Women’s Herstory Month has started at Sacramento State by offering events throughout March to emphasize the history of and issues facing women in the past and present.

The Women’s Resource Center is sponsoring Women’s Herstory Month this year.

Pat Grady, director of the Women’s Resource Center, said the first goal of the month is to recognize and make people aware of the issues women have faced throughout time and identify women and their contributions throughout history.

She said the second goal is to acknowledge the issues women face today.

“I think that it’s important, for young women particularly, to be aware that life isn’t always as it has been,” Grady said.

When Grady was a student at the University of Pennsylvania in the 1970s, she told a psychology professor that she did not face gender discrimination.

Peering over her glasses, the professor told Grady that she needed an SAT score 200 points over the men’s requirement to be admitted at the university.

Grady said this event marked the point she became a feminist because she wasn’t aware gender discrimination existed. She noticed the student ratio was five men to one woman but hadn’t understood the reason for the imbalance.

Grady said even today some individuals are not informed of the continued existence of sexism until they are taught about it.

“There still is institutionalized sexism that exists, but you’re not aware of it until you smack up against it,” Grady said. “We have moved along, but there’s still lots of road to go in really changing societal ideas about sex roles and the limits of gender because there aren’t really any limits to it.”

Grady said some examples of sexism include women making 73 cents to every dollar a man makes, and the number of women being underrepresented in math and science fields.

The events scheduled throughout this month highlight further issues of sexism nationally and internationally. Various groups on campus helped the Women’s Resource Center brainstorm and coordinate the events that Grady said change every year.

The PRIDE Center at Sac State is helping to coordinate the showing of a documentary titled “Through Thick and Thin” that deals with the struggles of binational gay and lesbian couples.

Nicole Scanlan, co-coordinator of the PRIDE Center, said the center decided to highlight this film during Women’s Herstory Month because it shows lesbian relationships and supports women’s rights and rights of the queer community.

“I think the most important message we want people to take away from the film is that when you don’t give equal rights to everyone, people suffer. And that transmits all cultures, all races, all genders, all sexes,” Scanlan said.

She said liberation in the women’s movement is more represented today, but the lesbian movement is less widely understood.

“There were some lesbians in the original movement, but they didn’t identify as lesbians. So I think there’s sometimes a blurring of the lesbian movement and the women’s movement,” Scanlan said.

She said there are similarities and divergences between the lesbian movement and women’s movement, but a closer look might be necessary to see how the two movements relate.

Sac State’s Multi-Cultural Center is co-sponsoring and helped to coordinate Women’s Herstory Month.

Charlene Martinez, director of the Multi-Cultural Center, said the center co-sponsored the month because it supports efforts to educate on social justice issues.

She feels the significance of the month is “to both educate and empower the campus community on important women’s issues.”

The Multi-Cultural Center co-sponsored a showing of the film “Made in L.A.” on March 5 that Martinez said focuses on migrant women in sweatshops subcontracted by Forever 21.

“These are women who are working and they’re here and are not being paid fairly. There are no fair labor laws for them and so they are not protected,” Martinez said.

Women and men spoke about women in the past and present that have inspired them during the first event of Women’s Herstory Month, “In Our Own Words: Honoring Our Sheroes.”

Heidi Van Beek, program adviser for clubs and organizations at Student Activities, read a couple of passages from “If the Buddha Dated” by author Charlotte Kasl. Van Beek said the passages discussed gender equality and knowing who you are.

Van Beek said Women’s Herstory Month is a great opportunity to recognize and appreciate all women.

“I sincerely believe every person deserves an opportunity. Every culture, whether it’s a gender or an ethnicity or a community, deserves to be able to have the opportunity to be recognized,” Van Beek said.

Sac State students expressed different views on the significance of Women’s Herstory Month.

Stanley Favors, senior history major, said he has been attending Women’s Herstory Month events because of his interest in history. Favors said there still isn’t equality for women today and taboos exist that women aren’t supposed to be in certain occupations.

He pointed out a marine recruiter at Sac State and said an idea exists that women aren’t supposed to enroll in the service infantry.

“If she’s got the guts to go out to perform as well or better as any man, why not if she truly wants to do that?” Favors said. “It’s almost like the glass-top of the ceiling in corporations. Women still only earn about 70 or 75 cents on the dollar for a man and the occupation is the same.”

Dawn Greene, senior English major, hadn’t heard about Women’s Herstory Month until an English professor told her class about it.

Greene attended the “Honoring Our Sheroes” event for extra credit for a course and said the passages that were read were interesting but not remarkable.

Though Greene would like the month to be significant at Sac State, she felt it wasn’t advertised.

She took a women’s history class and is aware of issues women face today. Greene felt other history classes did not make women’s history a big issue.

“Women aren’t really a big part in history until the 1920s. They don’t vote and don’t have property (prior to that),” Greene said.

Women’s History Month is recognized nationally every March. Since Grady became the director in 1999, the Women’s Resource Center has sponsored and organized Women’s Herstory Month.

The Women’s Resource Center customized the name from “history” to “herstory” because the month is celebrating the stories of women who have been written out of history.

“We don’t have the identification of women and their roles in any areas in our history – it could be art or politics or education. To kind of make it more focused, we changed it to ‘herstory’ from ‘history,'” Grady said.

Ashley Downton can be reached at [email protected].