Women’s History is Being Deleted—And It’s Not About Merit
History Doesn’t Vanish—It’s Erased
When the people erasing history are the least qualified to lead, we have to ask: What are they so afraid of?
Something is happening.
Quietly.
Systematically.
And most people don’t even know it’s underway.
You won’t hear about it on the nightly news. There won’t be a siren. No front-page headlines.
Just a quiet, digital deletion—
Of thousands of names.
Thousands of stories.
Entire legacies of service, risk, and sacrifice… gone.
As I watched Greta Gerwig’s Little Women with my mom and sister at Field Hall’s Women’s History Month celebration the other night, I was reminded that Jo March’s battle to have her voice heard is far from over—because even now, women’s stories are being erased.
The struggle to be seen, to be heard, to have one’s work recognized as valuable—it’s not just a personal battle.
It’s political.
It’s historical.
It almost happened to me in high school.
And it’s happening right now.
The Power of a Community That Says No
I grew up in a small town. A town where fairness was valued.
A town where when the girls’ basketball team was the one dominating the playoffs, we were the ones who played in the prime 7 PM slot—because that’s when the community could show up for us.
We packed the stands.
We traded practice times with the boys’ team every other week.
Our coach even pulled some of the varsity boys into practice against us to push us to improve. (And we beat them sometimes.)
We were respected. Our skills and our success were recognized.
And then we got a new superintendent.
He came in with an agenda.
First? Move the girls’ team out of the gym entirely –to the cafetorium, which wasn’t even a full-sized basketball court. He also suggested we could practice before school –so the boys team would have full access to the gym in the afternoon and evening.
The second thing he tried? Taking away our prime-time games and moving us to the 4:15 PM game slot.
His reasoning?
Well, he might not have said it outright.
But it was clear: He didn’t believe girls’ basketball deserved the spotlight.
But here’s the thing: The community pushed back.
And we won.
The girls’ team stayed in the gym. We continued trading gym times with the boys. We kept our 7 PM games. The superintendent had to back down.
This was not a fight about politics.
This was a fight about fairness. About values. About doing what’s right.
People in my town—regardless of party, background, or beliefs—stood up for the truth.
They saw what was happening and said, “No. That’s not how we do things here.”
And that’s what we need now … in our country.
This Isn’t Just My Story—It’s a Pattern
The latest example of the attempted erasure of women?
Women who served in the military.
The Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASP) were among the first women to fly military aircraft in WWII. Over 25,000 applied for this dangerous work. Only 1,074 were accepted. They ferried new planes, tested overhauled ones, and even flew as live target practice for training gunners.
Thirty-eight of them died serving a country that refused to drape a flag over their coffins.
Now, their photographs and records—along with tens of thousands of others documenting women and minorities in the military—are being deleted from government archives as part of Trump’s latest executive order under Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.
The justification? A return to “merit.”
Which begs the question: Whose merit?
Hegseth himself, a Fox News loyalist with no experience managing anything close to the scale of the Defense Department, is hardly a beacon of qualification.
The very people who scream “merit” are the same ones whose own credentials wouldn’t survive scrutiny. And yet, they’re in power, wielding the delete key as if history itself is an inconvenience.
Women Shouldn’t Be Footnotes in History—Without Us There Wouldn’t BE History
We need to push back against the erasure of women’s history not because it’s a political issue, but because it’s the truth.
Because truth matters. Because fairness matters. Because recognizing real achievement matters.
When women’s history is deleted from military archives, it’s not just about the past.
It’s about the future.
It’s about what young girls see when they look back and look ahead.
Will they see a legacy of courage and contribution? Or will they see blank spaces where their stories should have been?
The most dangerous thing women can do is refuse to disappear.
So let’s do exactly that.
Let’s tell these stories. Let’s demand they be preserved.
Let’s remind those in power that women are not footnotes in history—we are the creators of it. The ones who birth every leader, every soldier, every man who’s ever tried to erase us.
