Vanishing act: The erasure of women from America’s story

It’s happening now. And if we don’t name it and fight it, history will forget us—again.

By Jean Kilbourne

What happens when a country begins to forget its women?

You won’t see a headline. You might not even notice at first. A name disappears here, a page goes dark there. A general dismissed. A scientist’s legacy erased.

This is how erasure works—not with a bang but with quiet deletion. This time, it’s not an accident. It’s an agenda.

For years, I’ve studied how women are underestimated, objectified, and exploited. Still, I didn’t expect us to vanish from the country’s national memory—almost overnight.

Since returning to office, President Donald Trump has led a deliberate purge of women from public view, starting with the military. Right away, Adm. Linda Fagan, the first woman to lead a branch of the U.S. Armed Forces, was fired and given just three hours to vacate her home. In the following weeks, other high-ranking women were dismissed.

The National Institutes of Health has received guidance discouraging the use of words like women, female, and feminism. NASA has removed web content that celebrates women in leadership. Even President Joe Biden’s 2024 executive order directing the National Park Service to elevate women’s stories at historical sites has been scrubbed.

At a rally, Trump claimed he would “protect women, whether they like it or not”—a statement made even more chilling by his history: He was found liable for sexual assault and credibly accused by over two dozen women.

The deeper danger here isn't only censorship—it's also invisibility. Erasure. A nation in which girls grow up seeing fewer examples of women in power, and boys are taught to devalue them accordingly.

“If you erase the memory, we really forget the people,” historian Alessio Ponzio told NPR. “It’s an act of violence that is very subtle but can really destroy the psychology of people.”

Stories matter. They shape our sense of what’s possible. Author Lydia Millet wrote, “Action depends on a perception of possibility.” If women are missing from the narrative, how can the next generation imagine themselves in it?

It is so important that, right now, we challenge every deletion, question every omission, and name every effort to silence half the population for what it is: an act of power and a warning.

We must fight back—not just through protest or policy, but through storytelling.

The National Women’s History Museum and the National Women’s Hall of Fame are leading this resistance. These institutions are preserving and sharing the stories of women who helped build this country.

The Hall’s mission is to advance gender equity—yes, the very phrase stripped from federal websites—through action, education, and narrative. Many of the more than 300 women inducted into the Hall are names the history books left out. Women like Oveta Culp Hobby, the first director of the Women’s Army Corps. Sheila Widnall, the first female secretary of the Air Force. And Matilda Josyln Gage, a suffragist and scholar who identified the systemic erasure of women in science as early as 1870—a phenomenon now called the Matilda Effect.

Today, fewer than 7% of national monuments honor women. As Rebecca Solnit observed in “Nonstop Metropolis,” “A horde of dead men... haunt New York City and almost every city in the Western world.” The silencing is systemic—and intentional.

History has never been neutral. It’s a mirror held up to power—reflecting who is remembered and who is made to disappear. In America, women have always had to fight for their stories to be told. Their achievements are often footnotes, their contributions minimized or omitted entirely. From textbooks to national monuments, from public art to political memory, the record of our nation has long been tilted toward the men who held the pens—and the power.

I am inspired by the words of the late Cecile Richards, who once said stories, told and retold, are the key to igniting change.

So, let’s tell them. Loudly. Relentlessly. Let’s amplify the women who’ve shaped our world—those we know and those still waiting to be discovered. Let’s teach the next generations that women can be all they can dream--and no less!

Let’s support the institutions that fight to preserve their legacies. And let’s refuse to accept a world in which women’s achievements are erased and our voices silenced.

Jean Kilbourne is internationally recognized for her work on the image of women in advertising and her studies of alcohol and tobacco advertising. She is the author of “Can’t Buy My Love: How Advertising Changes the Way We Think and Feel” and the creator of the prize-winning film series “Killing Us Softly: Advertising’s Image of Women.” She is the first inductee to serve on the board of the National Women’s Hall of Fame.

---