By: Diana Garcia, Deputy Director of Advocacy; Blanca Rodriguez, Deputy Director of Advocacy; and DonYeta Villavaso-Madden, Equity and Anti-Racist Strategist.
“Women’s leadership is not the absence of fear—it is what we choose to build while facing fear, carrying what we have survived, holding hope, lifting others, and healing ourselves.” – DonYeta Villavaso-Madden
March invites us to celebrate Women’s History Month—a time to honor the brilliance, resilience, and contributions of women whose labor, leadership, and vision have shaped movements, communities, and futures. It is also a time to reflect more deeply on how those contributions are remembered, whose leadership is centered, and what stories are elevated or left untold.
Honoring women requires more than recognition. It requires a willingness to tell the truth—not only about impact and achievement, but also about the conditions under which women have led, the harm they have endured, and the systems that have shaped both.
THE TRUTH WOMEN HOLD
Across movements, a consistent pattern emerges: systems often protect legacy over people. When harm occurs—particularly harm involving individuals with power—institutions and communities can default to minimizing, delaying, or redirecting attention in ways that preserve reputation rather than address impact. In doing so, they shift the burden of silence onto those who were harmed, who are most often women, frequently young, and often without power or protection. The burden is even heavier for women of color, particularly Black, Indigenous, and Latino women. We witness the unevenness when women go missing and the lack of media attention provided.
This pattern is not incidental; it is structural. In a patriarchal society, power is unevenly distributed, and with that imbalance comes predictable consequences. Women who experience harm at the hands of powerful men are often placed in impossible positions. Speaking out can mean risking safety, livelihood, credibility, and belonging—sometimes within the very movements or institutions they helped build. Remaining silent, however, requires carrying the weight of harm alone, and at times witnessing that harm continue without intervention.
These dynamics are not new. They echo across history, including in periods such as chattel slavery, where women—particularly Black women—had no legal protection from sexual violence and no recourse for accountability. The absence of protection was not a failure of the system; it was a feature of it.
Today, while laws and policies have evolved, many of these dynamics remain. The cost of silence continues to be carried in professional isolation, diminished opportunity, damaged credibility, and loss of safety and livelihood. These impacts are especially pronounced in sectors such as agriculture, where economic precarity, geographic isolation, and immigration status intensify vulnerability and limit access to protection.
If we are willing to tell the truth about harm, we must also be willing to tell the truth about leadership.
RE-CENTERING THE MOVEMENT
To fully understand the farmworker movement, we must begin by centering the women who helped build, sustain, and lead it—not as supporting figures but as central architects.
Dolores Huerta co-founded the United Farm Workers and served as a lead strategist, negotiator, and political force within the movement. Her leadership shaped organizing strategy, secured tangible gains for workers, and helped define the direction of the movement itself. She also co-created the phrase “Sí, se puede”(meaning “Yes, it can be done” or “Yes, you can”)—a declaration of collective power that continues to resonate across movements today.
In Washington State, Rosalinda Guillen has carried forward this legacy through her leadership in securing collective bargaining rights for farmworkers and advancing organizing efforts through Familias Unidas por la Justicia. Her work reflects the ongoing nature of this movement and the continued reliance on women’s leadership to sustain it.
And yet, despite the centrality of their contributions, the names of Huerta, Guillen, and many others are often relegated to secondary roles in narratives that favor singular male leadership figures. This is not incidental—it reflects a broader pattern in how leadership is constructed, recognized, and remembered.
If we are willing to tell a more complete story, we must recognize that women have always been central to these movements—not only as leaders but also as those who often bear both the labor and the weight of what is left unspoken.
ACROSS MOVEMENTS, THE PATTERN REPEATS
This pattern extends far beyond the farmworker movement. Across generations and causes, women have shaped social change in ways that are foundational—and frequently underrecognized.
From Angela Davis to Fannie Lou Hamer, Ella Baker, Lilly Ledbetter, Ai-jen Poo, and Tarana Burke, we see a consistent throughline: women build movements, sustain them, and develop the frameworks that allow them to grow—yet recognition often follows different lines of power.
Angela Davis advanced a global analysis connecting racial justice, economic systems, and incarceration, reshaping how movements understand structural inequality.
Fannie Lou Hamer organized Black voter registration under conditions of extreme violence and co-founded the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party to challenge systemic exclusion at the national level.
Ella Baker championed grassroots, decentralized organizing and mentored a generation of leaders, shaping the philosophy behind the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and influencing organizing models that continue today.
Lilly Ledbetter transformed the national conversation on pay equity, leading to landmark legislation that expanded workers’ ability to challenge wage discrimination.
Ai-jen Poo built a national movement advocating for domestic workers—one of the most historically excluded labor forces—securing policy change and increased visibility for this workforce.
Tarana Burke founded the “Me Too” movement to support survivors of sexual violence, particularly Black girls and women, years before it gained mainstream recognition, fundamentally shifting how society understands and responds to harm.
These examples are not isolated. They reflect a broader pattern in which women’s leadership is essential to movement-building, yet frequently positioned at the margins of how those movements are remembered.
This pattern becomes even more pronounced when we consider the experiences of farmworker women whose names may never be known. Research has consistently shown that harassment is widespread in agricultural labor, where fear of retaliation and lack of protection make reporting unsafe. For many farmworker women—particularly immigrant and undocumented workers—this vulnerability is intensified by economic precarity, language barriers, and limited access to legal protections.
These conditions do more than create risk—they shape silence. When speaking out threatens not only employment but safety, stability, and the ability to remain in the country, silence becomes a form of survival rather than a choice.
For immigrant and undocumented workers, these risks are further compounded by language barriers, fear of deportation, and limited access to legal recourse. Their invisibility is not incidental; it reflects systems that depend on their labor while failing to ensure their safety or recognition.
HOLDING LEGACY AND HARM TOGETHER
In February, I met with colleagues to outline an article recognizing César Chávez and his contributions to advancing farmworker rights. We were clear that no movement is built alone.
As the article developed, new information emerged about Chávez. Investigations by the Associated Press and The New York Times brought forward serious allegations that Chávez abused women and girls over a period of years, including coercion and violence, within a culture where women felt unable to speak.
This information does not erase contribution—but it does require reckoning. It challenges us to confront a deeper question: how do we hold both impact and harm at the same time?
There is a tendency to simplify—to choose between honoring legacy or acknowledging harm. But justice requires something more difficult. It requires us to hold complexity without collapsing into justification.
Brilliance does not absolve harm. And harm does not disappear because someone did good work.
PATTERN AND ORGANIZATIONAL REFLECTION
Across these histories, a consistent pattern emerges: women do the work, systems absorb the impact, and recognition is often redirected elsewhere. When harm occurs, that pattern deepens—silence is maintained, and those most affected carry the consequences.
These dynamics are not confined to history. They show up in everyday organizational life—whose voices are heard, whose ideas are credited, whose leadership is trusted, and who is expected to endure.
When left unexamined, dominant norms—rooted in white, male, patriarchal structures—are often replicated as the default standard for how leadership and professionalism are defined. As a result, women of color can find themselves navigating these same dynamics not only from men, but also within interactions with other women, particularly when those norms are internalized and reinforced as “just how business is done.”
For organizations committed to justice, including legal aid organizations like CLS, this is not abstract. It is a call to examine how power operates within our own systems.
If we are serious about equity, we must ensure our practices reflect it—creating environments where women are heard, believed, protected, and recognized in real time.
CLOSING
Women’s History Month calls to uplift women’s brilliance, confront the conditions that silence their voices, and avoid placing the burden on them to carry their pain alone.
Accountability is not about punishment. It is about truth.
For generations, women have not been empowered to speak their truth in ways that lead to corrective action—whether in relationships, workplaces, or community spaces shaped by patriarchal norms.
And yet, women continue to nurture, lead, and shape the world—and the next generation of leaders—often while carrying what has gone unspoken.
It is about recognizing that women’s leadership has always been central to movements—not only in what they build, but in what they endure. And it is about ensuring that we no longer ask women to carry both the work and the harm in silence.
Because justice, in its fullest form, is not only about what we build—but about who we are willing to see, hear, and protect equitably along the way.
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