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In case you didn't know, March is Women's History Month. Personally, I think we should celebrate women every single day, not just one month out of the year, and I make sure to remind my husband of that as often as I can.

Anyway, there are so many women who are recognized for their contributions throughout history, but there are a few, sadly, who go unmentioned even though they made a HUGE impact on society.

Take Marion Donovan. In 1946, after three kids, Marion had had it with washing out their dirty cloth diapers, clothes and bed linens, and decided to take matters into her own hands, or rather, her own sewing machine. Using just a shower curtain and some heavy-duty thread, Marion fashioned a waterproof diaper cover, and then later, the first disposable diaper. In 1961, her design was used to help create Pampers®, the first mass-produced disposable diaper. But it was Donovan who we should thank for all those diapers we no longer have to wash by hand.

Then there was Mary Phelps Jacob, a young New York socialite in 1914 who decided corsets were both uncomfortable and unattractive under her clothing. Determined to create a better alternative, Jacob took two silk handkerchiefs and, with help from her maid, sewed them together to make the first bra. As an aside, I have to imagine that women of that day must have been significantly smaller in the bosom area than we are today because if someone my (generously endowed) size tried to get away with a bra made from two silk handkerchiefs, the weight around my neck would probably cause my head to snap off.

Ann Moore was a Peace Corps nurse during the 1960s in Togo, West Africa, when she noticed how African mothers carried their babies in slings on their backs. Moore saw that this way of toting around their babies not only made life a lot easier for the mothers, but also seemed to make the infants feel more secure.

When Moore came back home she decided to try creating something similar to carry around her own child and thus, the Snugli® was born. As mothers, we all owe a debt of gratitude to Moore for this invention, and I'm sure Moore owes a debt of gratitude to Marion Donovan for creating that disposable diaper, because the one thing worse than having a wet baby is having a wet baby in a Snugli® on your chest.

In 1930, Ruth Wakefield was mixing a batch of chocolate cookies for her guests at her lodge, The Toll House Inn, when she discovered that she was out of baking chocolate. All she had were some Nestle's semi-sweet morsels. So, expecting the morsels to get absorbed into the dough like the baking chocolate, she used them instead. But as we now know, Nestle's Morsels don't ever fully melt when you bake them, and the resulting cookie launched Ruth Wakefield into fame as the inventor of the chocolate chip cookie.

This was obviously a great moment in culinary history but also a potential problem for many women who could just not get enough of Wakefield's Toll House cookies. Fortunately for us, Jean Nidetch, another great woman in history, came along in 1963 and founded Weight Watchers.

Clearly, these women have had a profound effect on our lives, but I have to say, as a humor writer, the woman who probably influenced me the most, aside from my mother, was Erma Bombeck.

Most people don't realize that Erma Bombeck was almost 38 when she started writing her humor column for the Dayton Journal Herald. By today's work standards, that is practically old enough to retire to a senior community called "Journey's End" in Florida and start stealing sugar packets at the Early Bird Special. Like Erma, I was also nearly 40 when I started writing my column. Like Erma, my column grew out of the experience of becoming a mother. It was not something I could have written in my 20s. I actually don't even think I really hit my writing stride until my 40s. With age, they say, comes wisdom - but also, sometimes, children. That kind of blows that whole wisdom theory to heck. But with children come hemorrhoids. And with children and hemorrhoids come a humor column.

Erma Bombeck wrote about children and hemorrhoids and other familial things that annoy and inconvenience us in more than 4,000 columns that appeared in over 900 newspapers. She wrote 12 books, nine of which made The New York Times' Best Sellers List. Considering she didn't start writing until she was almost 40 and she passed away, sadly, when she was 69, that is a heck of a body of work for such a short time.

So what did Erma Bombeck really achieve aside from all these books and columns? What makes her someone worth celebrating during Women's History Month? Well, she made people laugh. She made us forget our financial struggles and health issues and parenting challenges for a short time by helping us see the humor in life. She helped us feel less alone with our problems by letting us share in hers. She opened a window into the challenges of child rearing and let us know it was okay to laugh at our mistakes. Most importantly, she taught us the healing power of humor and the fundamental need we have, as humans, to connect through laughter.

Interestingly enough, although she was undoubtedly one of the most gifted columnists of our time, Erma Bombeck was incredibly humble about her achievements and defined herself as a wife and mother first, and a writer second.

As for me, I define myself as a writer first, a wife second, and a mother third because my kids really annoyed me this morning, and if my husband doesn't come home with flowers today to make up for all the hell the kids put me through, he's definitely dropping into third place.

Nevertheless, I'm glad I'm taking the time to remember some women in history who did so much to improve the quality of our lives. But I think we should also take a moment to celebrate ourselves. Everyday we simply make someone else smile, we are doing something that makes a difference. For me, that is writing a humor column, but it can also be as simple as just telling someone how much I appreciate them.

I think a lot of the time we are way, way too critical of ourselves. My husband says if anyone else talked about me the way I talk about myself, he'd deck them, which isn't saying much because even I can bench press more than my husband.

But this is the time of year when the media tells us we should start feeling bad about the weight we gained over the winter, or the book we didn't write, or the kids we forgot to feed (and by the way, I only did that last one once). It's hard to feel good about yourself when it feels like everyone else is telling you you're not thin enough or working hard enough or a good enough mother. However, if history is any indication, our foremothers did not have perfect bodies or perfect careers or perfect children, either. They did the best they could and sometimes they had amazing results and sometimes they had so-so results, just like us.

So instead, let's celebrate what we do achieve, not what we don't, and everyday just be the amazing, authentic individuals that we are.

We might not get our house on the National Register of Historic Places like Erma just did, but we are certainly likely to make someone's day.

- Tracy Beckerman

Tracy Beckerman, who served on the faculty at the 2014 EBWW, writes the syndicated humor column and blog, "Lost in Suburbia," which is carried by more than 400 newspapers in 25 states and on 250 websites to approximately 10 million readers. She's also the author of Lost in Suburbia: A Momoir and Rebel Without a Minivan: Observations on Life in the 'Burbs. In 2014, she was the global humor winner in the Erma Bombeck Writing Competition sponsored by the Washington-Centerville Public Library in Centerville, Ohio.