March is always Women’s Month at the Josephy Center. The art show features women artists; there’s a reading night with women writers and this year the addition of “musical stories” on Gail Swart’s piano. And then a final, full-blown women musicians night.

Janis Carper coordinates the concert and gives us her own music. In the last 15 years, at the Methodist Camp and Wallowa Lake Lodge, on the stage at the courthouse, Embers and at the Josephy Center, Janis has amazed with musical athleticism.

She plays guitar and mandolin and saxophone and moves from bluegrass to jazz at the flick of a fellow performer. She sings harmony or lead, and smoothly catches up with guest musicians on fiddle, piano or accordion.

I had to get that in about Janis, because she’s a star, a musician herself who is helping and encouraging others — men and women — to make music.

Janis set it up, but it was at the Josephy Center.

“Harmony Rising,” a chorus of women singers who led off the music show, sing a cappella and get bigger and better with each performance. This year there were 12 women. They are realtors and foresters, women you’ve seen with fiddle or guitar, and women who’ve never been on a stage, women born and raised here and others new. As a 75 year-old white man, I am absolutely thrilled to see women take the stage. Any stage. The first time I saw it was actually in Turkey when I was a Peace Corps volunteer. It was 1965, and I met my first women doctors and engineers in a country pulled into the 20th century by a man they called Ataturk — father of the Turks. Ataturk had founded the modern country in 1923 and immediately given women the vote and seats at many tables.

That must have given me courage in my first Wallowa County job at the Extension Service. I was in charge of a program called Neighborhood Youth Corps. Working with Bob Palmer at the Forest Service, I sent a crew of 14- to 16-year-old boys and girls to Billy Meadows for a summer. Later, we used special programs to put women on trail crews.

Title 9 came along, and we had girls basketball teams locally and a rising number of women in medical and law schools across the country.

I thought we were on the way to equity, and we are making progress: my OSU Ag class at Eastern has been 50-50 men and women the past four years; most of our county docs are women; Sales Force is in the media explaining how deeply rooted inequality in the workforce is, and how they are working to change it. And women across the country — Democrats and Republicans — are lining up for the 2018 fall elections.

But the backlash is immense. In my old second country, Turkey, an authoritarian government is chipping away at many of Ataturk’s reforms, and although women in academia and writing from abroad are speaking out, their in-country presence is tough.

In our country, many pundits attribute Trump’s presidential victory to the rise of angry white men, while the campaign videos of Donald Trump boasting about having his way with women have helped propel the #MeToo and #TimesUp movements.

We had another unique event this women’s month: Rep. Pramila Jayapal talked to a group of men and women live from her congressional office in Washington, D.C. Although she represents a Seattle district in Congress, she is a frequent visitor to the Wallowas with many local friends.

Pramila, an immigrant from India at 16, didn’t set out to be a politician, but rose with the times and Seattle area concerns about race and gender. Our conversation was wide-ranging, and her constant reminder was that it is women’s time.

The movements — yes, but more importantly, women are primarily engaged in issues that concern all Americans: health care; income disparity; war and peace. And they are running for office.

Times are changing. Like an increasing number of older white guys, I have a brown granddaughter, and I want her to be free of assault, able to work where and how she wants and to be justly paid for it.

Maybe she’ll run for congress someday. Maybe your granddaughter will be President or Secretary of Defense. Women have rarely made war. They’ve been busy raising families and promoting harmony.

Columnist Rich Wandschneider lives in Joseph.