About the Remedial Herstory Project

The Remedial Herstory Project is a New Hampshire based nonprofit founded and led by women educators and advocates under the advisement of women's historians and college professors working to get women's history into the primary and secondary curriculum, as well as our cultural competence.

Our Mission

The RHP is dedicated to developing and providing inquiry-based learning materials on women’s history free to educators. In support of its mission, the RHP produces media, provides resources, and professional development in history for educators.

Board of Directors

The Remedial Herstory Project is operated by a Board of Directors and is located in New Hampshire, USA.

Our Why

The history curriculum in schools is insufficient in their representation of women’s contribution to past events. This website 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 history. 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.

--Kelsie Brook Eckert, Founder

Why "Remedial" Herstory?

While in the process of turning her research on social studies education and women's studies into the founding of The Remedial Herstory Project, organization founder Kelsie Brook Eckert was lost on a name for the new organization. So many other podcasts and organizations were named "Herstory" in different variations, but few were actually about women's history. In her spare time, she was feverously reading women's history books, including Gloria Steinem's collection of essays, Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions, when she stumbled upon a line about women's studies that resonated. Digging deeper, Eckert found an interview where Steinem elaborated:

"Women's history and women's studies are absolutely crucial for all students. Maybe we should call them 'remedial studies', which is what they really are- and will remain until we have human history and human studies."

Steinem goes on:

"For instance, in 1976, Devaki and I thought we had a  great idea to take Gandhi's letters and writings and make a little book or pamphlet for women's movements around the world, since his non-violent tactics were so well suited to women's movements. And we were going full steam, interviewing people and so on until we came to Kamaladevi (Chattopadhyaya). She listened to us with great patience and then she said, 'Well, my dear, we taught him every thing he knew.' The methods he used were often the methods the women's movement used in fighting sati and child marriage. The independence movement subsumed and absorbed them, so we end up looking to or wait ing for another Gandhi for what we ourselves invented. That is the great penalty of the absence of women's history: you not only have to reinvent the wheel, but you end up by being grateful to men instead of honouring what women have accomplished - and continue to accomplish. There's a quote: 'I honoured dead men for their strength, forgetting I was strong.' In that sense I am very grateful to women's studies - very, very grateful."

You can examine this full interview using the citation below. For Eckert, this quote was invaluable: a summation of the continuing problem in K-12 education even if it was resolved at universities, a bitter stab at her own education, and a rallying cry. How bizarre that Steinem's experience in the 1970's was so similar to that of a woman born a decade later trying to teach inclusive history, but failing.

Remedial Herstory co-founder, Brooke Sullivan, often laments that "Remedial Herstory" is too hard to pronounce, and she is probably not wrong. But the story behind the name has provided fuel to our mission.

Steinem, Gloria, Meenakshi Mukherjee, and Ira Pande. “A Conversation with Gloria Steinem.” India International Centre Quarterly 34, no. 2 (2007): 90–105. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23006309.