First only celebrated as one week in Santa Rosa, California, Women’s History Week in 1978 started it all. The Education Task Force of Sonoma County created and executed the holiday annually with yearly parades and seasonal activities until the idea spread around the country. Women's rights groups and historians of the time also caught wind of the movement, pushing for it to be officially proclaimed and, in Feb. 1980, they got just that. President Jimmy Carter issued the first Presidential Proclamation declaring the Week of Mar. 8, 1980 as National Women’s History Week but this was only the start. According to the National Women's History Museum, “Presidents continued to proclaim a National Women’s History Week in March until 1987 when Congress passed Public Law 100-9, designating March as Women’s History Month Between 1988 and 1994”. After this, presidents in the United States annually presented March as National Women's History Month and have continued every year since.

Society has come so far when it comes to equal rights for the women of the United States, even if there is room for improvement. There are so many events and people that have formed the foundation for current and future generations that can easily get wiped away in the minds of the people who experience the impact that these events now have. As the National Women's History Alliance said: “Over the past seven generations, dramatic social and legal changes have been accomplished that are now so accepted that they go unnoticed by people whose lives they have utterly changed”. These dramatic changes completely alter future generations and yet these model figures get little recognition for these historic events and how they affected them. Society needs times and places to fully understand and take in the accomplishments of model figures like Sally Ride, the first-ever American woman in space; Clara Barton, the founder of the American Red Cross; Susan B. Anthony, a well-known leader in the suffrage movement; Rosa Parks, the women know for sparking the Montgomery Bus Boycott against segregation and who was later the founder of the Montgomery NAACP Youth Council; and Laura Jane Addams, a sociologist, philosopher and a leader in the women's suffrage movement.