Spring semester of my freshman year I took Intro to Women’s Studies. That March to celebrate Women’s History Month Lee Sharkey booked the kiosk in the Student Center and asked for volunteers to take a week and decorate the kiosk for the month. Faye Joost and I were the first to volunteer.

We took one weekend and poured over our magazines and our own photo albums looking for women who exemplified women’s history for us. We chose artists, writers, teachers, doctors, and musicians. We found poems and artwork by female artists and friends. And we chose to include our own photographs of our friends and family: mothers, grandmothers, and great-grandmothers. We spent a Sunday afternoon putting the kiosk together, pasting up pictures and making sure everything was the way we wanted it.

Then two days later we found that someone had stolen an original photograph a friend of mine had taken while in art school and given to me as a gift. I was crushed.

Faye and I decided that we had been too trusting. Maybe we had shared too much. We took back all of our personal artifacts. The kiosk was suddenly bare, but I could not stand to lose another thing.

Now three years later it is time for me to commemorate Women’s History Month again. I have shared this story because I realized something as I looked back after so much time. Maybe Faye and I had been naive to trust that people would not assume ownership of what wasn’t theirs. But we had, (though we did not realize it at the time), embraced what is at the very core of this month’s celebration.

When we celebrate women’s history month we are not just celebrating the achievements of the women who came before us. We celebrate our own lives and achievements. In this way our history will have merit and our future will flourish.

And we have much to celebrate this year. UMF has approved the women’s studies major. Some of the first women to graduate from UMF with individualized Women’s Studies majors are now going on to graduate women’s studies programs and more will follow.

That is women’s history worth celebrating.