​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?

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]

​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.

​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. History is also the study of the written record. Given that most of human history women were overwhelmingly illiterate, denied opportunities to record or publish, the method of historical knowing, denies women a space. Most importantly, history puts emphasis on spheres of public life that women were barred from: politics, economics, and the military. If emphasis were put on the family, medicine, and food, women would dominate history. The choice of emphasis is fundamentally exclusive of women. ​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.

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.