Although the position of women in higher education is changing, the University community must remain wary. Women in classrooms may cause men to act immorally.

And what about women's health?

"She cannot afford to risk her health in acquiring a knowledge of the advanced sciences, mathematics, or philosophy for which she has no use . . . too many women have already made themselves permanent invalids by an overstrain of study at schools and colleges."

Are you reading the Collegian's opinion? Not exactly, but the school newspaper at the Pennsylvania State College in 1889 ran an editorial with the above quote. And the college's president James Calder expressed the first view about 120 years ago.

Anecdotes such as these may seem funny a century later.

They're not.

The history of women in higher education and in all aspects of society is one of struggle both here and throughout the world. As Women's History Month comes to a close, the need to celebrate women's history and commit to future change needs reaffirmation.

Some people question why "special attention" should be paid to particular groups. Why celebrate women's history, critics ask, when it is a part of everyone's history?

But such a view does not consider the complex issues of writing and interpreting history. The teaching of history traditionally has excluded women. The "movers and shakers" -- women such as Sojourner Truth, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Fannie Lou Hammer and others -- are forgotten or overshadowed by men's actions in history. By omitting these women from the classrooms, educators succeed in convincing students that men made history while women followed.

Recognizing women's history must go beyond highlighting heroes. Much history that affects women is not the history of individuals but rather of groups. What did women do during certain time periods? How did events in history impact them?

Many educators now are realizing the need to study these questions. Changes in academia are exciting and if educators act with earnest to implement them into curricula, they can alter the way students view themselves, their roots and their world.

Although understanding history gives power to the women's movement, we must not be lured into believing that the struggle for equality is won. With the Reagan and now Bush administrations, the nation is a stage of set-backs on women's issues. Neither men support the Equal Rights Amendment and both discourage affirmative action.

Women still earn only 70 cents to a man's dollar and are concentrated in low-income jobs. Sexual harrassment, rape and pornography continue to harm and kill women. Currently, the fundamental right of a woman to control her own body by abortion is threatened severely.

The month of celebration will end. Now is the time to gain strength from the history of strong, influential women along with the painful memory of those who have been silenced to move on in the struggle.