In our communities….
March 3, 2009
by Amy Siskind
|MARCH IS WOMEN’S HISTORY MONTH
Today I spent my morning hanging posters of famous women around my son’s school. What a cool thing to watch the kids walking in the hallway and pausing for a moment to look and read. I think of the little girls who get to look at famous scientists, politicians, musicians, athletes and think to themselves: “hmm… this could be me.”
TNA co-founder Jenn Lee has frequently pointed out to me the importance of images that our children see. For young girls, think about the barrage of information that they get from our MSM. On Ophelia last night, Liz Funk spoke about how so much of the self-image and self-esteem of our young girls comes from what they see in the media (I encourage all mothers to listen to this important interview). Unfortunately, what the girls see in the media is frequently NOT what we would like them to see.
PTA co-President Kristen Axelrad, Asst Principal Edgar McIntosh and me
Much of our work here at The New Agenda is aimed at promoting women into positions of power and influence — in the government, in academia and in corporations. We want the generations behind us to have positive role models so they can dream big.
I think of my own daughter and the information she picks up around her. Ask her what she wants to be when she grows up and she will not hesitate to tell you: a professional basketball player. In fact, she is confident that she will be the third girl to dunk (never mind that Lisa Leslie is 6’5″ and Candace Parker is 6’4″). When I was her age, the only women’s basketball on the television was the final game of the college season and of course there were no professional teams. So how would I aspire to be a professional player – well, I wouldn’t and didn’t.
I also think about our young children and how they got to see an African American and a woman run for president, and I suppose that is progress. But I then think of how many moms in my community told their daughters that we have made so much progress, that we don’t have to vote for a woman just because she is a woman. Is that the case? Well, I for one do not agree. I wish that my children had either Hillary Clinton or Sarah Palin in the White House. Or, as my son, the natural diplomat would posit, he hopes we can find a woman who has brown skin to be our next president.
Beautiful! I love the posters very much! I couldn’t agree more about exposure. That is so critical. People imagine from what they know, and if they have no example from which to imagine, it’s harder to make progress. Someone has to consciously go against convention in that case, and not everyone wants to do that, or even knows they can.
For myself, I’m going back to my high school (all girl) every week in March to offer women’s history lectures to social studies classes. I’ll have my first one tomorrow. Really looking forward to it!
Amy, Anna Belle,
I think this is going to be a big part of it – women getting out into their local communities and getting the kind of exposure we WANT for women.
Anna Belle, let us know how the lectures go. This is great!
I’ll have to listen to the Liz Funk interview. Already I feel like I have to block my daughter’s eyes from seeing hostile images toward women in the media. And she is only one and a half! Just a trip to CVS can cause me to do this. it’s horrible what is out there and thank you for doing your part to present the positive and inspiring.
I think this is something that each one of us can do. Imagine the affect it would have if we all did this. Talked to teachers about including women’s history, libraries, etc. Anyway you can do it in your community.
Thank you to Amy and all of the other parents that are out there working in schools this month to give our children great female role models.
What bothers me is that all history courses, in grade school, colleges and university, are MALE history. Women’s history has to be set aside to one month, women’s right to freedom of access to one day. It should be integrated. It’s too easy to dismiss when it’s set aside. Even when it is observed I get the idea it’s lip service. There we’ve done it. Now back to the real history.
I love that you’re doing this. It reminds me when it was done in the ’60s and ’70s. We had a great surging of knowlege about our foremothers and respedct for their accomplishments, when they achieved in the public sphere, or in women’s ways. Where did it go?
Amy, good going!
Sis, it’s dang hard to get women into “anything important” in school. The textbooks just are not written that way. It takes a teacher to present the “supplemental material” (and/or parents to encourage it); if the teacher and encouraging parents are fortunate, other parents/school board/principal will also be supportive.
I’m teaching Intro to Physical Anthropology this semester, and it was necessary to devote an entire lecture to introduce feminist and queer theory in anthropology, both of which have been around in the field for over 20 and 10 years, respectively, but haven’t made it into the mainstream texts. It isn’t just at the grammar/high school level, unfortunately.
Sis, I agree with you entirely that WH ought to be integrated. But don’t fear that this singling it out for a month is a bad idea. Here’s what happened with Balck History:
It’s been in the schools for over 30 years now, beginning with MLK. Now, after all that time, you are beginning to see the records of great black achievers show up in history books written by students who had access to this information all through schools. At the rate it is going now, black history will be fully integrated in another 30 years. We can do that same thing with women’s history, and that’s really part of the point with this WHM deal. That and images, images, images. Get the examples out there! So take heart! This is only the beginning. And I’ll be writing an all-inclusive history book in my retirement, though Ii hope we don’t have to wait that long!
Great article. Indoctonation into patrairchy starts very young. I can attest to that. I once read somewhere (sorry I don’t remember) that children don’t know whether they are a girl or a boy until they are six years old. But my favorite shows when I was three were “Barney” and “Mary Tyler Moore”. I think I perfered female protagonists over male. I also remember really liking “Dr. Quinn” a couple years later.
When I was four years old, I decided that I wanted to be a musical conducter (of an orchestra) when I grew up. But later I gave up that dream because I had never heard of a woman conducter and came to belive that woman could not be conducters. Then I decided maybe I should be a dental hygenist. There were lots of woman doing that!
At six, I compleatly shocked my parents (and grandparents) when I told them one day that girls weren’t supposed to be good at math and science. They had no idea were that came from, because I was homeschooled. Before then, I had actaully exelled at math, and really liked it. After, it became an absolute struggle. Oddly, not to long afterwards, I thought that maybe I should become a scientist, simply beacsue there were not very many woman in that field. But it’s rather difficult to be a scientist when you hate math (and flunked it more than once in school).
It’s almost like there is some sort of “hate woman” vibe running around (personally, I think it’s demonic).
Sorry for the book. I’ve just been thinking a lot about this lately. I hope it’s readable!
Anna, I remember reading a book about Nelly Bly as a 9 year old and being utterly fascinated. What an incredible woman. I think it might have been my first (inadvertent) women’s history lesson, other than Betsy Ross. I never even heard of “Remember the ladies” and Abigail Adams until I was 22 years old. Sad. So sad.
But I take a measure of solace from the fact that we’re working so hard to correct this. I started blogging primarily because I wanted to seed this topic into emerging female political movements, and by golly, it seems to be working! (not that I can take sole credit or anything)
I wanted to mention that we should not just teach this to our daughters. This should be taught to our sons as well. My 5 yr old asked me around the time of the inauguration, why there never were any female presidents. I told him that it was an excellent question. He didn’t see the historical significance of color but he did of gender. It bothered him that there were 44 presidents and not one a woman.
Something else I wanted to mention. I work in a hospital. The staff and patients were all abuzz with the election as such a hot topic. Most didn’t want to see a woman in power, because she might be a bit**, or might have a bad case of PMS. That is we’re up against.
Commercials and television shows portray women as needy, emotional, the only ones to ever clean anything, the only ones to immerse themselves in a tub of ice cream, the only ones to need diet and skin products,etc. It’s the portrayal of helpless,out of shape,emotionally wrecked women to maintain their low self esteem. How could you not have low self esteem with all of the things the marketers tell you are wrong with you? I think they(Madison Ave) need to be targeted to be enlightened as well.
SOME GREAT RESOURCES FOR WOMEN’S HISTORY MONTH:
1. A moving video clip: http://www.girleffect.org/#/video/
2. International Museum of Women: http://www.imow.org/home/index
One more resource:
http://www.thewhitehouseproject.org/
The White House Project, a 501(c)(3), aims to advance women’s leadership in all communities and sectors—up to the U.S. presidency—by filling the leadership pipeline with a richly diverse, critical mass of women. . . . At The White House Project, we believe that if you add women to the ranks of leadership, you change everything.
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