Women's History Month: Keeping Herstory Important
March is Women's History Month. Girls do not learn a lot about the history of the important contributions that women have made to the world as school curricula tend to have a bias towards teaching war as history and certainly towards teaching mostly about men. In 1971, the year in which I was born, a study of thirteen popular U.S. History books found that only 1% of the content was about women.
We have gained a few percentage points in the more than thirty-eight years since then, but only a few. We are not in double digits. According to the American Association of University Women’s report How Schools Shortchange Girls, a study on books taught in high school English classes found that only one of the ten most frequently studied books was written by a woman (none, by the way, were written by minorities). When girls go to school, they learn that men do important things. They rarely ever hear about women like themselves. Thanks to the State Board of Education, it doesn't look like this will be getting better any time very soon. As parents, we have to find the experiences that will rectify this weakness in our schools and in our sexist culture and provide them ourselves. We have to teach our girls (and boys) about all the important things that women have done and can do so that they will know that they can change the world in oh, so very many ways, wonderful and true.
Participating in Girl Scouting has been one thing that has provided wonderful opportunities for me to help connect my older daughter to women’s stories. Her Brownie Girl Scout Troop earned their Herstory Try-It and their Ms. President Patch, soaking up many wonderful materials on women in history and government provided by the Girl Scouts and by The White House Project. They visited City Hall and sat in the Council chairs while a female Assistant City Manager told them about how she ran her City Departments and how she had discovered her leadership skills when she was a Brownie. The girls clowned in the Council chairs, singing camp songs and acted out faerie tales in which no one needed any rescuing on the floor of the Council chambers. They had their snack in one of the upstairs conference rooms where the powerful people wheel and deal and they prowled the Assistant City Manager’s office, poking at her gadgets and dutifully writing down her phone number in case they needed anything from her later. They visited a female judge and sat in her courtroom listening to stories about her life on the bench, big-eyed and nervous until she let them try on her robe and sit in her chair. They visited a teen-aged girl who told them stories about being a girl in high school, about mean kids and nice ones, teachers and boys. Sitting with us, their mothers, in my darkened office, they talked to us about our careers and what we had learned on our journeys that we wanted them to know. Mothers spoke of what they were proud of in their careers, of the importance of traveling before settling down, of what was hard and what was good. The girls made time lines of their lives, mapping out what they hoped to accomplish with all the strength that bubbled up out of them that day and everyday. It was good.
When my older daughter was very young, I read storybooks to her about strong girl characters. Now her baby sister is starting to clamor for those same stories. Madeline, Ramona, Betsy, Laura and others can lay a strong framework of spirit and confidence in the worth of girls from a very young age. Madeline is fearless and kind, Ramona marches to her own inner rhythm and Betsy is creative and has parents who support her dreams and the dreams of her sister. She only gets in trouble when she is not true to herself. Laura is headstrong, independent and curious, a pioneer (though Laura also lived in a very racist time and her parents pushed Native peoples out of their land - her story, if shared, must be told with a lot of explanation about what was wrong with what her parents did). These are the role models that help me bring spirit and confidence to my girls. Their stories are part of the songs we sing and the make-believe worlds that my daughters spin on long walks and in those long, rambling bedtime oratories.
As girls grow older, it is time to introduce them to real-life herstory…women’s history, the stories of the great women who came before us. It became clear to me very early in my mothering years that I would have to build a library of these stories myself…the schools were not going to teach my girls herstory; they teach only men’s stories. Having not learned enough herstory myself as a child, my older daughter and I had to learn together. This was a very special journey for us. Book by book, we collected the stories of accomplished women in history: women in science, in government, in social movements, literature and the Bible. We found them and read them and bought them and saved them. We talked about them and wrote stories and poems about them until their lives were part of our own. We trotted these stories to school every March and requested that they be used in the classroom for Women’s History Month. Teachers were usually surprised at first by my request, but happy enough to oblige. They read the books in class or asked me to do so. It wasn’t much to even out the imbalances of the curriculum, but it was something.
I took my daughter and young sister on outings before the baby was born...we were women on adventures. We went to the Women’s Museum in Dallas where we learned about women in sports, about suffrage, the ERA and much, much more. We went camping in the hills and saw deer and told each other stories in the dark. My husband and I encouraged activities like Girl Scouts and publications like New Moon: The Magazine for Girls and Their Dreams that would reinforce what we were trying to teach our girls.
I must be always seeking ways to bring women’s stories into the lives of my children, and I must do it well. I must be relentless and tireless about it. No one else will be. It is a responsibility that we mothers mainly carry alone. I think that needs to change. We mothers must talk to teachers, principals and state agencies and legislatures about making history and social studies curricula more equitable, if we are not to carry this responsibility alone. We must protect Title IX, and continue demanding equity for our daughters in their schools. Studies have shown that curricula transmit values. What values can today’s curricula, absent of women, be transmitting but that women are worthless? We must never stop fighting.
History is not just about men and their wars. Women shape civilization just as surely through our accomplishments and through our very lives. I want my daughters to know of Betsy Ross, Grandma Moses, Amelia Earhart, Marie Curie and Rosa Parks. These well-known women in history might get scant paragraphs today in longer textbook discussions that abound with male achievements. I want more than scant paragraphs, though. I want depth and focus. I want my girls to know the names of Jane Addams, Lucretia Mott, Dolores Huerta, Wilma Mankiller and Queen Liliuokalani as well. My daughters need to know that the contributions that women make, the contributions that they, my daughters, will make, are important. Their stories are important. They are important. They are strong and brilliant and they will change the world.
Books About Strong Girl Characters
• Madeline
By: Ludwig Bemelmans
• The Ramona Books
By: Beverly Cleary
• The Little House Books
By: Laura Ingalls Wilder
• Tatterhood and the Hobgoblins
Retold by Lauren Mills
• The Betsy-Tacy Books
By: Maud Hart Lovelace
• Little Women
By: Louisa May Alcott
• The Anne of Green Gables Books
By: L.M. Montgomery
Books About Herstory for Kids
• Cool Women: The Thinking Girl’s Guide to the Hippest Women in History
By: Pam Nelson
• The Ballot Box Battle
By Emily Arnold McCully
• You Forgot Your Skirt, Amelia Bloomer
By: Shana Corey
• Amelia and Eleanor Go For A Ride
By: Pam Munoz Ryan
• The Value of Friendship: The Story of Jane Addams
By: Ann Donegan Johnson
• Rare Treasure: Mary Anning And Her Remarkable Discoveries
By: Don Brown
• Maria’s Comet
By: Deborah Hopkinson
Sources
The American Association of University Women, 1995. How Schools Shortchange Girls: The
AAUW Report: A Study of Major Findings on Girls and Education. AAUW.
For more from Lone Star Ma, go to www.lonestarmablog.blogspot.com.
