During the 1830s and 1840s, the movement to abolish slavery in the United States was gaining momentum. Oddly, many of those calling for justice for the enslaved refused to allow women’s rights advocates to participate in their crusade. This prompted activists such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott to organize the Seneca Falls Convention in upstate New York during two days in July of 1848.
One of the most significant developments at this convention was the creation of the Declaration of Sentiments, a foundational document in the long struggle for women’s rights.
I offer this now after reading We the Women: The Hidden Heroes Who Shaped America (2026) by prominent Emmy Award winning journalist Norah O’Donnell, a book I chose in consideration of Women’s History Month. It also seemed a good time to reflect on the role of women in our nation’s history because many powerful figures in our government have spent the last decade denouncing, both directly and indirectly, much of the progress that has been made in regard to civil rights.
O’Donnell’s timely book portrays dozens of individual characters who, throughout United States history, have made significant contributions, often without recognition. It is the correction of this long-standing oversight for which we celebrate Women’s History Month. Organized into five fifty-year blocks, beginning with 1776-1826, We the Women is O’Donnell’s contribution to and celebration of the upcoming Semiquincentennial—“half of 500,” or 250th anniversary—of the signing of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776.
The Declaration of Sentiments, largely written by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and featured prominently in O’Donnell’s enlightening book, was intentionally modeled after the Declaration of Independence.
So that you might properly appreciate the significance of the Semiquincentennial, you’ll recall that the Declaration of Independence is held up not only as the founding document of our country but also because it is crafted beautifully with a magical cadence demanding that the world pay attention to what the new country is up to.
It begins by honoring the obligation that, when one is embarking on such a significant journey, it is demanded of those participating to announce the separation to the world. The document then proclaims that all men have natural rights granted by their “Creator” and therefore not to be trifled with. What follows is a long list of grievances against King George III that document the decade-long violation of those rights, and describe how previous demands for redress of these grievances had been ignored. Finally, in the flowery language flowing from Thomas Jefferson’s pen, American independence is declared to the world.
The Declaration of Sentiments follows a similar literary rhythm. However, whereas the colonists declared independence because King George III had repeatedly violated the natural rights of subjects of the Crown, the Declaration of Sentiments includes a long list of grievances describing how the men in society had violated the natural rights of women, in direct contradiction of the founding document of the nation.
There are more than a dozen grievances listed in the Declaration of Sentiments. For example, “He [man] has compelled her to submit to laws, in the formation of which she had no voice.” “He has taken from her all right in property, even to the wages she earns.” “He has denied her the facilities for obtaining a thorough education – all colleges being closed against her.”
The final grievance captures the spirit of the entire declaration and is put forth by Norah O’Donnell as the driving sentiment of the struggle for women’s rights, and it describes the intimate behavior of men toward women: “He has endeavored, in every way that he could to destroy her confidence in her own powers, to lessen her self-respect, and to make her willing to lead a dependent and abject life.”
While reading We the Women, I was pleased to discover that I was relatively familiar with many of these women and their accomplishments; of course, it has been my job to know. To my chagrin, however, I also discovered several women whose names I had never seen in print, which suggests that maybe I hadn’t done my job as well as I previously presumed. And this, my friends, is the reason we set aside a part of our calendar each year to address the deficiency, to remedy the abject failure of the journalist and the historian.
Here are a few examples of my effort to do just that.
The key to making history books is that someone takes the time to write things down. It is apt then that Norah O’Donnell’s first mini-biography is that of Mary Katherine Goddard, the “first female postmaster in the United States.” In this position, Goddard’s primary responsibility was “one of the country’s most important jobs: printing and distributing its founding documents.”
Several months after declaring independence, it became Goddard’s job to print the official versions of the sacred document. “It was the first time,” as O’Donnell writes, “that the country would learn the names of almost every signer of the Declaration. America was at war, and they needed to know the men leading the charge.” The country also heard of Mary Katherine Goddard, the only woman whose name, as printer, is found on the founding document.
I’m going to guess that, even as you may have heard of Mary Katherine Goddard, this is the first time you have seen this name: Zitkala-Ša. In the early twentieth century, Zitkala-Ša wrote of her experiences in a Native American boarding school whose purpose was to force her to shed her own culture and adopt another. O’Donnell cites an article Zitkala-Ša wrote for the Atlantic Monthly describing her indoctrination into the school: “I cried aloud, shaking my head all the while until I felt the cold blades of the scissors against my neck, and heard them gnaw off one of my thick braids. Then I lost my spirit.” We shave the heads of prisoners, too.
Another group of women I had never heard of is The Hello Girls of World War I. Working as switchboard operators, some of these women worked so “near the front lines” that they had “gas masks and helmets on hand for emergencies.” By facilitating communication between officers and troops in the trenches, among other things, over 200 brave women “connected 150,000 calls a day at their busiest.” And, as O’Donnell writes, these women “were key to the Allied victory.”
I have actually heard of the Six Triple Eight, but only because a recent movie portrayed their work. In the final year of World War II, as O’Donnell notes, the “6888 Central Postal Directory Battalion” was “the only all female battalion of Black women in the Women’s Army Corps (WAC)” to serve in the war. Their job was to distribute a massive backlog of mail for troops on their march across Europe allowing the soldiers to communicate with loved ones back home. The Six Triple Eight motto was: No Mail, Low Morale. They were magnificently successful in their work even as it was believed that those who had put them to the task expected the Black women to fail.
Just as Black soldiers fighting in World War II were not properly recognized for their service. It wasn’t until 2025 that the Six Triple Eight received the Congressional Gold Medal. “Sadly,” as O’Donnell writes, “only two members of the battalion were still alive at the time” of the ceremony. And while the awarding of the Congressional Gold Medal was signed into law in 2022, it is not clear why the actual ceremony wasn’t held until 2025. I’d like to think that the 2024 Netflix film The Six Triple Eight had a bit to do with it; further evidence, perhaps, that the job of correcting the record requires a bit of pressure.
And this is exactly what Norah O’Donnell’s informative book does, which is the very purpose of Women’s History Month: correcting the record.
As evidence of the viability and purpose of Women’s History Month, O’Donnell cites Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson who, as a teenager, was inspired by the story of Constance Baker Motley, the first woman of color to argue before the highest court in the land. In this capacity, Motley won nine out of the ten cases she argued before the Supreme Court in the early 1960s, the era in which the United States finally began to come to terms with its long history of discrimination and segregation.
While acknowledging that there is still work to be done in the area of women’s rights, O’Donnell closes her fine book with the last fifty years, her lifetime. In that time, our lifetime, great gains have been made for women in terms of legal equality, educational access, economic and cultural power, advances within the military and medicine. Indeed, the progress we’ve made reflects directly upon the demand of the 1848 Declaration of Sentiments.
Despite some continuing disparities in these areas, and due to the widespread presence of women throughout most institutions within American society, O’Donnell writes that, “What’s changed in the last fifty years is that women are no longer asking to be remembered. They’ve become impossible to ignore.”
And finally, as to the young women who have come of age in an era where women stand on a largely equal footing with men, but also at a time when powerful men are calling for a return to some other period of alleged American greatness, O’Donnell advises that the struggle of these women should not be forgotten and that the gains made should not be taken for granted.
