THE REMEDIAL HERSTORY PROJECT
  • Home
    • About RHP
    • Contact and Consulting
    • Testimonials
  • Podcast
    • About the Podcast
    • Episodes
    • Sponsor Our Work
    • Apply to Speak
  • Store
  • Lessons
    • Buy Our Lessons
    • K-6 Lessons
    • 7-12 Lessons Dashboard >
      • World History
      • United States Women's History >
        • Early American History: Cultural Encounters
        • The Revolutionary Era: Women's Liberties?
        • The Antebellum Era: Abolition is Women's Ticket
        • The Civil War Era: Women Supporters, Soldiers, and Spies
        • Reconstruction: And Woman Suffrage
        • The Industrial Revolution: Women Laborers
        • The Progressive Era: Women's Causes
        • The World War I Era: Woman Suffrage
        • The New Woman Era: Roaring
        • The Great Depression Era: Women Making Do
        • The World War II Era: Women and the War Effort
        • The Post-War Era: Contradictions for Women
        • The Civil Rights Era: And Sexual Freedoms
        • The Feminist Era: Women Redefining Norms
        • The Modern Era: Post Feminism?
  • Resources
    • Reading
    • Watching >
      • Feature Films
  • Blog
    • About the Blog
    • Blog
    • Women
  • YouTube
  • Book Club
  • Employment

Remedial Herstory Blog

Support Our Work at Patreon

6 Reasons to Teach Pre-History

8/15/2020

0 Comments

 
Picture
​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.

Author

Kelsie Eckert is the founder of The Remedial Herstory Project and host of the Remedial Herstory podcast. You can read more about her on the About page.

0 Comments



Leave a Reply.

    Categories

    All
    16th Century
    Barriers To Women's History
    Caroline Taylor
    Historiography
    Kelsie Eckert
    Pedagogy
    Reformation
    World History

    About

    ​The history curriculum in schools is insufficient in their representation of women’s contribution to past events. This blog aims to address that. While teachers want to include women’s history, they have not had access to the training, modeling, and resources to do it effectively. Women make up fifty percent of the global population, and yet are in a small fraction of events discussed in school. Women’s choices have been harrowing, infamous, and monumental, and yet their stories are so rarely associated with mainstream history. Ask your average high school graduate, or even college graduate, to name 20 significant men in history and the list flows easily. Ask that same person to name 20 women and the names drag, if they come at all. This case in point leaves us with conclusions like, “women did not do as much” or “women’s stories were not recorded.” These assertions justify our own indifference to the history of half the human race, and could not be further from the truth.

    The flaws and impact of how we teach history are many. Women often get summarized in history in vague terms of their roles, rights, or responsibilities, and individual women are rarely mentioned. Never will you see a section in a history book where men are generalized in this way. If we were to generalize gendered behaviors, it is clear that human qualities such as powerful, innovative, and disruptive regularly make the books. Not surprisingly, feminine qualities of compassion, maintaining, and healing do not make the books as these are often grassroots ideals and are not as easily taught in hisotry. These self-effacing qualities doom women to being underrepresented, yet can you imagine a world without them? And further, when women’s actions have all the hallmarks of history, somehow their accomplishments still don’t make the cut, or do so with the caveat of “for a woman” tacked on.

    We study history to learn from our past. Girls have been denied the opportunity to fully learn about women’s struggles and triumphs in schools. Public history teachers, like myself, are stuck in a cycle because we never learned women’s history either  . We have failed to mend the errors of our own educations, and are continuing to regurgitate these errors to our students.

    Archives

    January 2021
    October 2020
    September 2020
    August 2020
    July 2020

Where we ask what happened to the women? And put them in.

Our mission is to provide educators with ready-to-use inquiry-based lesson plans on women's history, which is why all our lessons, the podcast, and videos are free. Consider donating to RHP to support the production of new lesson plans and videos. 
Become a Patron

Support the Remedial Herstory Project

Donate
Terms and Conditions
  • Home
    • About RHP
    • Contact and Consulting
    • Testimonials
  • Podcast
    • About the Podcast
    • Episodes
    • Sponsor Our Work
    • Apply to Speak
  • Store
  • Lessons
    • Buy Our Lessons
    • K-6 Lessons
    • 7-12 Lessons Dashboard >
      • World History
      • United States Women's History >
        • Early American History: Cultural Encounters
        • The Revolutionary Era: Women's Liberties?
        • The Antebellum Era: Abolition is Women's Ticket
        • The Civil War Era: Women Supporters, Soldiers, and Spies
        • Reconstruction: And Woman Suffrage
        • The Industrial Revolution: Women Laborers
        • The Progressive Era: Women's Causes
        • The World War I Era: Woman Suffrage
        • The New Woman Era: Roaring
        • The Great Depression Era: Women Making Do
        • The World War II Era: Women and the War Effort
        • The Post-War Era: Contradictions for Women
        • The Civil Rights Era: And Sexual Freedoms
        • The Feminist Era: Women Redefining Norms
        • The Modern Era: Post Feminism?
  • Resources
    • Reading
    • Watching >
      • Feature Films
  • Blog
    • About the Blog
    • Blog
    • Women
  • YouTube
  • Book Club
  • Employment