March is Women’s History Month, a fact that prompted us to search our archives for inspiration on the progress women have made.

Real progress. Today’s woman takes voting for granted; her grandmothers won that right less than 100 years ago. Today’s woman starts a business, purchases a house, attends a service academy or law or medical school, as a matter of ability and merit regardless of gender. Her forebears won those rights for her also.

Virginia Slims cigarettes burst on the scene in 1968 with the slogan "You’ve come a long way, baby," and women’s lib was here.

And yet … how much progress have women really made? One can almost see finger-shaking members of the Virginia General Assembly going right into the doctor’s office with a woman and interfering with her decision-making process. (And we thought conservative legislators disapproved of the so-called "nanny state.")

Commentators have long felt the urge to guide women. After a constitutional amendment gave women the right to vote in 1920, Samuel J. Foster, a correspondent for the Mathews Journal from the small community of Susan, wrote that "the woman of the South has been dragged down from the high and exalted position which she has ever held in the hearts and homes of the people and descended to the groveling position of political equality with the rougher sex. … In my opinion she can accomplish more good for home, for country and for God by staying at home and training her children and by using her influence over the men of her acquaintance, than she can ever accomplish at the ballot box."

In 1927, the Journal’s correspondent from Cricket Hill asked "Why do women smoke?"

In 1933, the Rev. Noel J. Allen, a Baptist preacher, wrote to the Journal, "It was bound to come sooner or later. It has come. Pants for women. … Up in New York it seems they are parading the streets in this latest garb. A writer up there expresses the wish that he could turn loose a detail of small boys armed with snow balls to attend to the sap-headed females. I hope the bare-brained females who don this idiot’s costume will get a kick out of it … It is one of the jig-saw puzzles that these creatures who are straining to attract attention by making and wearing detestable garb cannot see that they are publishing their unfitness to become winsome wives and mothers and home makers."

Actions in this year’s General Assembly, and actions of SWAT teams and riot police called out to deal with subsequent protests at Virginia’s temple to democracy and human rights, the Capitol, have dampened the urge to write about progress.

Perhaps we will write about our women pioneers another day. Today, we wonder how many people still agree with the ancient wags quoted above, and if women would still be having trouble controlling their own bodies and decisions if the Equal Rights Amendment, sent out of Congress in 1972, had won ratification instead of expiring in 1982 for lack of approval from a sufficient number of states.

Virginia never approved the ERA. No surprise there.