LANCASTER, OHIO — Kim Barlag knew she couldn’t let women be canceled.

For nearly two decades, Ohio University’s Lancaster campus hosted an annual conference to “promote and advance gender equity by recognizing the past, present, and future achievements of women from diverse ages and backgrounds.” Known as Celebrate Women, it featured awards honoring women in leadership, panels on business and civic engagement and service opportunities. The plan for this year was to collect food and school supplies for university students facing financial hardship.

Celebrate Women became a much-anticipated Women’s History Month tradition in this central Ohio city of 40,000, just 30 miles southeast of Columbus, the state capital. But then, on the eve of its 19th year, politics intervened.

On March 6, two weeks and a day before the event, Ohio University announced that the conference had been “placed on hold … in light of recent guidance from the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights,” which threatened to withhold federal funding to institutions that do not conform to the Trump administration’s notion of anti-discrimination. The university’s decision followed the cancellation of a reunion for Black alumni, another regular occurrence in previous years. 

When she heard the news about the women’s conference, Barlag, herself an alumnus and the president of the Chamber of Commerce in nearby Pickerington, cycled through a series of emotions: disappointment, sadness, anger, resolve.

“I guess I should have seen it coming after that happened, but I was still surprised,” she told The 19th. “I was pretty devastated. I shed a few tears. Then I thought: Action makes people feel better. How can we save this event? We needed to act fast.”

She called and emailed other women leaders in the area — including some who, like her, had been scheduled to participate in Celebrate Women panels — to gauge their interest in reviving the conference as a non-university event. Their response, Barlag said, was “gung ho.” The plans for the new event came together quicker than Pam Kaylor, a communications professor who organized Celebrate Women for the university, was able to notify participants of the previous one’s cancellation.

The independent event had a new name, We Rally & We Rise Women’s Conference, and it brought together some 300 women at the Crossroads Event Center in Lancaster last week. Many Celebrate Women sponsors shifted their support and some new sponsors signed on, angry about the cancellation — Barlag took to calling it “mad money.” Organizers handed out branded tote bags and notebooks. The event raised money for local nonprofit organizations. Speakers shared strategies to conquer anxiety and impostor syndrome. The boxed lunches were made by a nonprofit caterer that employs survivors of sex trafficking. The writing on the back of attendees’ name tags captured the vibe: “Welcome All BABS!!! BAD ASS BITCHES. Yes, you read that correctly.” 

As Barlag opened the conference, the audience’s enthusiastic response “set me off my game there for a minute” because “it was so powerful and inspiring,” she later said.

“The energy was great — people were grateful to have a conference to attend, to be together, a show of force in support,” she added. 

Lancaster may be close to the state’s capital, but it’s the county seat in an agricultural region of pig and cattle farms. Lancaster itself is known for its glassware — the hometown company, Anchor Hocking, is named for the Hocking River, which snakes through the city. Once one of the world’s largest manufacturers of glassware, Anchor Hocking went through a merger, then a bankruptcy. Like in so many small cities and towns, Lancaster’s historic downtown became a symbol of economic decline in the post-industrial Rust Belt. In recent years, though, Lancaster’s population began to tick up again. 

Fairfield County is a Republican stronghold in presidential elections. President Lyndon Johnson, in 1968, is the only Democrat who has won there since 1944. Republican President Donald Trump’s America-first economic message resonated with voters who have watched Lancaster struggle, then rebound. In 2024, close to 62 percent of the county’s voters cast ballots for Trump and Vice President JD Vance, who was then one of the U.S. senators for Ohio. The state, a one-time presidential bellwether that has in recent cycles grown more conservative, backed Trump over Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris by 55-to-44 percent. 

In this slice of Trump Country, personal interpretations of the reasons for the cancellation of Celebrate Women are a sort of political Rorschach test. Some left-leaning voters believe it was the inevitable result of Trump’s assault on diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, a broad concept that his administration has deployed to challenge and threaten institutions deemed too liberal. Some conservative-leaning voters believe the cancellation to be an overly cautious move by the university — and potentially a way to make the new administration look bad. 

One thing on which women on both sides agree is that they should not be silenced.

“There is dissent about how we came to this place,” Fairfield County Auditor Carri Brown, an elected Republican, acknowledged during her opening remarks. But “when we’re told we cannot celebrate women, we’ll respond by saying, ‘Yes we can’ … and we’ll rally and we’ll rise!” 

When she described diversity as “not a bad word” but a “blessing,” the crowd applauded and some rose to their feet. “I have a very strong faith in America,” Brown said.

Ohio University’s decision to cancel the Celebrate Women event is the latest skirmish between conservative politicians and the elite institutions of higher education that they have long charged with being hostile to their political viewpoints, with so-called DEI efforts at colleges and universities now front and center to their case. 

A February 14 “dear colleague” letter from the civil rights office of Trump’s Department of Education to colleges and universities alleged an “embrace of pervasive and repugnant race-based preferences and other forms of racial discrimination” at the expense of White students. It noted that federal law “prohibits covered entities from using race in decisions pertaining to admissions, hiring, promotion, compensation, financial aid, scholarships, prizes, administrative support, discipline, housing, graduation ceremonies, and all other aspects of student, academic, and campus life.” Noncompliance would risk the federal funding that nearly all colleges and universities receive. 

Though the letter made no direct mention of gender, it put university administrators on alert as they sought to identify any programming that could jeopardize their funding. When the Department of Education, which Trump now seeks to dismantle, launched investigations against more than 50 education institutions, it included two in Ohio: the University of Cincinnati and the Ohio State University. 

Judith Cosgray, a librarian and leader of an arts nonprofit who has attended Celebrate Women on and off for the past 15 years, described its cancellation as a balloon deflating when its attendees most needed a lift. 

“I understand that they’re afraid of losing their funding, I understand that, but sometimes you’ve got to stand up, too,” Cosgray said in between conference sessions.

In addition to the various executive orders and directives that Trump has made about DEI, the Ohio legislature, where Republicans hold a veto-proof majority in part due to unconstitutional gerrymandering, recently approved a higher education bill that bans DEI training, scholarships and offices, and contains admonitions about teaching “controversial” topics. It is expected to be sent to GOP Gov. Mike DeWine for his signature as early as this week. 

A spokesperson for DeWine did not respond to a request to comment on whether he will sign the anti-DEI legislation or if, by his estimation, events like Celebrate Women would fall under its purview. The office of GOP state House Speaker Matt Huffman likewise did not respond to the same question by publication time.

Celebrate Women isn’t the only recent example of how the assault on DEI across public life has led to a seeming prohibition on celebrating the accomplishments of women, with many actions taken during March, the month specifically earmarked to remember such events. 

Information about the first woman to pass Marine infantry training was among some 26,000 photos and online posts marked for deletion as part of a DEI purge at the Defense Department, the Associated Press reported. A page about Golden Girls actor Bea Arthur, one of the first to serve in the Marine Corps Women’s Reserve, also disappeared. There are reports that Arlington National Cemetery scrubbed its website of references related to notable women veterans. 

It isn’t limited to women. A Defense Department webpage that described the military service of Black civil rights icon and baseball player Jackie Robinson disappeared — and then reappeared. Information about the Tuskegee Airmen, the first Black military pilots who served in World War II, when the U.S. military was still segregated, has also vanished. Outcry over the removal of webpages about the Navajo Code Talkers who served during the same war led to their restoration. “History is not DEI,” Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell said as the department scrambled to respond.

Tabitha Stover, a financial adviser who describes herself as liberal, attended Celebrate Women for the first time last year. Despite spending most of her life in Lancaster, she didn’t know anyone at the event, but found the group kind and inviting. She was disappointed to hear this year’s conference would not move forward, then heartened when We Rally & We Rise took its place. She has vacillated about who was to blame, but described it as an event that brings people together instead of driving them apart.

Stover shared a table with a group of colleagues from the area branch of a national nonprofit organization focused on youth mentorship. Several of them are friends of hers on Facebook; she knows the women have what she called “very different” politics from one another.

“And yet we’re all here sitting at the same table,” Stover said.