Trump’s Rewriting of the Past for Evil

The Trump administration’s basic goal on both economic and social issues is not only to return America to an imagined 1950s, but to an imagined 1890s. This Jim Crow Gilded Age administration effectively wants to make anything beginning in the Progressive Era verboten. This includes women’s suffrage. The historian Cate LiaBraaten was scheduled to give a talk to the Tennessee National Guard on women’s suffrage, when the Guard told her she couldn’t because it would make Trump mad. This is both the point and beyond ridiculous: She wrote about it in The Tennesseean:

Unfortunately, by the end of February, I received an email stating that because of Department of Defense changes, guest speakers are no longer allowed to focus on “certain groups.” The Trump administration’s position is that women’s history is unimportant and divisive. It is anything but.

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Women’s History Month itself has been around for decades, and President Reagan was the first to recognize it by presidential proclamation in 1987. Still, women’s stories are treated as add-ons, as bonuses instead of the crux of American history.

Politicians who limit the scholarship and publicity of women’s history do so because of fear. They fear the truth. There are two fundamental truths when it comes to American women’s history: women have been consistent contributors to the American project, and men have oppressed women throughout history.

Women’s history is powerful because it claims and explores these two truths, but many people are afraid of the truth.

Pioneering scholar Dr. Gerda Lerner, often known as the “godmother of women’s history,” famously stated that women’s history is the primary tool for women’s emancipation. This is not just true for women − one could substitute other groups in for “women” in that phrase. History is truth, and that sets us free.

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It is a mistake for the Trump administration to limit women’s history. I don’t think that my talk to the National Guard would have changed the world, but more exposure to women’s history does matter. We need to continue highlighting and telling these stories.

Gerda Lerner also said “women’s history is women’s right − an essential, indispensable heritage from which we can draw pride, comfort, courage, and long range vision.”

I argue that women’s history is in fact everyone’s right − a source from which all Americans can draw pride, comfort, courage, and long range vision − surely things we can all agree that our country needs.

Right. Which is exactly why Trump is looking to ban it.