We like to tell ourselves that the world is getting better for women. That every generation is a little more equal, a little more just. That visibility equals power, and institutional access equals permanence. But the more history I read, the less I believe that.
Progress isn’t linear. It’s circular. And women—especially women of color—have been here before: powerful, visible, contributing centrally to culture, science, politics, art. And then forgotten. Again and again.
Femina by Janina Ramirez forced me to reckon with this reality. It’s not a book about exceptional women in the Middle Ages. It’s a book about how common women’s power once was—until it was deliberately erased. Women weren’t marginal figures—they were landowners, spiritual leaders, intellectuals, authors of their own lives. Then the archive was rewritten—often under the guise of reactionary secularism that reframed women’s authority as deviant or irrelevant. Their stories weren’t lost; they were buried.
Reading The Swans of Harlem by Karen Valby made that pattern even more tangible. It tells the story of five Black ballerinas who danced with the Dance Theatre of Harlem during the 1970s and 1980s—artists who broke barriers, toured internationally, and helped reshape the face of American ballet. And yet, their contributions were largely wiped from public memory.
As a white reader, I came to this story without knowing that history—and that gap is part of the point. Misty Copeland, the first Black woman promoted to principal dancer at the American Ballet Theatre in its 75-year history, was widely celebrated in 2015 as a singular trailblazer. And yet, she herself had to learn as an adult that Black women had already carved space in ballet decades earlier. It’s something she mourns discovering so late, as she shares in her book The Wind At My Back, written in honor of her mentor Raven Wilkinson.
This wasn’t obscure or ancient history—Lydia Abarca Mitchell appeared on the cover of Dance Magazine in 1975, a publication still widely read today. Forty years later, the women of The Swans of Harlem watched with everyone else as Copeland was praised for ‘opening the door’—a door they themselves had walked through, unrecognized. Their legacy had been forgotten in real time.
Invisible Women by Caroline Criado-Perez reminds us that this isn’t just about memory—it’s structural. The systems we navigate daily, from crash test dummies to medical trials to city planning, were built on male defaults. Our needs aren’t included. Our safety isn’t assumed. Our time isn’t valued. And books like Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In and Lois Frankel’s Nice Girls Don’t Get the Corner Office tell us how to survive in those systems by adapting to them. Smile more. Don’t cry. Don’t take up space. Don’t ask for too much. Together, these books reveal how the cycle sustains itself: systems erase women, and we’re taught to become more compatible with our own erasure. The loop tightens, disguised as empowerment.
Much of mainstream corporate feminism still clings to the idea that progress is linear and permanent—that once a woman makes it through the door, it stays open behind her. But history doesn’t bear that out. We say history repeats itself—but for women, it’s more than a saying. We’ve been here before. The real question isn’t just how to make more space at the table—it’s how to make sure the table doesn’t get dismantled the moment we look away. I don’t just want progress—I want to prevent regression. I want the kind of presence that can’t be erased.
Power without permanence isn’t power. Visibility without memory isn’t progress. When we fail to remember who came before us—when we treat each victory as a first—we play directly into the cycle of erasure.
So no, I don’t find comfort in the progress story anymore. I find resolve. We don’t need to be the first. We need to be the ones who remember. Because that’s how we stop playing the system’s game. That’s how we break the loop.