Celebrate Women's History Month at Trexler Library
March is Women’s History Month, and Trexler Library is here to help you recognize it with a display in our lobby and an online resource guide. Our display this year focuses on women who achieved great things but did not get recognition at the time for their work. It includes:
- Hedy Lamarr, the Hollywood actress who also invented frequency-hopping speed spectrum technology which is the basis for Bluetooth and WiFi;
- Rosalind Franklin, the chemist and X-ray crystallographer whose work was central to the discovery of DNA; and
- Sybil Ludington, who at 16 made an all-night horseback ride to alert militia of the advancing British forces during the Revolutionary War.
You can learn about these women and more at the display in our lobby and our Women’s History Month guide all month long. Women’s History Month began as an effort in the 1970s to revise school curriculum in California to better reflect the role women played throughout US history. This lead to a Women’s History Week in 1978, correlating with March 8, International Women’s Day. In 1980, the National Women’s History Project along with other advocacy groups and historians successfully lobbied for national recognition: President Jimmy Carter declared the week of March 8, 1980 as National Women’s History Week by Presidential Proclamation. In 1987, Congress passes Public Law 100-9, designating March as Women’s History Month.