As I conducted some research for National Women’s History Month, I read a sentence that reminded me about the lack of awareness and recognition of NWHM in our schools, and quite frankly, I got irritated.
Very irritated.
The sentence explained that, “March, as National Women’s History Month, has been part of our cultural calendar for over a generation. Yet each year, we receive countless complaints about the lack of coverage of National Women’s History Month in the press, radio, and television. Further concerns are expressed about bookstores and libraries that often don’t even put up a poster or a Women’s History Month display. Most discouraging is that Women’s History Month is often not even mentioned in the schools.”
I thought, “Hey, yeah, I have no memory of learning about NWHM in middle school, junior high school or high school!”
I’m sure staff at my schools had a few posters, and put a blurb somewhere in those monthly one-page newsletters, but there was no pedagogy of substance that lit students’ interest.
Sadly, I don’t think it was until the beginning of my undergraduate years that I learned about NWHM, and Native American History Month, in depth.
It’s one thing to designate vital contributions of a group of people to one month, but then to barely teach it to our youth is another.
As my mind reflected on earlier years, and my television played an MTV marathon of Exposed (a very cheesy show where a woman goes out with two potential dates and later reveals to them that they have been hooked to a lie detector test), I wondered, “Couldn’t the producers at MTV have been just a little more pro-active considering the countless number of young people that tune in after school everyday? Couldn’t they have shown some special on the first female videos that got played on their network?”
Maybe their early education lacked substance like mine. For now, I’ll conclude that instead of the real reasons.
McDonald’s has a 365Black campaign to advocate Black History Month every day, which is great. But why not also have something like that for NWHM? 365Black provides a new tidbit every day on black history. It’d be nice if they did that for other histories, too.
I started thinking about more little things, like how a great quote on International Women’s Day in the paper was neatly tucked in the bottom left corner of the paper. And how the women’s basketball information in my school newspaper was frequently relegated to the back pages.
I remembered, The Mind Has No Sex: Women in the Origins of Modern Science, by Londa Schiebinger and recalled the many historical contributions women made to science while they were excluded from public recognition for them. Maria Merian was a leading entomologist in the 18th century. Maria Cunitz, Maria Winklemann, and Maria Eimmart (that’s a lot of Maria’s) finally received a little recognition for their scientific contributions, after Copernicus and Galileo, of course (even though the Maria’s finished their work first).
The contributions of women in the fields of astronomy, mathematics, botany, science, the arts, and so on and so on make it all the more ludicrous to relegate a month to women that isn’t even reinforced in many schools. (This is, of course, just as other groups don’t receive their dues.)
I read The Mind Has No Sex in adulthood. I wish I had known facts like these earlier.
Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s great to designate a specific time for the country to honor the achievements of a group, but I think it’s fair to say that women’s history isn’t taught to kids or observed as it deserves to be–in March or at any other time.
All children deserve to gain knowledge on the successes women have made and continue to make on a basic level, beginning in their early educational years.
This weekend I thumbed through a book on the benefits of secondary education for girls in Africa, and learned that many times, teachers extract female students from class to perform cooking duties, run errands, and clean. Of course, this is a different culture, but the pattern of educational institutions failing to pay their due respects to women prevails.
I’m not trying to sound like someone who blames our schools completely for my own lack of knowledge.
I, as an adult, am responsible for learning new things. There comes an age where we become pro-active, but it makes a difference when our schools disseminate the correct lessons early on. And, of course, all schools aren’t like my schools; plenty of my peers had a rich education on their culture and history early on.
Nevertheless, we can’t count on MTV or McDonald’s, even though they cater to many young minds of America, so we need the schools, where kids are from morning to evening, to talk about this. Accessible and quality secondary education is vital, because schools hold the key to our future. They are a powerful vehicle that can make HWHM something to remember.
So what will I do to reverse the bad cycle my home schools generate? I am not off the hook to do something.
More on that in the next installment…
