Writing women’s history is a race against time. To unearth the documents before they rot, to record her voice before memories fade, to find the connections before they’re cut by more dominant narratives have always been the challenges for those preserving the record of women’s contributions.
These obstacles are compounded when it comes to the histories of male-dominated fields, where women are often omitted as a matter of course, military history being a chief example.
But now, there is another threat to women’s history, particularly the hard-won gains in women’s military history: the erasure of that which has already been preserved, documented, and archived.
In March of 2025, anti-DEI orders from the Oval Office had the cascading effect of the DOD erasing over 26,000 images from their archives of female, people of color, and LGBTQ+ service members. More than photographs of individuals, these images constituted a visual record of who fought and sacrificed for our country and democracy.
Taken together, these conscious and unconscious attempts to write women out of history constitute a clear and present danger to women’s capacity to participate in democracy. Why? Because if our contributions are erased, so is the record of our necessity and right to be full citizens.
This week on the Female Body Politic, I sat down with Military Women’s Memorial Chief Impact Officer Cathleen Pearl, along with photojournalist and the Visual Truth Matters campaign founder Michelle Riley, to discuss these twin threats to women’s history that constitute an existential threat to our ability to participate in democracy.
And, of course, we dive into what these two dynamos are doing to protect, preserve, and write women’s history - and how you can help.
Tune in and don’t forget to subscribe for more stories, insights, and analysis of 250 years of women’s participation in American democracy.
