The elimination of Women's History Month in March, 2110

March 10, 2110 (New York): Congress has abolished Women’s History Month, a tradition that has lasted 123 years, and the culminating point in women’s efforts to establish a nationally recognized awareness event that began almost 200 years ago with the first International Women’s Day. Susan Qoppa, America’s 10th female president, said in a speech last week that women should rejoice at the fact that awareness is “no longer necessary, as institutions across this nation have succeeded in implementing a most democratic and veracious education that celebrates women’s role in history not merely as a supplement, but as an integral part of history itself.”

Interestingly, a Spectator article from exactly a century ago published a series of columns regarding the importance of Women’s History Month. In answer to the question, “Why should we continue to celebrate Women’s History Month?” a professor wrote, “So that women do not disappear again from history.” We can only imagine how marginal women’s literature must have been at Columbia back in those days.

Up until the 2050s Columbia housed many non-digital libraries filled with antiquarian paper-made books, the most popular one being Butler Library (where the headquarters for 4PBV, or Past Professors and Prominent Philosophers Brain Vats, is currently located). Engraved around Butler were names of notable writers and politicians, the bulk of which were male and white, whose works featured the required readings for the Core Curriculum at Columbia College. Inspired by Barnard’s version of the undergraduate program titled “Reinventing Literary History” that sought to include women writers and philosophers into the literary canon, Columbia began a revolutionary rewriting of the Core in the mid-21st century, foreshadowing the physical and symbolic demolition of the historic library.

This revision was not a complete substitution; works of undeniably influential figures like Homer, Plato, Aristotle, and Shakespeare remained in place, as you 22nd century Lit Hum folks know. The revision did, however, promise to revive the works of women writers and philosophers that have been buried for centuries. As scholar Jane Duran wrote in 2006, “It is clear now that many women who wrote and thought extensively about philosophical topics were considered to be philosophers during their time—there are certainly more such women than we might first think—and their work was lost or ignored only at a later point.”

“Man is defined as a human being and a woman as a female,” Simone de Beauvoir wrote. “Whenever she behaves as a human being she is said to imitate the male.” As though to predict the reputation of her own philosophical works, de Beauvoir was seen merely as Jean-Paul Sartre’s shadow for most of modern history. Things have definitely changed a lot since then, as the White House First Husband’s Club recently sponsored a public philosophical discussion on de Beauvoir’s works, highlighting her achievements as a renowned individual.

Undergraduates in this busy midterm season are currently scrambling through their portable 3-D digital documents that outline “at least 16 women philosophers in the classical world, 17 women philosophers from 500-1600, and over 30 from 1600-1900,” as dictated by the modified “History of Philosophy” syllabus that was inspired by Mary Ellen Waithe’s four-volume history books. This was unheard of at Columbia when my great-grandmother, Yurina Ko, was studying philosophy at Barnard in the 21st century Aughts. In her columns for the Spectator, the most cited philosophers were almost all male, like Hume and Rousseau, the latter of which—as we all know—advocated an inferior education for girls. In the early 2000s students were only able to name a few women philosophers like Anne Conway and Mary Wollstonecraft, as the institution still failed to recognize all of the others. It is truly a shame that Ko cannot witness how far we’ve come in this world where the term “glass ceiling” is as archaic as “laptop.”

The term “feminism,” however, persists in philosophy classes not so much as a political ideology, but a historical one. “It is a mistake,” said Susan James in 2000, “to think of feminism as a single philosophical doctrine, or as implying an agreed political program.” Christia Mercer, a philosophy professor at Columbia who taught a course called “Philosophy and Feminism,” wrote in 2008 that “feminism broadly conceived is not just a legal and political movement whose goal is equality. It has expanded its range to the examination of the very nature of self and the categories through which we see the world.” And indeed it has.

I wonder if any philosopher of a bygone society could have predicted our tremendous progress in gender equality. John Stuart Mill wrote in 1869 that treating women as equals would “naturally appear unnatural.” With this attitude, it’s about time that we celebrate, for the status quo proudly justifies, a most natural elimination of Women’s History Month.

Yurina Ko is a Barnard College junior majoring in philosophy. She is a senior editor of the Columbia Political Review. 2+2=5 runs alternate Wednesdays.