March is one of my favorite months. It’s a fantastic month: it’s my birthday month, Spring Break is in March and March is also Women’s History Month.

Women’s History Month is important. Think of a handful of major holidays; they’re all centered around dudes. Don’t get me wrong, the vast majority of them are awesome dudes, but dudes just the same: President’s Day, Columbus Day … even Valentine’s day, St. Patrick’s day, Christmas, and Easter are all centered around men if you really want to go there.

Think about it — we live in a country in which Christopher Columbus gets a day dedicated to him while amazing women like Abigail Adams, Rosa Parks, Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr, Wilma Mankiller, Eleanor Roosevelt, Sojourner Truth, Margaret Sanger, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Brenda Howard, Lyda Conley, Sally Ride, Sacajawea, Nellie Bly, Ada Deer, Ida B. Wells and so many more get maybe a paragraph in the history text book and are set aside.

March is for the women. Why don’t the School of Medicine and the pre-med society have a celebration in January for Elizabeth Blackwell, the first woman in the U.S. to earn a medical degree?

Let’s have the journalism department talk about early influential women reporters like Ida B. Wells and Nellie Bly and what they did for the field.

Let’s have the Nursing School have an event to talk about Lydia Hall, Margaret Sanger and Florence Nightingale.

The education department could team

up with other organizations to talk about activists like Malala Yousufzai and the status of education for women in other countries.

Rosalind Franklin helped unlock the secrets of DNA and is rarely ever acknowledged in the original research. I hear we have pretty awesome science programs here at Creighton, it would be cool to see how research evolved from that as well as women’s roles in scientific research — we all know how much Creighton loves research.

Frances Perkins was the first woman appointed to a U.S. Cabinet post; I think the political science department could have a really cool symposium about the history of women in politics. For example, why were Hillary Clinton’s pantsuits so worth talking about when she was literally helping to run the country?

There is so much we could do and there is so much that we just don’t know about the awesome women in our history. Did you know that John Hopkins University Medical School was founded after a donation from Mary Elizabeth Garrett with the stipulation that men and women would have to have an equal shot of getting in? That was the first modern medical school in the U.S., and it was founded with the intent for equality between genders.

Coincidentally, both Creighton University and its Medical School were founded with money from women. I’m just pointing this out for the parallel and because we have Jack and Ed’s but no Mary and Sarah’s.

Don’t get that look on your face. Put down your fedora and listen to me for a minute. March is a stand-in month for all of those women who have changed the world and are forgotten. Why doesn’t Marie Curie have a day? Who decided that Mae C. Jemison and Sally Ride going up into space wasn’t worth mention? Let’s talk about the unsinkable Molly Brown and how exactly she got that name. Spoiler alert: she got that name because of all of the lives she saved in the aftermath of the Titanic sinking. Let’s talk about why Helen Keller and Corretta Scott King are influential figures other than her disability and her husband. Let’s talk about these things.

This is what Women’s History Month is for — education. It’s about informing you about all of these women who rock. The Lieben Center for Women has some interesting stuff planned, as they should, and hopefully other organizations will join in the fun. There are more women students here than men; let’s learn about the history that helped us get here.