By REP. JAMIE ALLARD
Have you seen the recent Hershey commercial celebrating Women’s History Month?
The “She” bar is intended to uplift women, and “shine a light on the women and girls who inspire us every day.”
The ad features a biological male dressed as a woman — transgender activist Fae Johnstone. This year the company’s initiative to celebrate and uplift women will feature the pictures of five inspiring women on the candy bar wrappers. One of them is Johnstone. Immediately the ad received harsh criticism and backlash on social media: “Hershey is erasing women.”
I am extremely concerned about the future for my daughters. How will they thrive in a world where if a woman can do it, a man can do it better? In a world where a biological male can take their crown in a beauty pageant, or take their gold in a swim meet? In a world where a man can be a mother? The woke mob is erasing women.
Feminism is no longer helping women. We have fought long and hard to achieve the freedom of equality with men. And now an angry mob that denies God and defies science is trying to make us inferior again by stripping us of the very definition of what it means to be a woman. I will not sit idly by and watch as we are stripped of womanhood. Like the brave women before us who changed history, we have a voice and it’s time to use it.
As a Junior Olympic track athlete in California, I was grateful for the women ahead of me who paved the way so I could compete at that level. My two daughters are depending on me to fight for their futures and pass them the baton. I will fight to keep the path open for them. If men are allowed to be women and enter into physical competition with women, women will lose. Our grandmothers did not stand on the front lines for women’s suffrage just so men could claim to be women and take trophies from females.
What people choose to do with their sexuality is their private business, but a small percentage of the world seems hell-bent on forcing the rest of us to approve of something that is none of our business in the first place.
March is National Women’s History Month. The idea was birthed in Sonoma County in 1978 with the development of a Women’s Week to address the problem that women’s history was unknown in the curriculum. The idea was popular and quickly garnered support as it spread across the country.
By 1980 President Carter issued the first presidential proclamation declaring the week of March 8th as National Women’s History Week. President Carter said, “From the first settlers who came to our shores, from the first American Indian families who befriended them, men and women have worked together to build this nation. Too often the women were unsung and sometimes their contributions went unnoticed. But the achievements, leadership, courage, strength and love of the women who build America was as vital as that of the men whose names we know so well.”
The Women’s History Week initiative was an effective way to achieve equity goals in the classroom. There were parades and essay contests and public-school curriculum developed to highlight women in history. By 1986, 14 states had adopted March as Women’s History Month followed by Congress establishing National Women’s History Month in 1987.
On March 3, 1913, the first Alaska Territorial Legislature convened in the Elks Lodge building in Juneau. 110 years ago, the first act of the 23-member, all-male legislature was to unanimously grant Alaska women the right to vote. Within a decade, Alaskan Natives were given the right to vote.
It was in very recent history that women earned the right to own property, the right to vote, the right to divorce, or the right to equal pay. We fought for the right to be in the Olympics, attend medical school, or buy a house. This month as we focus on how far we have come, let us not forget what makes us women. We are equal but different. Feminism is supposed to empower women, not erase them. How can we tout a Women’s History Month if we deny that women are biologically unique? How can we honor the women who had the courage to stand up to men making arbitrary rules over us if we allow men to be us?
Femininity and masculinity are sacred and different and good. This March, let’s honor the women who came before us by protecting the women after us. We must embrace and defend those sacred spaces of womanhood. Our daughters will not be erased.
Rep. Jamie Allard serves in the Alaska Legislature on behalf of Eagle River.
