March is Women’s History Month. Two women who crucially influenced our contemporary thinking about women died during the first days of its 2025 incarnation: Marysa Navarro-Aranguren, on March 2, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Sandra G. Harding, on March 5, in Northampton, Massachusetts. At their retirement, both women were named professors in their academic homes.

Welcome though a month devoted to women might be, the achievements of Marysa and Sandra should be recognized and celebrated throughout the year. They were among the leaders of a rebellious, creative, tireless generation of feminist scholars who began to come into their own in the early 1960s. They made mistakes, but they dramatized minds, bodies, and psyches in action. Like a number of members of this cohort, Marysa and Sandra were born before World War II, Marysa in 1934, Sandra in 1935. 

I knew Marysa better and write with personal gratitude. She befriended my family. We all loved her. Because of her, we spent some crucial summers across the street from her on Sargent Street in Hanover, New Hampshire.  Here, kids could be kids, and the adults could stretch out, cook together, talk of matters large and small, and regard the stars from the vantage point of a back deck.

Dartmouth College has published a finely affectionate tribute to Marysa. [i] Born in Spain in 1934, her childhood was radically interrupted by the Spanish Civil War and the cruelties of its “winner,” Generalissimo Franco.  From 1937 to 1948, she lived precariously in France until the family moved to Uruguay. She would tell me about her prowess as a competitive swimmer there. After her education in Uruguay, she came to America on a fellowship to Douglass College, then the women’s college of Rutgers University. She took her doctorate at Columbia, and then, after various teaching jobs, came to Dartmouth in 1968. 

Marysa was divorced and the mother of an extraordinary daughter, now a professor, Nina Gerassi-Navarro. Dartmouth was an all-male institution and, among the Ivy League colleges, perhaps the most resistant to co-education.  Marysa was to stay for 42 years. Correctly described as a “force of nature,” she retired from an Institution that she had pushed and pulled towards change. “How do you like the them apples?,” she would ask sardonically when she noted something annoying and/or that needed to be changed. “How do you like them apples?”

A founder of Latin American women’s studies, she published an important biography of Evita Perón. She was an inspiring teacher. Melinda Fine, who graduated in 1980, has said, “How lucky I was to have been fed by her big personality, big laugh, and big heart for over more than four decades.”[ii] Marysa also helped to build institutions. By the time she retired, Dartmouth had programs in women’s studies (now Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies) and in Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies. It had far more women faculty with a far more solid status. She had been only the second woman ever to be tenured.

Moreover, Dartmouth was now co-educational. Famously, before the Dartmouth Trustees voted on whether Dartmouth would admit women, Marysa had bet that it would not happen. If it did, she said, she would dress up like a football player and run around the iconic Dartmouth Green. The trustees did vote to become co-educational. She pulled on pants, jersey, pads, and helmet, and ran around the Green, to be met at the end by the Dartmouth president holding a bouquet of flowers.

Marysa also contributed to, reformed, and shaped institutions outside of Hanover. From 2003-04, she was president of the Latin American Studies Association. She chaired the boards of the Global Fund for Women, the Ms. Foundation for Women, the International Planned Parenthood Federation, and Catholics for Choice. This is only a short list of her global activities.

On March 14 and March 15, the Dartmouth flag was to be lowered to half-staff in Marysa’s honor, a fitting tribute to her indomitability.

It is more than a coincidence that Sandra G. Harding also attended Douglass College, although she took a B.A. there in 1956. [iii]  For the graduates and faculty of the women’s colleges played an out-sized, if under-measured, role in this generation of feminist scholars. Like many members of it, Sandra did not go directly to graduate or professional school. For 12 years, she was a researcher, an editor, a teacher. Then, she entered New York University and took a doctorate In philosophy in 1973. She taught at the University of Delaware and after 1996, at UCLA. 

Like Marysa, she built, not only her scholarly record, but institutions inside and out of the academy itself. From 2000 through 2005, she, with Kathryn Norberg, co-edited Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, from offices at UCLA. For their first issue, they called for papers on “Development Cultures: New Environments, New Realities, New Strategies.” The “Call” states admirably, “Our goal is to bring together scholars and those participating actively in this process (of development) and to contribute to a new articulation of development theory, practices, and ethics.”

Because Marysa was a robust friend and Sandra a respected colleague, I worried that this comment about the two of them would be off-balance. As a result, I sought the help of Helen Longino, the much esteemed feminist philosopher of science, now the Clarence Irving Lewis Professor of Philosophy at Stanford, Emerita. She kindly gave me these words:

“Sandra Harding was a pioneer in feminist philosophy.  While originally based in philosophy of science, her work had influence across philosophy and feminist thought.  She is perhaps most associated with feminist standpoint theory, an approach to knowledge that privileges the perspective of the subjugated.  Harding was not only a champion of the approach, but also a critic of its shortcomings. Her first book, The Science Question in Feminism, for example, explored the integration of a concept of fragmented consciousness into the standpoint picture and insisted that the standpoint picture include perspectives of the formerly colonized. She identified resonances among standpoint theorists and the work of African and South Asian philosophers and social theorists and became a champion of postcolonial thought in her later writings. For example, in Sciences from Below, she outlines possibilities for the transformation of the sciences available by abandoning Eurocentric modernist perspectives. 

Longino ends, “Not surprisingly her work was fiercely criticized. She was not daunted, bravely accepted invitations to talk to predictably hostile audiences, and maintained a calm demeanor as she rebutted the caricatures used to attack her and her work. Her person as well as her philosophical work continue to inspire younger feminist philosophers. She was an internationally sought after lecturer and consulted with various UN agencies concerned to bring globally marginalized perspectives into policy making positions. Harding was the recipient of many awards, including the J.D. Bernal Prize from the Society for Social Studies of Science in 2013.”

I learned about Sandra’s death from Mary Hawkesworth, who succeeded Sandra and Kathryn as the editor of Signs and is now a Distinguished Professor Emerita in Political Science/Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies at Rutgers University. In turn, I told Mary that in this “bad week” Marysa had also died. Mary responded, “It is hard to reckon with the loss of this brilliant generation of feminists, especially as the world they (we) struggled to bring into existence is so under threat.  Stay strong! In solidarity, Mary.”[iv]

This generation of feminists is also mine. Perhaps inevitably, I regard the loss of Marysa and Sandra with a piercing poignancy and doubled sense of mortality. The zealous, too often gleeful efforts to dismantle our scholarship and institutions are ubiquitous. President Trump may have acknowledged Women’s History Month this year, but Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth abolished it as well as Black History Month and other recognitions of race or ethnicity at the Department he is so eager to change and to order in the monochrome. A few days ago, I clipped a piece from The New York Times about words that the federal government is seeking to purge, limit, or avoid.  Among them are “bias,” “gender,” “intersectionality,” “prejudice,” “race,” “sex,” “transgender,” “vulnerable populations,” and “women.” [v] I ask, “How do you like them apples?”

I don’t like them apples, not at all.  I also hope that this tribute to Marysa and Sandra provides some elements of a vocabulary of action in response:  hard even relentless work; strength; solidarity; dauntlessness; an often raucous and ironic sense of humor that is compatible with a care for others; and the belief, no matter how crazy it might seem, that the banned words have too much meaning, and were spoken with too much passionate intelligence, to disappear like broken shells on a neglected beach.

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[i] https://faculty.dartmouth.edu/artsandsciences/news/2025/03/remembering-marysa-navarro-aranguren-towering-scholar-latin-american-history-and

[ii] Ibid., p. 4.

[iii] https://www.legacy.com/obituaries/name/sandra-harding-obituary?pid=208763839. The obituaries here were published in The Boston Globe and The New York Times.

[iv] Personal correspondence, 3/7/2025.

[v] These Words Are Vanishing in a ‘Free Speech’ Administration,” New York Times, print edition (March 11, 2025), p. A13.