How Women's History Month came to be
The year was 1972. In a high school classroom in Northern California, a student asked his teacher a timely question: What is the women's movement?
Shirley Chisholm had just made history as the first African-American to seek a presidential nomination from a major party. Title IX, the federal law that prohibits gender discrimination in education and sports had passed, and Gloria Steinem and Dorothy Pitman Hughes had launched Ms. Magazine. Still, little information about the history of half the population was readily available to students.
Molly MacGregor, then a 24-year-old, 11th-grade history teacher in Santa Rosa, Calif., came up near empty-handed in trying to answer her student's question. The only item on women's history she could find in
