A Women’s History Month Reflection on Voice, Protest, and Persistence
March has always felt like a turning point.
The light shifts, the days are getting longer. And, especially after this last gloomy, perpetually cold, damp, foggy winter, it finally feels like someone finally took the lid off of winter. Life begins, almost quietly, to move forward again.
There’s a small linguistic coincidence tucked into the calendar that I love:
March 4 is the only day of the year that doubles as a command: march forth.
I saw a version of that idea recently shared by the Instagram account @WordPorn:
Leave behind what didn’t serve you. Walk boldly into everything that’s waiting.
It feels especially fitting during Women’s History Month, when we pause to remember the women who did exactly that: stepping forward when the world expected them to remain quiet.
Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means for women to “step forward.”
I just finished reading The Book Club for Troublesome Women, and what stayed with me most wasn’t just the story itself, but the idea threaded throughout it, that women who speak up, question, organize, or push back have almost always been labeled in some way.
Troublesome.
Difficult.
Too much.
If you’ve read it, you may remember the quiet, infuriating moments that linger long after you close the book, like when Bitsy, despite being at the top of her class, with a semester remaining, is denied a recommendation letter for veterinary school because she will “likely just get married anyway.”
Or Viv, a brilliant nurse who served in combat during wartime, already raising six children, is unable to sign for her own birth control prescription without her husband present. By the time that was arranged, she was pregnant with her seventh child, and her plans to return to her career in nursing? Quietly and completely rerouted.
I think sometimes about how far we’ve come. I think too that when I was born, my mother could not have her own bank account or her own credit card. Or buy her own home. When she co-signed (without my father) for my first bank account when I turned 13, I wish I could have known what that might have meant to her. I, of course, have known nothing different all these decades...
And yet, reading about the “Betty’s” in Marie Bostwick’s novel, what struck me is how familiar that framing still feels.
Because here we are, in 2026, and we’re still hearing variations of the same thing.
Recently, I came across the now-infamous and public commentary describing women, again, as “meddlesome and quarrelsome.”
And it landed exactly the way you’d expect.
Maddening.
Dismissive.
Unsurprising.
Because the language changes, but the sentiment doesn’t.
And yet.
On March 28, I stood among a huge gathering of people who had absolutely no intention of being quiet.
There were signs; some funny, some sharp, some deeply personal.
There were conversations happening between strangers like they’d known each other for years. Compliments on signs, asking to take photos of signs (my friend and I had a great system - she asked permission and I snapped the pics for us), cheers, honking, oh so much honking. Literal joy.
There was that unmistakable energy of people who had decided, collectively, to show up. In record numbers around the nation, the world.
Not perfectly. Not uniformly. But intentionally. Like the mom driving by, honking with her four or five-year-old son in his car seat in the back seat, enthusiastically holding up his sign that read: "Hate will not make America great." No, kiddo, it will not - you give me hope!
And standing there, it struck me how often the act of showing up…of speaking, questioning, participating, gets reframed as something negative.
Meddlesome.
Quarrelsome.
As if engagement itself is the problem.
And when you think about it, really think about it, you realize that engagement itself is the problem. Speaking up. Voting. Expecting equality.
But what if we looked at those words differently?
What if meddlesome simply meant paying attention?
What if quarrelsome meant refusing to accept what isn’t right?
What if those labels were never really about behavior?
What if those labels were really all about discomfort?
Because historically, women who have moved things forward have rarely been described as agreeable.
They’ve been described as disruptive. Persistent. Inconvenient.
Necessary.
So I decided to reclaim it.
I took those words...meddlesome & quarrelsome... and turned them into something visible.
Something a little playful. A little defiant.
Something you could stick on a laptop, or your water bottle, or send to a friend who gets it.
They’re bright. A little retro. Slightly irreverent.
Because sometimes the best response isn’t silence; it’s a raised eyebrow and sharing a knowing look: “I see you…”
How appropriate it is that march forth is at the opening of Women’s History Month - they way I see it, it is honoring those women before us who did just that, and extends the same invitation to us to do the same, for those who will come behind us. Maybe this is one small way of doing that.
Not grand gestures. Not perfect words.
Just…
Showing up.
Speaking up.
Making things.
Taking up space.
Even when - especially when - there are those who would prefer we didn’t.
Some words are meant to quiet us.
Others, we get to reclaim.
I’ll close with a thought I came across on the @wetheurban on Instagram
Close March with acceptance.
You don’t have to understand everything to make peace with it.
I hope you find yourself Meddlesome & Quarrelsome, when the moment(s) deserve it.
I would love to hear from you...which words have you been called...and what have you chosen to reclaim? Have you ever been considered meddlesome or quarrelsome?
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