquiry and hope.

Susan Henking
Interim President

The role of women in mathematics has a long and storied past, especially in the original quadrivium—arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy (well, it was astrology back then; let’s call it astronomy instead). 

Hypatia of Alexandria (c. 370–415) loved “practical science,” primarily embracing the role of teacher. She drafted new versions of classic mathematics and astronomy texts, adding her own commentaries, with the intent to make these more accessible and understandable for her students. Often, when rewriting classics, she improved upon them, such as when she added new astronomical tables to Ptolemy’s text using a novel base-60 calculation technique, with a tool similar to an abacus, to predict when certain events, such as planetary conjunctions, would occur.

Augusta Ada Byron Lovelace (1815–1852) broke barriers into the patriarchal world of science and mathematics, with encouragement from her mother (the estranged wife of the poet Lord Byron). In her teens, she was introduced to Charles Babbage and was instrumental in translating others’ work and adding her own original commentary. She created one of the first algorithms designed for a computing machine. Ada believed that the limits of a computing machine went beyond number-crunching. She imagined the possibility of using such machines to create complex patterns to translate into music—she could be credited as a pioneer of electronic dance music (EDM)!

While Ada was adamant that machines would not do more than what their human controllers told the machines to do, her pioneering work has inspired many scientists, programmers, artists, and game developers.

Hypatia would be pleased that Salem Academy and College provides a climate where women research, teach, and learn the liberal arts unfettered. Ada, too, would be proud, especially if she knew of the Academy’s Robotics Team and the accomplishments of Salem graduates.

The Gramley Library website has a section set up with resources for Women’s History Month.