At a party to celebrate a friend’s birthday this past weekend, I was struck by how many strong women were on that balcony, and I’m not just saying that because there were a lot of rugby players there.

(Yes, the awkward hermit went to a party, but true to form, stuck mostly with her core group. Baby steps, people.)

It seems appropriate, then, that today is International Women’s Day (the 112th observance), in the first full week of Women’s History Month.

I’ve been lucky to have had more than a few strong women in my life, from my mom and Nanny Opal, great-aunts like Nita, Isabel and Irene, and sisters-in-law Karen and Carletta to teachers like Carol Ferguson, Jo Elsken and Jennifer Rogers, and friends like Sarah Kinsey (yes, Sarah, you are strong) and Kathy Phillips. It’s because of women like them that girls and women after them have had opportunities they didn’t have, even something as seemingly simple as being able to take shop class instead of home economics. (I didn’t take either one.)

And right now, any of the usual complainers who are hate-reading right now are grousing about women being given a month to celebrate their history. I mean, how dare they get so uppity! Who cares that females are half of the world? They should bow to their betters and hesh up, right?

E.J. Dionne, in his Sunday column in The Washington Post, talked about the reasons those who’ve been left out of the narrative are getting attention now, which is basically because historians are looking at the past with new eyes and seeing things others hadn’t noticed, which means that interpretations of history can change with the new (well, old, but overlooked) information.

Dionne wrote that, in reaction, “Admirers of what was seen as more traditional history grumbled over the lifting up of ‘race, class and gender’ as Black and working-class Americans, women, and immigrants at long last became the subjects of extensive scholarship. Traditionalists asked: What happened to recounting the exploits and achievement of the leading political figures in our history, almost all of whom were white men?

“Washington, Adams, Hamilton, Madison, Lincoln and FDR never disappeared — and Lincoln has always been a special figure of fascination. One count made about a decade ago found that some 15,000 books had been written about Lincoln. But it’s true that, for a while, political history lagged behind the new bottom-up social history.”

“In recent years, political history has made a comeback, but it’s a history far more mindful of the role of Black Americans, women and workers, and far more aware of racism, sexism and elitism.”

And once you’ve seen how women and minorities have been written out of or demeaned in official history, it’s next to impossible to go back (which is one reason some are fighting so hard to keep inconvenient history out of school curricula).

Without women … well, you wouldn’t have anything, really, would you? But women have had a far greater impact on the world other than giving birth and raising children. Women have made a significant impact on virtually all facets of life, though often their contributions have been overlooked, belittled, and even appropriated by men (sometimes unintentionally, but when women are already looked down upon as less than men, even when they have more knowledge and skill, it’s a cycle that’s hard to break).

Margaret Knight invented a machine to fold and glue flat-bottomed paper bags, and a man stole the idea to patent it for himself, saying that a woman couldn’t possibly understand its mechanical complexity. Knight proved in court that she was the true inventor. Other things invented by women: the windshield wiper (Mary Anderson); the dishwasher (Josephine Cochrane): frequency-hopping/spread-spectrum technology, which provided the foundation for things like Wi-Fi and Bluetooth (Hedy Lamarr): Kevlar (Stephanie Kwolek); and many more.

Katherine Johnson and other female “computers” (racially segregated at first) at NASA helped ensure that the U.S. would safely travel to and from space, yet they were mostly unknown outside their field until Johnson was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2015, followed by 2016’s “Hidden Figures” (the book and the movie). With co-workers like Dorothy Vaughn (who headed the segregated computing team and was NASA’s first Black manager) and Mary W. Jackson (who advanced from the computing team to become NASA’s first Black female engineer), our astronauts were in good hands.

Ada Lovelace, daughter of Lord and Lady Byron, was a highly talented mathematician when she met Charles Babbage, who was working on a calculating machine he called a “difference engine.” He eventually abandoned that in favor of the “analytical engine,” which would become the basis for the world’s first digital computer. Lovelace’s work on the analytical engine made her the first computer programmer, but in Babbage’s view it was little more than an interpretation of his work.

British chemist Rosalind Franklin was pivotal to the discovery of DNA’s helical structure; her colleague Maurice Wilkins showed her X-ray images of DNA to James Watson and Francis Crick in 1953. Franklin died in 1958 from ovarian cancer, and in 1962, Watson, Crick and Wilkins received the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine; though Watson suggested Franklin and Wilkins should receive the chemistry prize, the committee generally doesn’t do posthumous nominations.

Josephine Grey Butler was integral to getting the Victorian-era Contagious Diseases Acts, which allowed the forcible examination and imprisonment of women suspected of being prostitutes while holding no consequences for the men, done away with in Great Britain. She also fought child prostitution and campaigned for women’s rights to vote and to be better educated, as well as the right for married women to own and control property in their own right.

Then there are two of Arkansas’ own. Maya Angelou was, among other things, a poet, author and civil rights activist (and the first Black woman to be featured on the U.S. quarter) who in 1993 became the first poet since Robert Frost in 1961 to make an inaugural recitation, reciting “On the Pulse of Morning” for Bill Clinton’s presidential inauguration. The recording of that recitation would go on to win a Grammy. Hattie Caraway, who was first appointed to her husband Thaddeus’ U.S. Senate seat after his death, became the first woman elected to a full term in the Senate in 1932. The Library of Congress blog notes that she was called “Silent Hattie” since she rarely spoke on the Senate floor, explaining once, “I haven’t the heart to take a minute away from the men. The poor dears love it so.”

Lord, what she would make of the people in D.C. now.

No matter how some of these women might be viewed today (Caraway joined a filibuster with fellow Southerners and voted against an anti-lynching bill and, for example), it can’t be denied that they paved the way for women today. But there’s still far to go.

As Dionne pointed out in his column, “The number of women who are voting members in one of the chambers of Congress hit a new high of 149 after the 2022 elections—106 Democrats, 42 Republicans and one independent, according to the Rutgers Center for American Women and Politics.

“We should celebrate the achievement—and also ask why our democracy still lags far behind many others in electing women. While 28 percent of the members of the U.S. Congress are women, women make up between 40 to 50 percent of the parliamentarians in such democracies as France, Iceland, Mexico, Norway, Portugal, Spain, South Africa, Sweden and Switzerland.”

But still, we’ll march on, and in the meantime celebrate the history of the women who’ve gone before. As to whether that means history has been politicized, Dionne cautions that it’s “only in the sense that political change always affects how we see history. The better view is that history is more accurate and more complete when we ask new questions, include more people’s experiences and … notice things our forebears didn’t. It’s why everyone has an interest in celebrating months in honor of those who were once written out of history altogether.”

Women, this one’s for you.