Rev. Dr. Carolyn Pressler Reflects on Women’s History Month
Dear Friends of United, The National Women’s History Alliance’s theme for the 2026 Women’s History Month, “Leading the Change: Women Shaping a Sustainable Future,” reverberates in very concrete, localized, and urgent ways in the context of ICE’s months-long, brutal occupation, a federal “reckoning and retribution” that savaged our immigrant neighbors and tested our resolve. Women—including numerous members of the United Community—have worked with men and gender fluid folk to sustain our state. Women leaders have sustained political resistance, organizing and showing up for large and small demonstrations, sit-ins, and vigils. As constitutional observers, women, along with people of all genders, have sought to sustain legal accountability. Minnesotan women have worked to sustain life, offering aid—groceries, medicines, rent money— to people with reason to be afraid to leave their homes. Medically trained women have made house calls. Women have sustained courage and connection, leading singing resistance pods in hard-hit areas, as a way of letting neighbors know that they are seen and that they matter. And immigrant mothers, aunties, grandmas, and friends, have sustained families, calming terrified children, holding the family together when members are disappeared. This Women’s History Month, let us honor the thousands of women and girls who, as their foremothers did in earlier occupations, stepped up to sustain political will, life, courage, and families. Carolyn Pressler is the Professor Emerita of Biblical Interpretation at United. Learn more about her here. >