Thornbrugh: Textbooks ignore women’s triumphs
History should not favor one sex over the other.
Thursday, March 27th, 2008
In one of my first classes this semester, my history professor was introducing her feelings on the subject to the class.
Displayed boldly on a PowerPoint slide, she read a quote from Catherine Morland in Jane Austen’s “Northanger Abbey.” Referring to studying history, she says, “I read it a little as a duty, but it tells me nothing that does not either vex or weary me. The quarrels of popes and kings, with wars or pestilences, in every page; the men all so good for nothing, and hardly any women at all — it is very tiresome.”
My professor said that when she was younger, she didn’t see a lot of people like her talked about in history classes or textbooks.
Until now, history has been an uninteresting subject, where a teacher lectures from president to president with the token female thrown in here and there. We’ve heard of Susan B. Anthony and how Sacagawea helped Lewis and Clark.
Students should ask questions about the women from the time period they are studying. We no longer live in a time period when women’s actions have less value than the accomplishments of men.
History should not favor one sex over the other, and professors should refuse to accept subject material that doesn’t include women.
I’m a sophomore in college, and this is the first time I’ve actually enjoyed history. One reason is because of the high quality of the professor’s teaching, but a large part of it is because it’s a women’s history class. I learn about the actions and lives of women who built the foundation for how I live my life today. Women of this century are living what they worked for. I’m allowed to vote, seek higher education and write this column because women before me fought for the right to do it themselves.
In 1980, the National Women’s History Project was founded because its group members had a problem with the absence of learning about women in the classroom. According to its Web site, only 3 percent of the content in educational history books covered women. They tried to increase this number, one of the most prominent attempts was the start of a national Women’s History Month.
If more young girls knew that women like Alice Paul were force fed and jailed to give women today the right to vote, they would be less apathetic to what is going on in politics. If young girls were educated about the struggles and triumphs of Margaret Sanger and the beginning of birth control, would there be fewer teenage pregnancies? Why do we know the details of Britney Spears’ psychological meltdown but have no clue who Elizabeth Cady Stanton is? If girls were given strong, successful women to look up to, would the recent study from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention stating that one in four teenage girls have a sexually transmitted disease be true?
A greater emphasis should be placed on women’s history in all levels of education. It took 14 years of education before I learned about the majority of women in my current history class. March is Women’s History Month, and even though I support this celebration of women’s history, it is not enough. If Jane Austen was writing about women not being recognized in history in the 1800s and women today are still pointing out the problem, this is obviously not something that has been corrected. If we have learned anything from the women of our past, it’s that we know how to put up a long fight for what we believe in.
Thornbrugh is a Lenexa sophomore in women’s studies and creative writing.
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