Sunday, March 8, 2026
Sermons:
- A Short History of International Women’s Day by Debra Bloom
- What Shall I Be? by Monica Staaf
- A View of Feminism by Karyn Frink
- Two Narratives of Re-Tooling Gender Roles || Doll Parts by Ruth Debrot
- I Am Not Your Honey. I Am Not Your Sweetie. by Donna Seagrave
A Short History of International Women’s Day, by Debra Bloom
March is recognized as Women’s History Month in the US, UK and Australia, dedicated to honoring the contributions of women to history and society. The 2026 theme is “Leading the Charge: Women Shaping a Sustainable Future.” International Women’s Day (IWD) is a focal point of the month. Celebrated every year on March 8, International Women’s Day is a global day recognizing women’s achievements and advancing the ongoing struggle for gender equality. Its roots lie in the early 20th‑century labor and suffrage movements in Europe and North America, where women were organizing for better working conditions, political rights, and social justice.
The earliest known observance was National Woman’s Day, held on February 28, 1909, in New York City. Organized by the Socialist Party of America, it highlighted women’s demands for voting rights and fair labor practices.
Momentum grew internationally. At the 1910 International Socialist Women’s Conference in Copenhagen, German socialist Clara Zetkin proposed establishing a global Women’s Day to unify efforts for women’s rights. Delegates from 17 countries unanimously supported the idea. Although no date was set, the first International Women’s Day was celebrated on March 19, 1911, in Austria, Denmark, Germany, and Switzerland, drawing more than a million participants. Women demanded suffrage, labor protections, and the right to hold public office.
A defining moment came in 1917 in Petrograd (now St. Petersburg), Russia. On March 8, women textile workers launched a strike for “bread and peace,” protesting food shortages, the hardships of WWI, and oppressive working conditions. Their uprising helped ignite the Russian Revolution, leading to the abdication of Czar Nicholas II and the granting of voting rights to Russian women. In recognition of their pivotal role, March 8 became the official date for International Women’s Day.
Throughout the mid‑20th century, IWD was widely celebrated in socialist and communist countries, where women’s labor and political participation were emphasized. In the West, however, the day waned in visibility until the rise of second‑wave feminism in the 1960s and 1970s. Activists revived IWD as a platform for equal pay, reproductive rights, legal equality, and an end to gender‑based violence.
A major turning point came in 1975, when the United Nations began officially recognizing International Women’s Day during International Women’s Year. In 1977, the UN invited member states to adopt March 8 as a day dedicated to women’s rights and world peace. Since then, the UN has issued annual themes highlighting issues such as economic empowerment, political representation, education, and ending violence against women.
Today, International Women’s Day is celebrated worldwide through marches, conferences, artistic performances, community events, and digital campaigns. It serves as both a celebration of women’s achievements and a call to action to address persistent inequalities—from pay gaps and reproductive autonomy to safety, education, and leadership representation.
What Shall I Be? by Monica Staaf
As Unitarian Universalists, we respect the inherent worth and dignity of all people, and that means, across sex and gender lines, to. So what I’d like to talk about today is actually jumping back to some childhood memories and what we can do today to help avoid stereotyping. Children when they’re growing up. So when I was growing up, I was a child in the 1960s.
At the time, very few, at least middle-class women in my suburb, worked outside the home. At the time, I remember asking my parents, I think I was in fourth grade, asking them when we were looking at our local Cleveland Plain Dealer newspaper. They had help, wanted ads. So instead of indeed help wanted, they had them segregated by men and women.
So wrote columns for help-wanted men, smaller columns for help-wanted women. The men could be things like lawyers, while the women were secretaries. The men were doctors, women were nurses. And that was it. So what concerns me when I think about is how children learn about these things. My, when my sister and I were growing up, we had a lot of board games that others may have played.
You know, Parcheesi, Monopoly. Well, one year, someone gave my sister, two years younger than I am, and me a board game called What Shall I be? I don’t know if anyone’s heard about this one before. The company has long since discontinued it. What shall it be? Was designed to help girls explore their career options
So what would you do in the career options? Anyone want to guess what they were?
If only they gave a teacher they didn’t even do teacher they had, which was surprising. Yes. Nurse was one, a model, an actress, a stewardess, a preflight attendant. Yeah. So these were the career options that girls had. What am I leaving out? Oh, yes. And. Oh, well, sorry. There was a teacher. Yes. Teacher and ballerina. So those are our choices.
So the point of this game, the point of this game, was to go around the board and collect different personality cards and training cards. So some of those personality cards and I had to look this up because I didn’t remember half of these would say things like, you’re overweight, you can’t be a stewardess or a model for that matter.
Your makeup is sloppy, so you can’t be an actress. You’re not good in school, so you can’t be a nurse or a teacher. So most of these personality cards were kind of insults, notes, insults. So you had to go around and collect these cards. Now there was a boy’s version of what shall I be, who once I guess what some of the career options were for the boys.
Yes. Astronaut. Yep. Baseball. Yeah. They did have one for an athlete. Yes. Ladies.
They had statesmen. Yes. Who is a politician? And who am I leaving out? Oh, yes. I think Pilot was one of those as well. So all of these and scientists so all of these. So the boys had cards about, you know, you knew you, you, you should get a you should. You’ve just been awarded a chemistry set, you know, which would help the become a scientist.
They had all kinds of helpful things like that. No insults like the girls. And I looked at that game thinking, what the heck kind of message is the sending girls now in our household? Our mother worked outside the home, which is unusual. And she had she was a school librarian, which is unusual in our suburb where most of the moms stayed home full time.
But at any rate. So we knew enough to say, does this make any sense? We thought the game was very boring and we stopped playing it pretty quickly. But, at the same time, my sister, who’s a little bit more adventurous than I was, wanted to have one year asked for a football and a race car track, which my parents gave her as presents.
The grief my parents got from some of their friends I heard about eavesdropping, of course, when they had friends over and some of their friends, especially the guys, were just scandalized that they were at. What lessons were they teaching my sister? She was going to become a tomboy. Another phrase in those days. Anyway. So, like from the guy.
Yeah, well, you’re exactly right that this is even though this is international or international Women’s History Month for focusing on having these limited choices, even though the greatest harm was done to women, men and boys were certainly harm to why can’t a man be a nurse? They can now. Okay. Anyway, let’s move on to a couple of other toy moments.
So I don’t read out my time here. Another one as an adult that I was very surprised. I’m not a parent myself, although I enjoy being around children. About 20 years ago, well, one of my friends had her youngest son was having a birthday party, so I set foot and a toys for us to get him a toy.
This may not be news to the rest of you. Or is to this. I walked in and wondered if I’d been transported in time because there I saw aisles for boys toys and girls toys. The girls toys were what make up kids. These are Barbie dolls. Baby dolls? Yes. In the boys aisles.
Yeah. Fire trucks, construction materials, science labs and action figures. Okay. Yes. Oh, no. Don’t call them dolls. Stephanie. Action figures. So the reason I mentioned these things. So fortunately, a group of parents got together, organized and was able to pressure a change in that. But we still have things like pink Legos, Legos under fire. They’re making changes to that.
Now, there’s nothing wrong with the color pink. There’s nothing wrong with the color blue. Why do all the girls things have to be in pink? Why can’t you just have Legos and different colors, all these different toys like that? So the reason I mentioned that is, even though things have improved significantly for women and for men from when I was growing up, I mean, women now can be lawyers, men can be administrative assistants.
See how we’ve upgraded that title now that the guys get it? Guys could be nurses. Women can be doctors. We had had those improvements, but there’s still many major areas that women are still, by and large, left out of many careers in science construction. I have to say, every time I drive past a construction site, maybe there’s one woman who’s a flag or something, but where are the rest of them?
Never crossed my mind to to look into that for a career because I but I don’t know, blame it all on toys, but, technology, high tech careers. Yes, there women in them. Nowhere near the extent of men. And finally, when the heck are we going to have a woman who’s president of the United States?
Better happen in my lifetime, let’s just say. And the clock is ticking. So what I want to conclude by saying, other than just kind of tripping down memory lane of some odd toys and games from my childhood, was just you know, doing more critical lens and what kind of message were sending kids when they’re younger. And what I hope is that any child in your life, whether it’s somebody new from here, family member or grandchild, friend of a friend’s child, grandchild, if that child asks, what shall I be?
I hope the message is anything you want.
A View of Feminism by Karyn Frink
A Personal Reflection on Feminism
As I was thinking about feminism, I found myself looking back over a lifetime of moments—small ones, quiet ones, painful ones, empowering ones—that shaped my understanding of what it means to be a woman in this world. My feminism didn’t begin with a book or a movement. It began in childhood, long before I had the language for it.
When I was little, I was told not to ask questions.
“Act like a young lady,” my mother would say.
“Sit like a young lady,”
“Dress like a young lady,”
And that meant one thing: a dress.
I remember the resistance I felt in kindergarten and every time someone tried to put me in one. It wasn’t just about clothing—it was about being molded into something that didn’t feel like me. Even then, I sensed that girlhood came with expectations I hadn’t agreed to. To this day, I still don’t like wearing dresses. I think I used up my lifetime quota before age ten.
But even then, something in me pushed back. I didn’t have the words for it, but I knew I didn’t want to be squeezed into someone else’s idea of what a girl should be. I believed girls and boys should have the same rights—it just didn’t take long to see that the world didn’t agree.
Boys had sports to play, girls didn’t.
I saw boys praised for being bold, while girls were praised for being quiet.
I saw men make decisions while women made sacrifices.
I saw how easily women’s voices were dismissed or softened.
Those observations stayed with me. They became the foundation of the woman I would grow into.
When I entered the workforce, the gap between what I believed and what I experienced became impossible to ignore. I remember being hired by a company, only to realize that I had stepped into a deeply patriarchal environment.
The hierarchy was unmistakable.
The decision-makers were almost all men.
The women did the supporting work, the invisible work, the work that kept everything running but rarely earned recognition.
And yet, over the years, I watched that same company slowly become more diverse. I saw women step into leadership roles. I saw voices that had been ignored finally being heard. I saw change—not complete, not perfect, but real.
It reminds me that progress is possible, but it is never automatic. It happens because people insist on it.
Feminism, for me, has been a lifelong process of unlearning.
Unlearning the idea that I shouldn’t ask questions.
Unlearning the belief that my worth depended on how “ladylike” I was.
Unlearning the pressure to be small, agreeable, or silent.
Feminism taught me to listen to women whose lives are shaped by race, class, sexuality, disability, and culture in ways I will never fully understand. It taught me that equality means nothing if it isn’t for all women.
International Women’s Day is not just a celebration, it’s a reminder. A reminder of the women who came before us, who pushed open doors with their bare hands. A reminder of the women beside us, still fighting to be heard. And a reminder of the girls growing up now, who deserve a world that doesn’t ask them to trade authenticity for acceptance.
It’s also a reminder that progress is fragile.
Rights can and have been rolled back.
Voices can be silenced.
Equality can stall if we stop insisting on it.
There is still work to do. I’ve seen change in my lifetime, but I’ve also seen how slowly it comes—and how easily it can be undone.
But it also fills me with hope. I look at younger women today—bold, outspoken, beautifully unwilling to shrink—and I feel proud. They are carrying the torch forward, and they’re doing it with fire.
So today, I celebrate all of us: the girls we were, the women we became, and the generations rising behind us. May we keep pushing, keep questioning, and keep imagining a world where equality isn’t a request—it’s a reality.
Because equality is not a destination—it’s a commitment.
Two Narratives of Re-Tooling Gender Roles || Doll Parts
Smith, T. D., Dansereau, D. R., Bylica, K., Debrot, R. A., & Hendricks, K. S. (2024). Interrogating the myth that sexism no longer exists in the music education academy, in Tales, myths, and stories, Springer.
Two Narratives of Re-Tooling Gender Roles, by Ruth A. Debrot
DOLL PARTS: A PERFORMER
SHE: (Looking in the mirror). Boobs and boots. Is this what people focus on while I’m performing? How I look shouldn’t really matter.
Inner Voice (IV): Images, like myths of sexuality, are powerful tools that convey meanings and have social consequences. “One is not born, but learns to be a woman (de Beauvior, 1973). You are engaging what Hakim (2011) identified as sexual capital.
SHE: Shakespeare captured the notion of “sexuality as commodity” in his characterization of Cleopatra. Madonna flaunted it. Beyoncé used it to oppose racial and patriarchal power structures. Lady Gaga engaged it as tool to challenge female gender roles.
IV: The female body can be seen as a playful instrument (Butler, 1990), a tool for freedom and power.
SHE: But there is a slippery, but necessary distinction between appearing sexual and being sexualized.
IV: Yes, it can be dangerous to mess with the master’s discourse.
SHE: There is safety in masquerade, which conceals female power through the appearance of seduction and flirtation (Riviere, 1929).
IV: Any BODY can seek safety in disguise. The danger is becoming an objet de désir.
SHE: Masquerade is a tool that uses deceptiveness, mockery, and overt sexuality to challenge discourse in the “phallic economy” (Butler, 1990, p. 64).
IV: Caution: Masquerade offers a slippery distinction between “having the goods” and “being the goods.”
SHE: The goal is to subvert the bodily realities of everyday life; to challenge personal, political, and psychic subordination. I say, bring on surprise and disguise!
SILENCED BODIES: AN ACADEMIC
IV: Challenging societal convention subverts culturally elitist practices, like those in the academy–practices that can lead to neoliberal, numbing, normal lives.
SHE: As a female academic, I continually experience problems of capitalist, patriarchal sexism.
IV: The unspoken dress code depicts the continuous policing of women’s bodies that pervades Western society. There remains a perception that female sexuality is disruptive–that it detracts from productivity (Eveline & Booth, 2002).
SHE: The expression of “gender identity” is a normative practice rather than a descriptive feature of who we really are (Butler, 1990), just as “normal life” is a fictional product of patriarchal power systems that profit from behavior regulation. Where might feminists find refuge or enlightenment?
IV: Feminist academics are often women of privilege who employ texts about feminism. Words are the master’s tools (Lorde, 1983).
SHE: Scholarly arguments, and linguistic tricks perpetuate the same old in and out – more “in” than out. Politics as usual. Academia’s conservative, controlling, capitalist business model cannot be an end goal of feminism.
IV: Carnival resists normalcy, order, closure, and the sacrosanct. Bring on bawdy parodies and public spectacles that challenge canons and rituals. Let us create new narratives that are disruptive and facilitate transgression.
SHE: “Normal life” is a construction of colonial and neocolonial power.
IV: Carnival invites disruption, and disorder, turning politics into performances that demonstrate “anarchist mistrust of structure with queer notions of bodily riot and antinormative disruption” (Halberstam, 2012, p. 133).
She: There will be no unified vision or utopian outcome. Rather, there will be no return to normal.
I Am Not Your Honey, I Am Not Your Sweetie, by Donna Seagrave
I Am Not Your Honey, I Am Not Your Sweetie
This is a direct quote by me to an interviewer from a Boston publishing company. The year was 1971, and I was about to graduate from college from what is now Worcester State University. Congrats on using my I words in a calm and direct way. We shall revisit this scene shortly.
This encounter, unpleasant though it was, helped me to appreciate how I came to find and use my voice. It was years in the making and started with my Girl Scout troop that I joined when I was 10 and stayed in until I was 18. Our scout leader, Mrs. A, taught us how to plan and execute a project in detail. Time, money, presentations for permissions, and evaluations were all on us. It all came down to how not if we were going to get things done.
A second major source of finding and using my voice came by joining a YMCA youth group for my high school years. Skills were fine-tuned. There was an expectation that we could get things done. We spoke to local, state, and national leaders about issues that were important to us. We advocated for playgrounds in several towns and helped build them. We organized after school programs for city schools and volunteered at them. Every year we held a legislative session and passed a law proposal that a state rep introduced on our behalf. We went to testify at the State House.
At home, there was a different experience from my very conservative parents. My sisters and I were to act like ladies, speak when spoken to, and do what we were told to do without question. Girls lived at home until they got married. Some of you may be familiar with the drill. A college education was not necessary for girls since they were just going to get married and have babies.
I did not subscribe to much of this, especially the college education part. So, I did it myself on my own. At Worcester State, I majored in History, minored in English and Education. I was a liberal arts student in a sea of traditional education majors! I became active in civil rights and women’s rights marches, leafleting sessions, petition signings, and anti-war protests. I am grateful that my professors included social history in each history and literature course that I took. Analyzing political and social themes was the norm.
This brings us back to my interview. There were very few teaching jobs available in the mid 1970s. Students were encouraged to defer student teaching and take more courses. The college arranged for interviews with a variety of businesses. Interviews were held in an office, and interviewers had access to our transcripts and resumes. The gentleman who did my interview started by asking how many words a minute I could type. I responded that I typed all my own papers and hadn’t taken a timed typing test since 8th grade. Could he tell me why it was important? There would be no. He acknowledged that I had good grades, but wasn’t that nice, sweetie. I asked how college graduates were employed and in what departments were available to an entry-level person. His reply? Listen, honey, the publishing business isn’t easy, and you have to start at the bottom. At this point, I felt that we were wasting each other’s time. I stood up, reached across the desk to reclaim my resume and transcript, and politely suggested that he should get with the times. The women’s movement had been around for a long time! I suggested that he speak to women in more respectful way.
His response was classic! Young lady, you can’t speak to me like that. My feminist response: Oh, honey, I just did! With remarkable restraint, I did not call him a sexist pig!
I wish these kinds of encounters were truly a thing of the past, but sadly, they are not. Every girl should have an education, grow up with the right to vote, to have personal and bodily integrity. The list goes on, but so do our efforts to make it right!
May it be so!
