In 1978 the Education Task Force of the Sonoma County, California, Commission on the Status of Women organized a local Women's History Week, timed around March 8. In 1980 President Jimmy Carter declared the first national Women's History Week, and the newly founded National Women's History Project led a coalition that lobbied Congress. Congress passed annual resolutions beginning in 1981, then designated March as Women's History Month in 1987 under Public Law 100-9. Since 1995 presidents have issued an annual proclamation each March.
CHAPTER 01
A national project takes up the cause
In 1980, a group in Santa Rosa, California, founded the National Women's History Project. Its co-founders, among them Molly Murphy MacGregor, set out to do for the whole country what Sonoma County had done at home. The project gathered educators and organizations into a coalition and turned its attention to Washington.
That same year, the cause reached the White House. President Jimmy Carter declared the first National Women's History Week, for the week of March 2 through 8, 1980. A local week was now a national one, but only by yearly declaration, and only for a week at a time.
