The following comes from a small section of Kelsie's manuscript on teaching women's history in the K-12 classroom:

I know sexism exists because I have experienced it personally. The examples are endless beginning in childhood and increasing in severity into adulthood, reaching a breaking point at motherhood. Not only were federal laws violated during my parental leave, I had to fight tooth and nail to get my jobs back. My health care surrounding childbirth was insufficient and put my life at risk. But this is just me.
If the way we teach history is to be reexamined to include the voices, experiences, and stories of women, a huge societal shift must occur, one that values women’s contributions past and present, to the home and to the workforce. This re-imagination requires an honest assessment of where we stand on achieving equality between the sexes and an acceptance that women remain unequal by almost every measure. Feminism convinced most that equality should be valued, it brought federal laws affirming this cultural value, and yet still signs of inequity persist. Being sexist doesn’t yet carry the same weight as being labeled racist. The myth that girls are equal now comes from a educational failure to show the lived experiences of women after the vote was achieved. Students are left confounded because the law says women have rights and yet some “extremists” are demanding more. To understand the importance of reforming our history classes, we must first understand that women remain unequal and that academic reform will help to fix this problem.
True equality for women and minorities has not yet been achieved despite abundant recent progress. This could not be more heavily felt in the lives of people with disabilities, LGBTQ, BIPOC, and other marginalized groups of women whose obstacles are compounded. To debunk the myth, one must go to the data and beyond to explore possible causalities for the data both globally and in the United States. Saying girls are equal now is like saying black school children were receiving equal education under Jim Crow. Until the stigma of being female is gone from every cultural norm, until equitable solutions are found to biological differences, until girls are no longer segregated, until women no longer have to fight and argue for their employers and government to uphold their Constitutional and human rights, girls are not equal.
Behavioral Economics and Womanhood            If women were equal, they would be seen, heard, and their stories would be told equally. As of 2020, women make up 7 percent of the Fortune 500 CEOs, 6 percent of Nobel Prize Winners, and only 24 percent of “heard, read about or seen in newspaper, television and radio.”[1] Women reported 37 percent of news stories and this trend is also true in the “democratized” digital media. In film, women represent 31 percent of speaking characters, 23 percent of protagonists, and 21 percent are filmmakers.[2] In sport, “Despite progress, women still continue to be excluded… and are paid far less than men in wages and prize money globally.” Their self-expression, ideas, and personhood remain visible at fractions of the men’s, why?
            There are a myriad of reasons as to why women are not seen and heard in these professions, and undeniably many of them have to do with the unalienable characteristic of being female.[3] This is not to say that sexism is necessarily rampant or intentional, but that society has not yet found a way to allow women to coexist in work outside the home. In high school and college, on average women out perform men. In their early careers, women too outperform their male counterparts. It is not until the middle of their careers that we see a shift.[4] Kindly, conservative psychologist, Jordan Peterson, said that because women tend to be more agreeable, they are less inclined to be cut throat in their path to the pinnacle of their careers. He also said that successful women on track to become administrators, partners, and CEOs are often also married to successful men who make the same or more than they do so money is usually not a object and the choice to stay home and care for their children seems wise and obvious.[5]
            Women do make choices that contribute to their own invisibility and lower income, but the notion that this is a free choice rather than a restrained and economic one is simply not true. When one searches the internet for information on the gender pay gap, the top two hits are sponsored from two organizations that seem at odds with one another: the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) and the Institute for Women’s Policy Research (IWPR). In his scathing article about recent pay-gap research by the IWPR, John Phelen of FEE claimed that pay gap research is poor social science because it takes the average male and average female salaries.[6] He said looking at the data this way does not account for choices women make, asserting that women on average work 7 hours a day to the 8 the average male worker puts in. He said that anyone who works less than someone else should expect to earn less. Proudly, Phelen claims that a Harvard study confirms what he and Peterson assert, namely that women choose to earn less. Harvard researchers examined data collected from the highly unionized and regulated Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA), where wage differences between men and women were virtually unthinkable. Phelen said, “Workers are promoted on the basis of seniority rather than performance, and male and female workers of the same seniority have the same choices for scheduling, routes, vacation, and overtime. There is almost no scope here for a sexist boss to favor men over women.”[7] Here is Phelen’s analysis of the study:
They find that male train and bus drivers worked about 83 percent more overtime than their female colleagues and were twice as likely to accept an overtime shift—which pays time-and-a-half—on short notice and that around twice as many women as men never took overtime. The male workers took 48 percent fewer unpaid hours off under the Family Medical Leave Act each year. Female workers were more likely to take less desirable routes if it meant working fewer nights, weekends, and holidays. Parenthood turns out to be an important factor. Fathers were more likely than childless men to want the extra cash from overtime, and mothers were more likely to want time off than childless women.[8]
His conclusion is actually very similar to those of IWPR, but they claim that, “Women’s ‘choices’ are not necessarily choices.”[9] Families at the peak of their professional careers are also often raising children and this family choice has a disproportionate impact on the woman’s career. The Center for American Progress explains:
Today, many families with young children must make a choice between spending a significant portion of their income on child care, finding a cheaper, but potentially lower-quality care option, or leaving the workforce altogether to become a full-time caregiver. Whether due to high cost, limited availability, or inconvenient program hours, child care challenges are driving parents out of the workforce at an alarming rate. In fact, in 2016 alone, an estimated 2 million parents made career sacrifices due to problems with child care.
Child care challenges have become a barrier to work, especially for mothers, who disproportionately take on unpaid caregiving responsibilities when their family cannot find or afford child care. In a 2018 survey conducted by the Center for American Progress, mothers were 40 percent more likely than fathers to report that they had personally felt the negative impact of child care issues on their careers.[10]
Why is it difficult for young families to find childcare? This is one of the most needed and underpaid professions in society. Childcare workers, almost all women, on average earn the equivalent of a cashier or food service worker.[11] In fact, across the board jobs traditionally held by women are lower paid, also contributing to the gap. How is it that jobs in such high demand are not paid well? There seems to be a societal value that the work women do is valued less. There is a long history of this, after all the majority of women’s work used to be unpaid. A good wife maintained a spectacular home, immaculate, with hearty meals, and healthy, curious children. This job was a 24-hour job for which women earned no monetary compensation. Women were supported by their spouses in a society that had no substantive plan for when the spouse died, left, or failed to provide. When women sought careers outside the home, jobs were advertised as “women’s jobs” and could overtly be paid less as a result.
Women routinely requested equal pay, but were denied because of comparisons to similar jobs within that field, a comparison that is flawed and perpetuates the wage gap. When jobs are compared between comparable “male” and “female” fields, however, the pay gap is significant. The Institute for Women’s Policy Research compared elementary school teachers, the most common female occupation, to software developers, the most common male occupation.[12] Both jobs require similar degrees, risks, and burdens. On average elementary school teachers made $982 a week, while software developers made $1894, not to mention that female software developers make $200 less than their male peers on average.
Women’s work is undervalued and this gap is not only seen between fields, but most notably and flagrantly within fields. IWPR concluded in their expansive study and research into the data of more than 125 occupations that, “Women’s median earnings are lower than men’s in nearly all occupations, whether they work in occupations predominantly done by women, occupations predominantly done by men, or occupations with a more even mix of men and women.”[13] This was true between men and women of the same race as well. Perhaps the most famous example is that of the US national soccer teams, where the women earn substantially less than the men. The argument is that the women’s game generates less revenue than the men’s. The US women’s team actually earns a higher percentage of revenue earned than the men do, but the women argue that the commitment and labor is equivalent and should garner equal pay. The argument is about value: how do we as a society value the people who work in it? When people put in equal effort, risk, and time, shouldn’t they be paid similarly?
In the last quarter century, despite feminism, mothers stay home at essentially the same rate because childcare is an enduring problem society has not yet solved.[14] Many lament the declining “American family” and the fact that young Americans are increasingly choosing not to have children, but the cost of living continues to rise and many families depend on two incomes. Additionally, while dad’s stay home more frequently than they did in the 1980’s, only 7% of dads stay home.[15] A huge part of this decision is economic. PEW Research saw a huge surge in stay at home parents, especially dads, in the wake of the Great Recession due largely to the fact that they couldn’t find work that could offset the cost of childcare.[16] The stagnation of stay at home parenting could reflect both the continued desire of many parents make the care of their children their life’s work and also how few options parents have for support.
It would be unfair to blame the patriarchy for biological aspects of child rearing, but after recovery and breastfeeding, there seems little reason the pressure and responsibility of child rearing could not be shared between parents. Gloria Steinem regularly stated in her essay, “The Importance of Work,” regularly reminded everyone that we all had two parents.[17] In the US, only 9 percent of workplaces offer paid paternity leave and 76 percent of fathers return to work within a week of their child’s birth leaving new mothers to fend for themselves.[18] After birth, doctors recommend a whole slew of limitations on women’s activity, especially women who give birth by cesarean section. After the birth of a baby, fathers are caregivers not only to their children, but to their recovering wife. The average woman is not cleared for normal activity by her doctor for between six to twelve weeks. I was one of the unlucky women who also underwent a rare emergency surgery six weeks postpartum prolonging my recovery. My husband’s employer had no paternity policy and although he was allowed to take two sick days to stay with me and our baby in the hospital, I was certainly not recovered after those two days.
The assumption often made is that there is little a man can do to help with the clear biological aspects of a baby’s first months of life. This is a concept mothers I know call the “default parent.” I remember vividly when my son was born the nurse saying that it was time to feed him. No amount of reading or birth class can prepare someone for the moment that a foreign being is pushed toward your nipple with the expectation that something will happen. I remember feeling like a fraud and being shocked when it actually worked. For the next few months I was indoctrinated as default parent with the hourly expectation that I could resolve anything that upset the baby despite the fact that my husband was also present. This baby was just as foreign to me as to my husband, but yet he and everyone else expected me to know what to do.
The biological aspect of womanhood cannot be understated and society has yet to find a solution that doesn’t put the pressure either on women or their spouses. Up until 2019, Ironman faced criticism for allowing fewer female professionals to compete at the world championship. Their defense was that the field of professional women was smaller and that their allocation of spots was proportional. Why were fewer women competing? One answer is that the peak of Ironman performance is around 35 years old, also the time when many women were having babies. Women who compete in Ironman had to schedule their career around having babies in ways men did not. Ironman had a very limited maternity policy and therefore professionals like Mirinda Carfrae, Rachel Jastrebsky, Meredith Kessler, and others had to re-qualify as a professional within months of having a baby. Jastrebsky did Ironman Lake Placid 11 months after childbirth only to learn afterward that she was pregnant with her second baby. Women, not only in sport, at the peak of their careers often face choices men don’t about pursuit of family and career.
Should society help families? If we want people to have children, yes. And we should want people to have children and have the means to raise them well. Finances are the leading cause of divorce and poverty is inexcusably tied to single parenthood. The rearing of our neighbor’s children should be our concern because it has disastrous impacts on the psychology and prospects of the children as well as the economy at large. The Atlantic addressed the plight of single parents, especially mothers in a 2015 article:
Single-parent households (which by and large are headed by women) have more than tripled as a share of American households since 1960. Now, 35 percent of children live in single-parent households… But while the numbers are growing, the amount of help available to single mothers is not.[19]           
The lack of resources and rising numbers of single parents should alarm everyone. The American Psychological Association explained that poverty has adverse academic impacts due to the toll poverty driven stress and anxiety wreck on children’s minds affecting everything from memory to concentration.[20] Dropout rates among this portion of the population are over four times higher than children living above the poverty line. Behavioral problems like impulsiveness, anxiety, ADHD, depression, and violence are seen at higher rates in children raised in poverty.
            If poverty and discrimination are not sufficient, there is also a darker side of the inequities women face usually at the hands of men: violence against women. The UN found that 35 percent of women have experienced sexual violence in their lifetime, a figure that can vary by country substantially, with some countries reporting up to 70 percent of women.[21] In the US the data is similar. The CDC asserts that one in four women experiences sexual violence by a partner, compared to one in ten men.[22] An intimate partner kills half of women who are murdered.[23] While sexual violence with non-partners is relatively similar between women and men, rape victims are much more likely to be women. One in five women in the US have reported being raped, while one in thirty-eight men have, and a high percentage of both genders were raped before adulthood.[24] The CDC explains that the trauma of sexual violence is long term, impacting the quality of ones life emotionally and financially. They said:
The consequences may also be chronic. Victims may suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, experience re-occurring gynecological, gastrointestinal, cardiovascular and sexual health problems.
Sexual violence is also linked to negative health behaviors. For example, victims are more likely to smoke, abuse alcohol, use drugs, and engage in risky sexual activity.
The trauma resulting from sexual violence can have an impact on a survivor’s employment in terms of time off from work, diminished performance, job loss, or being unable to work. These disrupt earning power and have a long-term effect on the economic well-being of survivors and their families.[25]  
The CDC recommends solutions to issues of sexual violence and intimate partner violence that include social programs, but mostly curbing the cultural norms around violence, empowering, supporting, and trusting women, as well as education reform.[26]


[1] “Visualizing the data.”

[2] “Visualizing the data.”

[3] Heidi Hartmann, Ariane Hegewisch, Barbara Gault, Gina Chirillo, Jennifer Clark, “Five Ways to Win an Argument about the Gender Wage Gap (Updated 2019),” Institute for Women’s Policy Research, last modified September 11, 2019, https://iwpr.org/publications/five-ways-to-win-an-argument-about-the-gender-wage-gap/.

[4] Jordan Peterson.

[5] Jordan Peterson.

[6] John Phelen, “Harvard Study: ‘Gender Wage Gap’ Explained Entirely by Work Choices of Men and Women: The ‘gender wage gap” is as real as unicorns and has been killed more times than Michael Myers,” Foundation for Economic Education, last modified December 10, 2018, https://fee.org/articles/harvard-study-gender-pay-gap-explained-entirely-by-work-choices-of-men-and-women/?gclid=CjwKCAjw26H3BRB2EiwAy32zhZKsF45zDh2P22RHSXgHrfc-hthCcA1Xh1hyUhN3A9XFwvx9XP6u6hoCXokQAvD_BwE.

[7] Phelen, “Harvard Study.”

[8] Phelen, “Harvard Study.”

[9] Hartmann, Hegewisch, Gault, Chirillo, Clark, “Five Ways to Win an Argument about the Gender Wage Gap.”

[10] Leila Schochet, “The Child Care Crisis Is Keeping Women Out of the Workforce,” Center for American Progress, last modified March 28, 2019, https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/early-childhood/reports/2019/03/28/467488/child-care-crisis-keeping-women-workforce/.

[11] Gillian B. White, “Why Daycare Workers Are So Poor, Even Though Daycare Costs So Much: They can't even afford child care for their own kids,” The Atlantic, last modified November 5, 2015, https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/11/childcare-workers-cant-afford-childcare/414496/.

[12] Ariane Hegewisch and Adiam Tesfaselassie. “The Gender Wage Gap by Occupation 2018,” The Institute for Women’s Policy Research, last modified April 2, 2019, https://iwpr.org/publications/gender-wage-gap-occupation-2018/.

[13] Hegewisch and Tesfaselassie, “The Gender Wage Gap by Occupation 2018.”

[14] Gretchen Livingston, “Stay-at-home moms and dads account for about one-in-five U.S. parents,” PEW Research Center, last modified September 24, 2018. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/09/24/stay-at-home-moms-and-dads-account-for-about-one-in-five-u-s-parents/.

[15] Livingston, “Stay-at-home moms and dads account for about one-in-five U.S. parents.”

[16] Livingston, “Stay-at-home moms and dads account for about one-in-five U.S. parents.”

[17] Gloria Steinem, “The Importance of Work,” Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions, 3rd Edition (New York, NY: Henry Holt and Company, 2019).

[18] Kathy Gurcheik, “Availability, Use of Paternity Leave Remains Rare in U.S.,” SHRM: Better Workplaces Better World, last modified August 16, 2019, https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/hr-topics/behavioral-competencies/global-and-cultural-effectiveness/pages/availability-use-of-paternity-leave-remains-rare-in-us.aspx.

[19] Alana Semuels, “How Poor Single Moms Survive: Welfare reform has driven many low-income parents to depend more heavily on family and friends for food, childcare, and cash,” The Atlantic, last modified December 1, 2015, https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/12/how-poor-single-moms-survive/418158/.

[20] “Effects of Poverty, Hunger and Homelessness on Children and Youth,” American Psychological Association, last modified 2009, https://www.apa.org/pi/families/poverty.

[21] “Facts and Figures: Ending Violence Against Women,” UN Women, last modified November 2019, https://www.unwomen.org/en/what-we-do/ending-violence-against-women/facts-and-figures.

[22] “Preventing Intimate Partner Violence.” CDC, last modified February 26, 2019. https://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/intimatepartnerviolence/fastfact.html.

[23] “Preventing Intimate Partner Violence.”

[24] “Preventing Sexual Violence,” CDC, last modified January 17, 2020 https://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/sexualviolence/fastfact.html.

[25] “Preventing Sexual Violence.”

[26] “Preventing Sexual Violence.”

To get women into the history curriculum faces systemic barriers at present, but it also faces barriers from the past, mainly that women’s voices, works, and ideas are harder to know than those of men. Dr. Bettany Hughes suggested that only 0.5% of history is written about women.[1] Historian, Aparna Basu proclaimed, “The only women who found a place in traditional history text books were either women who successfully performed male roles or whom great men loved.”[2] It is no wonder that teachers teach his-story… it’s the only one out there!
History was written largely by men and about men. Even when women wrote histories, they wrote about men. The field of history focused on politics, diplomacy, business, and the military: the essential absence of women in these areas would have made a women’s history impossible. The relatively new desire to write social history from the bottom up created space for a branch of history about women and the opportunity to find the voices of women from the past.[3]
Women historians in the late 19th century and early 20th century began writing professionally about women past and present in order to close the gaps on what we know about women’s past. They sometimes co-wrote with their historian husbands. This paralleled the rise of women’s colleges. These women tended to write about women, but certainly would not have considered that they were creating a new field of history.[4] But this was not the beginning of women’s historical writing.
Unprofessional women historians from around the world wrote centuries before the professional women of the last centuries. At best, their lack of education, gender, and focus on women’s issues kept their works hidden, at worst, blatant sexism, violence, and repression banished their works forever. It has been the work of these women’s historians in the last century to bring the work of their sisters from the past into the light.
Women’s absence from the history classroom has falsely left us with the impression that their thoughts and feelings on major issues were not recorded. And yet, in every period and in every culture, when women were barred from academia, discouraged, even forced from literacy, women wrote, drew, and told their stories. The problem faced by historians is that the volume of women writers is fewer, the authority of the women writers is always questioned, and the sexism or issues of their time led to many women writers being hidden.
The first professional historians were Greek and Roman, it is from them that western precedent for defining history as his-story, and certainly not hers, comes. Classicist Mary Beard explained that in the ancient tradition, female subordination was an important part of being a man and was deeply engrained in the culture and accounts of the time. She did a gendered analysis of Homer’s The Odyssey using Penelope as an example. In the story, she said, “as Homer has it, an integral part of growing up, as a man, is learning to control the public utterance and to silence the female of the species.“[5] She explained that entire works were dedicated to the absurdity and inferiority of female power. Examining the stories about the mythical Amazon women, Beard concluded that, “The underlying point was that it was the duty of man to save civilisation from the rule of women.“[6] She elegantly showed that oratory and power in the west have always seemed to be a male sphere of influence.
Finding the works of women is one of the hardest challenges in doing women’s history. The assumption that women did not record their history, as a justification of not digging for it, allows the mistakes of our past to repeat: our ancestors neglected the stories of women, and we fulfill the cycle by not examining their lives and records. Rosalind Miles suggested, “For even the most cursory survey of women’s work reveals that its range, quantity and significance has been massively underestimated, not least by women themselves.”[7] Women have been writing their stories since the beginning of writing, but few of their stories have made the cannon of historical reading.
Women Authors Were Rare and Privileged            In China, the first historians did not emerge until the Later Han Empire (23-220) at which point there was stability and wealth, which usually led to opportunities for women intellectuals and leaders. And for the Han, this was certainly true. The first woman historian was Ban Zhao (45-117). She was from a prominent and accomplished Chinese family, well integrated into the imperial court. Her father Ban Biao, was a historian eager to write a better history than his predecessors.[8] He began writing a many volume text too ambitious to complete in his lifetime, so Ban Zhao took on the task of finishing it.[9]  She was a tutor at the Dongguan Imperial Library and was permitted access to the texts and archives. In her role as a teacher in the imperial court, Ban Zhao taught astronomy, mathematics, history, Confucian classics, and traditional feminine virtues. She educated some of the most powerful women in China including the empress, the emperor’s concubines, and ladies-in-waiting.[10]
            Surrounded by powerful and bright women, it is not surprising that after finishing her father’s history, Ban Zhao wrote about women. She wrote a manual for women’s education that largely emphasized their submission and was the first Chinese philosophy about women, which endured far beyond her lifetime. Ban Zhao was not immune to her time; her ideas were heavily influenced by the dominant Confucian thought. Confucianism valued filial piety, or respect for and obedience to one’s ancestors. It encouraged strict hierarchies within families where ones authority was garnered by age and gender, with women being subordinate. Ban Zhao wrote:
“A woman (ought to) have four qualifications: (1) womanly virtue; (2) womanly words; (3) womanly bearing; and (4) womanly work. Now what is called womanly virtue need not be brilliant ability, exceptionally different from others. Womanly words need be neither clever in debate nor keen in conversation. Womanly appearance requires neither a pretty nor a perfect face and form. Womanly work need not be work done more skilfully than that of others.”[11]
She encouraged women to go about their work wholeheartedly and to submit to her husband and his family in all things. Who knows what pressure she felt to uphold these ideals of male domination and superiority. Perhaps she feared that her work would be discarded if not in line with contemporary thinkers? Or, perhaps Ban Zhao saw her instructions as woman’s path to relative liberation? Modern intellectuals often critique her work as diminishing of women’s role and potential, and perhaps they are correct, but without Ban Zhao attention to women’s education may not have come at all.
            Despite being honored by the empress upon her death, Ban Zhao’s work was ignored by male scholars and too intellectually sophisticated and literarily out of reach of most women readers. But as demand for women’s literacy grew, so did readership and her prominence. So much so that later women authors would predominantly cite Ban Zhao as a reference on women’s position and education.[12] But Ban Zhao was unique because of her position. And for most of world history it would be only the privileged who would write history, Ban Zhao being no different. Her instructions to women perhaps ignored the plight of women, especially poor women, in China, and did nothing to address widespread female infanticide.
            In the west, the first known female professional historian was Byzantine Princess Anna Comnena (1083-1153), who, similar to Ban Zhao, was a noble woman whose incredible privileges allowed her to record her ideas on philosophy and history.[13] Her life was wildly fascinating. She was a primary witness to both her father and brother’s reign. She also plotted to overthrow her brother and place her husband on the throne, a plot that failed leading to her forced seclusion in a covenant for the remainder of her life.[14] She wrote her history with the aid of the monks while imprisoned in 12th century.[15] Her fifteen volume historical account was based on records available at the covenant and her own experience, which included the first Crusade. She was contemptuous toward the westerners, whom she saw as barbaric looters that failed to defend Constantinople. Her history was more accurate than some of her male contemporaries who tended to exaggerate. Her book is certainly biased toward her father, glossing over some of his failings as a ruler, but her unique insider perspective made it colorful and illustrative.[16] She wrote of her repugnance at her husband’s timidity and failure to secure the throne. She speculated that, “perhaps their genders should have been reversed.”[17]
Of course she, like other historians, wrote about politics and the military, but similar to Ban Zhao saw an opportunity to write about women. She honored her grandmother, Anna Dalassena. She said:
“It may cause some surprise that my father the Emperor had raised his mother to such a position of honor, and that he had handed complete power over to her. Yielding up the reins of government, one might say, he ran alongside her as she drove the imperial chariot...
“My father reserved for himself the waging of wars against the barbarians, while he entrusted to his mother the administration of state affairs, the choosing of civil servants, and the fiscal management of the empire's revenues and expenses. One might perhaps, in reading this, blame my father's decision to entrust the imperial government to the gyneceum.[18] But once you understood the ability of this woman, her excellence, her good sense, and her remarkable capacity for hard work, you would turn from criticism to admiration.
“For my grandmother really had the gift of conducting the affairs of state. She knew so well how to organize and administer that she was capable of governing not only the Roman Empire but also every other kingdom under the sun....She was very shrewd in seizing on whatever was called for, and clever in carrying it out with certitude. Not only did she have an outstanding intelligence, but her powers of speech matched it. She was a truly persuasive orator, in no way wordy or long-winded...
“As for her compassion toward the poor and the lavishness of her hand toward the destitute, how can words describe these things? Her house was a shelter for her needy relatives, and it was no less a haven for strangers....Her expression, which revealed her true character, demanded the worship of the angels but struck terror among demons...”[19]
Her defense of her grandmother is striking for it demonstrates that her grandmother did not earn this recognition in her time, and shows the ways in which women exercised the power they were given even in a time when expectations were heavily gendered.
            Her work like Ban Zhao’s did not rise to prominence like those of male historians. As always it was factors greater than her womanhood. She was a traitor to her brother’s throne and holed up in a covenant. Nevertheless, her writing was significant and modern historians need not repeat history by ignoring her account.


[1] Bettany Hughes, “Why Were Women Written Out Of History? An Interview With Bettany Hughes,” English Hertiage, last modified February 29, 2016, http://blog.english-heritage.org.uk/women-written-history-interview-bettany-hughes/.

[2] Aparna Basu “Women’s History in India: An Historiographical Survey,” in: Offen K., Pierson R.R., Rendall J. (eds), Writing Women’s History. Palgrave Macmillan, London, 1991, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-21512-6_10.

[3] Richard T. Vann, “Historiography: Women’s History,” Encyclopædia Britannica, last modified January 17, 2020, https://www.britannica.com/topic/historiography.

[4] Vann, “Historiography.”

[5] Beard, Women & Power, 4.

[6] Beard, Women & Power, 4.

[7] Miles, The Women’s History of the World, 149.

[8] Yuen Ting Lee, “Ban Zhao: Scholar of Han Dynasty China,” World History Connected, last modified 2012, https://worldhistoryconnected.press.uillinois.edu/9.1/lee.html.

[9] Yuen Ting Lee, “Ban Zhao: Scholar of Han Dynasty China,” World History Connected, last modified 2012, https://worldhistoryconnected.press.uillinois.edu/9.1/lee.html.

[10] Yuen Ting Lee, “Ban Zhao: Scholar of Han Dynasty China,” World History Connected, last modified 2012, https://worldhistoryconnected.press.uillinois.edu/9.1/lee.html.

[11] Ban Zhao, Nancy Swan, trans., Lessons for Women, c.IV.

[12] Yuen Ting Lee, “Ban Zhao: Scholar of Han Dynasty China,” World History Connected, last modified 2012, https://worldhistoryconnected.press.uillinois.edu/9.1/lee.html.

[13] Meghan Kelley, "The Good Life of Anna Comnena: First Female Historian and Byzantine Princess," The Histories: Vol. 7 : Iss. 2 , Article 3. https://digitalcommons.lasalle.edu/the_histories/vol7/iss2/3.

[14] Jone Johnson Lewis, “Biography of Anna Comnena, the First Female Historian,” Thought Co, last modified May 15, 2019, https://www.thoughtco.com/anna-comnena-facts-3529667.

[15] Jone Johnson Lewis, “Biography of Anna Comnena, the First Female Historian,” Thought Co, last modified May 15, 2019, https://www.thoughtco.com/anna-comnena-facts-3529667.

[16] Meghan Kelley, "The Good Life of Anna Comnena: First Female Historian and Byzantine Princess," The Histories: Vol. 7 : Iss. 2 , Article 3. https://digitalcommons.lasalle.edu/the_histories/vol7/iss2/3.

[17] Lewis, “Biography of Anna Comenana.”

[18] The woman’s sphere within the home.

[19] Anna Comnena, Marcelle Thuebaux, trans., ed., The Writings of Medieval Women, vol. 14, New York: Garland Library of Medieval Literature, 1987, retrieved from http://www.womeninworldhistory.com/dalassena.html.

First, teaching pre-history and contrasting the study of it with the study of history helps students understand what we mean when we say "history" verses other studies into the past. History is what mankind wrote about itself, whereas archaeology is what remains intentionally or unintentionally from humans of the past.

Second, 95 percent of human history occurred during what we call the hunter-gatherer period. Zooming out to examine history in this context gives us a humbling realization of how small we are and how limited our understanding of the past really is. One of the things we know about this period is that the small bands of people who traversed the earth were far more egalitarian than their “civilized” relatives because they had to be.

Third, one of the big themes in women's history is that in times of turmoil and challenge, women often assume leadership roles. To not teach women's historical patterns is to deny them equal education about their past and therefore rights to education.

Fourth, our progressive view of world history insists that their move toward agriculture was a revolution dragging them slowly into the future of mankind, a step closer toward industrialization, modernity, and success. One fact that was conveniently omitted from my history courses, was that historians generally agree that agriculture and thus all the rich benefits thereafter: consistent food supply, beer, the need for organized religion, and then writing was likely discovered by women. In a course where literally everything else seemed to have been invented by men, this should have been forefront.

Fifth, students need to understand the consequences agriculture had for human society. Historian Jared Diamond in his once controversial article, “The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race” argued that the invention of agriculture had a horrible impact on human health and led to class differences and the rise of elites, along with sex discrimination. Farming women had more pregnancies, which had a negative impact on their health. Studies into pre-historic skeletons and mummies reveal that women were more likely to have suffered from infectious disease and using modern primitive societies as further evidence, women tend to do a disproportional amount of hard labor.

Some feminist historians go so far as to claim that in these hunter-gatherer societies gender relations were reversed. It was clear that their understanding of the biological world was primitive at best and the lesser evolved brains of our prehistoric ancestors did not lend to a deep understanding of cause and effect, which led to women augmenting a spiritual status as magical creatures that bring about life. This theory is defended through creation stories and prehistoric artifacts that survive and portray female pagan goddesses in all their sexualized glory.

But the evidence is not widely accepted, and historians, including female historians doubt this “revision” of history. In the following section we will explore this academic debate to more deeply understand the challenges of prehistory and also to see how the biases of our more egalitarian time can impact our reading of historical events. This debate would be a worthwhile learning experience in a world history classroom.

Sixth, because there is juicy historical debate... we should involve our students. How fun would that be to let students examine current scholarship and debate like historians on a topic that has meaningful implications for the world we continue to create and define. 

Bibliography
​Diamond, Jared. “The Worst Mistake in Human History.” Discover Magazine, 1987.
Miles, Rosalind. The Women’s History of the World. London, UK: Harper Collins Publishers, 1988.

In my secondary history classroom, I always start the year with the question, “What is history?” On the surface this is a straightforward question. Most students respond, “the study of the past.” But what is the past? When an event happens to all people agree on how it played out? History was once current events. How many different perspectives are there in current events? The same is true in history. Is it possible to know what truly happened or what it felt like to be there? There could be as many histories as there are human witnesses. History has been written by victors, suppressing the story of the losers, therefore it has not been a truthful account of what happened, but rather the dominating account. Good history is derived consensus of what happened based on evidence. And, as more evidence comes forward, the history changes. History is a moving target. It is alive. It is ever changing.
But this is not how some students learn history. In some classrooms they are told what happened. In some classrooms they read from a textbook that tells them what they need to know: a standard version of history… but there is no standard. There are an infinite number of sources and perspectives to consider. No such document exists for current events. Every newspaper has a different take. In history we find our truths, just like in current events, by the strength of the source, by the evidence that is presented, and sometimes even by an average of everything that is being said.
His-story serves the few. Our-story, which includes her-story involves the voices, stories, and experiences of all of us. We need our story to be told. Why are the lives of women separated from the lives of men in the same coherent story of the history of people? There’s a neat psychological phenomenon that helps illustrate the importance of our-story: the wisdom of the crowd. Aristotle first referenced it, modern juries are based on it, and Galton found evidence to support it.[1] When a crowd at a fair in 1906 speculated for fun on the weight of an ox, Galton found that the median of all their guesses was within one percent of the actual weight of the ox. This was significantly closer than the likelihood of any one person’s guess being accurate. What does this mean for historical study? Merely that the average of the stories told is perhaps the closest to the truth. Our history is better told, more truthful and accurate, when the voices of everyone are included.
However, history being his-story has a long… history. The first professional historians were Greek and Roman, it is from them that our precedent for defining history comes. Beard explains that in the ancient tradition, female subordination was an important part of being a man and was deeply engrained in the culture and accounts of the time. She did a gendered analysis of Homer’s The Odyssey using Penelope as an example. In the story, she said, “as Homer has it, an integral part of growing up, as a man, is learning to control the public utterance and to silence the female of the species.“[2] She explained that entire works were dedicated to the absurdity and inferiority of female power. Examining the stories about the mythical Amazon women, Beard concluded that, “The underlying point was that it was the duty of man to save civilisation from the rule of women.“[3] She elegantly showed that oratory and power in the west have always seemed to be a male sphere of influence.
To illustrate how history was male defined, historian Janis L. McDonald showed the failure of historians to include the work of women. She used Mercy Otis Warren, the US’s first historian, as a “case in point.” She dissected her life, her writings, her overall legacy, and the general devaluing of her historical works and found that the descriptive biographical approach to history writing used up to the 1950s would by definition fail to include women because their benchmarks for inclusion were defined by men. She cited the earlier work of historian William Raymond Smith who too claimed that, “Their categories and periodization have been masculine by definition, for they have defined significance primarily by power, influence, and visible activity in the world of political and economic affairs.”[4] McDonald explained that the standards for historical inclusion, while good for reliability and validity, and provide a clear measure of how widespread the readership was, almost literally exclude women. She said:
The assessment of ideas considered important for historical purposes has placed emphasis on published books, monographs, and political documents. Women have had little access to these forms of expression, and their other forms of expression have received little or no attention. Additionally, women have often become the focus of historical attention only in so far as their lives reveal information about important men. This neglect is partly a consequence of the difficulty of obtaining sources about the women themselves. As a result, their lives could only be explained in terms of the men who surrounded them. They have also suffered from a prioritization of male thought and action.[5]
So it’s not that women have not been writing and making history, it’s that the process of canonizing their history is rigged to exclude them.

Citations:
[1] F. Galton, "Vox populi," Nature, 1949(75), p.450–451.
[2] Mary Beard, Women & Power: A Manifesto, (Liveright Publishing Corporation: New York, NY, 2017), p.4
[3] Mary Beard, Women & Power: A Manifesto, (Liveright Publishing Corporation: New York, NY, 2017), p.4
[4] Willam Raymond Smith, History As Argument: Three Patriot Historians Of The American Revolution 17 (The Hague: Mouton & Co., 1966), p.207.
[5] Janis L. McDonald, “The Need for Contextual ReVision: Mercy Otis Warren, A Case in Point,” 1992, http://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1074&context=yjlf p.186-187.

In 1985 a woman named Alison Bechdel wrote a comic strip satirizing how few women appear as major characters, and appear to have lives, in movies. The immediate result was something nicknamed the Feminist Movie Test, or the Bechdel Test. Here it is: a film has to have at least two, named women in it, who talk to each other at some point, about something besides a man [1]. That’s it: two women who exist and talk about stuff. The bar for feminism in film is barely off the ground and yet sadly few films pass the test. Every one of my favorites failed miserably. When  I first learned about the test, the only film I showed in my history courses that passed the test was Iron Jawed Angels, a film about women’s suffrage. Thankfully today there are more options for history teachers. 

This test helped raise awareness of gender discrimination in the industry and created a rich national dialog about the absence of women of substance in the media. If women barely exist in the films, don’t have friends or meaningful conversations outside of men, what conclusions will children draw about women? It wouldn’t be a far cry to suggest they might conclude that girls don’t think about important things and are only interested in men. 

Watching your favorite show or film exposes you to some of the toxic stereotypes about women, most notably that they exist to serve men, don’t have female friends, and don’t have speaking roles.[2] These stereotypes are fueled by an industry dominated by male producers, directors, screen writers, and agents. Hopefully our students can distinguish that films are not real life, but sadly history, or at least the way it’s taught, would not pass the Bechdel test.

Saddened by how many times I fail to bring a female perspective into my own lessons, I've created the Eckert Test to hold myself and hopefully others to the standard of including the other 50% of the population in the history classroom. The test is this:

      Tokenism: One feminine perspective on the topic or inquiry is presented.
      Feminist: Two or more differing feminine perspectives on the topic or inquiry are presented. 
      Intersectional Feminist: Two or more differing feminine perspectives on the topic or inquiry are     
                      presented AND speakers come from different racial, ethnic, religious, economic, or
                      sexual viewpoints.

Someday when the voices of women are not at such a deficit in the classroom, half the sources students read should be half. Women are not an interest group: they are half of humanity! Women do not agree, are diverse, and have been present in one way or another throughout history. Women were the mothers, sisters, daughters, and wives of some of the greatest characters in our world history. In order to better understand those people and events, we need to hear from multiple female perspectives.

If you're a teacher and you're not sure how to do this, you are not alone. Most of my lessons are token lessons. The lessons page of this website pulls together resources from around academia to help you. Further there are so many things you could do in your classroom right now. For example, I have an awesome lesson from the Stanford History Education Group that I use to show that Black leaders around the turn of the 20th century disagreed on the best ways to uplift the race. The problem with this lesson is that it's sexist. There are no female voices in it. The lesson pits Booker T. Washington a man formerly enslaved, against W.E.B. Dubois a man from Massachusetts who was the first black man to graduate from Harvard. Both men were founders of the NAACP. To make this lesson less sexist, and to expose students to a more Black characters from history, I found a primary source from a female founder of the NAACP: Ida B. Wells (if you don't know her, here's a link to read about this incredible woman). She was a radical reformer who wanted change yesterday. Her perspective added more to the conversation. In this lesson, the three characters now present are relatively education and wealthy, perhaps an impoverished, non-NAACP member would provide a more full picture for future lessons. 

If you're not a teacher, I challenge you to find the voices of women where ever you get your news and information. Women are leading experts in every field. Allow them to weigh in on the voices that matter to you. Also know that if your history curriculum did not include primary sources from feminine perspectives, it was missing half the story.

[1]Alison Bechdel. "Bechdel Test Movie List." 2020. https://bechdeltest.com/.
[2] Jocelyn Nichole Murphy. "The role of women in film: Supporting the men -- An analysis of how culture influences the changing discourse on gender representations in film." 2015. Journalism Undergraduate Honors Theses. http://scholarworks.uark.edu/jouruht/.

​            I was sitting in the sun outside my favorite coffee shop on Main Street, the awning providing just enough shade from the summer heat. I had, like I usually do, my books splayed out over the small circular coffee street table, dubiously balancing on the uneven sidewalk. Every once and a while a breeze would catch on the tall shops that lined the road and whip down, sending my pages, labels, notes scribbled on scrap paper into momentary chaos.
Summer, for public school social studies teachers is time to both rejuvenate through relaxation and outdoor activity and hone our craft. For me, this has meant reading. I teach at a small school, so in my short time I’ve taught every subject we offer in the social studies. Needless to say, there is always more I can learn to bring to my classroom. I usually pick one book for each subject and then a couple for fun.
On this particular summer day, I was diving into two new books on world and US history: America’s Women by Gail Collins, and A Women’s History of the World by Rosalind Miles. These books were the first survey’s in women’s history, which was strange because I teach history and have already read substantially on both US and world history. My friends or family would not find it all surprising that I’d chosen these books to read, and honestly given my interest and numerous thesis papers in both college and graduate school on women’s history, I didn’t think I would glean much from these books. At best I hoped I’d learn about a couple women other than queens, civil rights leaders, and suffragists I didn’t know who had impacted history. I believed, like most people do, that few women had tapped into the glass ceiling and made a mark worthy of a historical footnote.
Sitting at the café, I found myself highlighting and tabbing frantically. It was almost overwhelming. Not realizing what I was reading and perhaps reacting to the pink “Feminist” shirt I was wearing, a friend I discuss history with regularly walked out and, in his patronizing, but entirely jovial tone, said, “You know…” I glanced up from my book, “It’s dangerous for a woman to read.” Annoyed, I laughed and went back to reading, the universal social cue for “I’m busy,” and a normalized reaction to passive-sexism disguised as a joke. Kindly, he obliged, reading the signs of my sticky notes, highlighters, and posture engrossed in the books.
I like to have several books going and had found myself going back and forth between these two books since school let out in June. I was around chapters three or four when I looked up from the page. Whatever the particular page was about I don’t remember. I was struck by a sickening feeling, “Why have I never heard this?” I knew generally about some women, but nothing this comprehensive. No American history book I’d read actually discussed things like how women dealt with birth and menstruation before medical advances, what women did in their separate sphere other than domestic duties, and the role women played in setting societal standards. Never had I seen such detailed accounts of extraordinary women. I knew many women mentioned in her book, but for everyone I knew well, she threw in two more I’d never even heard of.
I am certainly not an expert in history, I like to tell my world history students, “I don’t know everything that ever happened,” but I have spent the better part of the last decade studying these the subjects. Further, I am a feminist, who has always found herself drawn to women’s topics and outstanding women in history. And more importantly, I am a history teacher! Of all the people I know, besides my history professors, who else is more likely to know this information? Certainly, I concluded, none of my peers, who are also mostly college graduates and academics. Staring blankly across the street into the local park, I found myself perplexed. How can I have gotten to this point and not know this information?
When I entered my teaching career, I was incredibly qualified. I had a bachelors in political science and a masters in social studies education. I had minors in Asian Studies and Theater, and was one class shy of a history minor in undergrad. I had won awards, traveled abroad, taught outdoor education, run the state-wide history competition, and worked for a museum. Few 25-year-old first year teachers could be more qualified. I came in hot. I was ready to change the backward profession that lacked diverse instructional practices, did not accommodate special education students, failed to teach minority histories and diverse perspectives. I was ready to tear it down.
My first three years of teaching were exhausting, unsustainable, and draining. I put in easily 60 hours a week. I spent most of that time doing research and growing my own understanding of my subjects. I had heard a theory that the quality of a teacher plateaus at their third year, so as I entered my fourth year of teaching I wondered when I would feel confident in my subject area? When would I start to feel like a senior teacher? I slowly began to realize that I didn’t know or have the skills I needed to do what it was I set out to do. I was the teacher I had set out to dismantle. How did this happen?
…
I’m a pretty ambitious secondary high school history teacher. I am passionate about social, political, and economic equality for women of all races, and sexualities. If anyone should be giving women fair representation in the history classroom, it’s me. And yet, I look back at my lessons and feel they are inadequate to address, and provide context to, the complex issues that women face and have faced everyday. Why are they inadequate? Is it the culture? Is it the school? Is it me?
            In a time when education is underfunded and politicians are using terms like “underachieving,” “failing,” and trying to expand the number of charter and private schools, I can’t complain: I work in one of the best public schools in the nation. The school values social studies and puts trust in me to stay up-to-date with current literature on best practice in my subject. When I’ve spoken with my principal about how to give women a more accurate representation in the curriculum, I’ve gotten full support. My school is well funded, but economically below average in the state, with many students on free-and-reduced lunch. The class sizes are small with twelve or so students in an average class. The superintendent office is down the hall and I work in one of the rare secondary schools where our superintendent is female. The school is supportive of pretty much every initiative I try and willing to invest money into it. My principal is a former social studies teachers who regularly has my back on curriculum development, and is willing to go to bat for me. The community in general is supportive of the school and parents are relatively engaged. My situation is ideal, and is yet the root cause of my constant anxiety: I have absolutely no excuse to not “do it right.”
With no excuse to fall on, the problem then must be me. But how can that be? I am a highly qualified teacher and, on paper at least, I look pretty good. I earned my Masters in Social Studies Education, I got my first choice job out of graduate school. In my first few years I earned four professional awards at the state level, including NHD Teacher of the Year. In 2018, I was one of my lessons on Mercy Otis Warren was published by the HISTORY Channel. I have succeeded in holding high expectations while scaffolding to allow every student the potential for success. My AP history students consistently get scores that earn college credit and are above the national average.
And yet, in my years on the job, vigorously attacking traditional education on the ground, I know I’ve come up short. My classes, while they involve the voices of minorities and women, certainly leave my students with the impression that the experiences of women and minorities are separate and combative to the history of white males and after my new exposure to the contributions of women, I know I don’t include enough of their voices. In some lessons I guide students through discussions on the challenge of black or minority protest, and the ways that great and every day civil rights leaders advocated for their rights; including discussion on those initiatives that were most successful. I constantly struggle with what to include, and given my region eliminate topics that are less relevant to my students. I have days where I expertly introduce women from history and highlight their achievements in their context, but again have to pick and choose what women to highlight. This picking and choosing leads me to pick women that help highlight contentious topics that reflect current debates. I haven’t taught history the way I know it should or could be taught. I don’t have quite as many external forces to blame as other teachers do, and thus there is a constant guilt and this nagging question: If I can’t do it in my incredible circumstances, how can anyone else?
This question has driven me to this point. There are many that would look at this problem and blame the public school system. While the “system” certainly could be at play, the problem is much bigger. A piece of my personal challenge is that my social studies education was inadequate. And before advocates start harping on the failures of public education, I’d like to note that my social studies education led me into a highly successful undergraduate education at a private school and to one of the best private graduate teacher programs in the state. Certainly I would love more preparation periods and better pay, but have learned to accept my job as a service to my community, and I certainly don’t blame the school system. Given my relative talent and unbelievable privilege of working where I do: what are my barriers to proper history education?
Certainly my graduate program in Social Studies Education prepared me? Every teacher knows that theory is all well and good until you’re in a classroom. This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t strive for that bar, it’s just that every first year teacher has that frazzled moment where they realize being a good teacher is a lot harder than they thought it would be. In social studies we have a compounded problem in that we are being asked to teach topics and utilizing methodologies few of us have ever experienced. Despite my efforts to avoid it, I regularly default to how I was taught: lecture. And I’m all in for diversifying the sources and topics, but could you first tell me the name of a couple women and minority leaders? I spent the first year I taught Googling lists like “top 10 people in US History.” I’m ashamed to say I’d never heard the name Sojourner Truth. I scrounged the Internet and libraries, and ploughed through books recommended by my graduate professors. There were great resources online from Stanford, Brown, the Library of Congress, and several humanities organizations that provided me with primary source analysis activities, which I then emulated when I found other topics not discussed. All said and done, it wasn’t horrible. Compared to my predecessors, I patted myself on the back. I could say students “did history” and learned about marginalized groups more than I had.
Over the next few years I read more books, improved the curriculum and added more and more voices to the mix. In a step toward progress, women were mentioned in my classroom, but there was a gaping problem: women were only discussed when it came to women’s issues: temperance, suffrage, feminism. But, where were women in war, economics, and politics? Were they oblivious?  And why were women only mentioned when they converged into the male realms? Why don’t we mention the piece of history that has impacted all of us: childbirth and childrearing? Surely these two topics have their own history?
I then began diving into dense histories by women about women and the impact was staggering. It was as if I had never truly been taught history. I felt cheated. There I had been clinging to the scraps of women’s history in passing comments in the male narrative, when in reality there was a rich, dense world of women that I never knew existed.
Around this time I joined a book club with some women in my area, our first few books were all historical fictions, which led to some wonderful discussion of women’s history. One phrase we said over and over: I had no idea that this even happened, or I never learned about her in school. Almost all of them had said they disliked history until they read these simple narratives about real women who lived and experienced the same events we had learned about in school. I learned something else: I wasn’t alone. Most of the women in the book club had masters degrees and had never heard of the Grimke sisters, the women in the French Resistance, matriarchies in South Africa, and so on. When I began to compile this work, I did some searching on Amazon and Apple Podcast for “Women’s History” and found no results. Today there are a myriad of films, books, and podcasts that attempt to bring to light wonderful forgotten women.
I spent years building minority voices into my curriculum, but the way I taught about women turned them into a subtopic, rather than a part of the normal narrative. Women were only discussed in reference to suffrage and feminist movements. When I turned to labor unions, I focused in on Eugene Debs and Samuel Gompers. Who were the leaders of female labor unions? WWII affected almost everyone. How is it that almost all of the sources I have students read from that period are from or about men?  I give myself props for carving out time to discuss the Tuskegee Airmen, but what about their mothers and wives? Black nurses, secretaries, Rosies, and WACS?
            I know that incredible women are there in our world’s history and it is the work of our generation to bring their stories to light. It is the work of the social studies educator to bring them into the classroom. And there we face many barriers both historical, pedagogical, and social. Stumbling in the dark, I started to redo my education and my curriculum. I found the truth about women in history and became familiar with the women who should have been my childhood heroes. I learned about the ways I had been misled in my understanding of my female ancestors and began a journey to break the cycle of improper history instruction.