Let's Make Herstory
The Remedial Herstory Project is home to a free online textbook paired with primary source materials and free lesson plans for educators to bring diverse, juicy women's history to life in the classroom. On every page you will also find recommended books and films to extend the learning. Donate to the Remedial Herstory Project to keep these resources available for free.
Introduction to the Remedial Herstory Project Textbooks
Introduction
Myra Pollack Sadker once said "Each time a girl opens a book and finds a womanless history, she learns she is worth less." It’s basic math. Women are half of humanity, they should be half the content in history classes. But sadly they have not been… and Remedial Herstory is here to fix that.
Women’s history gives us a window into the broader study of gender and sexuality over time. Inclusive women’s history encompasses the study of gender and gender nonconforming people. It allows us to reevaluate the gendered biases in the study of history and to truly examine sources, cultures, and communities. Why do so many historians conclude that skeletons buried with weapons are male? Because the historical profession is dominated by male historians whose assumptions about gender permeate their scholarship. We learn more about the historical dynamic when we challenge those biases and make room for women in the historical narrative.
Historical scholarship tends to be dominated by diplomatic, military, and economic events that tend to minimize the importance of women in society. But history is the study of the past, and it is important to be aware of who wrote history and how the gender of the historian dramatically affects the nature of the narrative. Whatever the epoch, whatever the event, we know women were there. As the study of the documented past, history is enriched by the inclusion of details derived from an abundance of documents by women and about. We know women lived, felt, thought, acted, changed and were changed by history. But why are aspects of history in which women played dominant roles not included? Where is medical history? The history of child rearing? The history of economic activi\ty characterized as women’s work?” These histories, and many more, are crucial to understanding the past and the present.
Women held, seized, and wielded positions of power--and challenged people in power-- in the diplomatic, military, and economic spheres in every period of history. But those women and their stories are absent from our cultural understanding of the past. Women have been and continue to be monarchs, empresses, and presidents all over the world . Women, especially poor women, have always worked outside the home. With the emergence of what we now call social history, the stories of working women are being told with greater frequency.
Beginning in the mid-twentieth century women’s history programs emerged across college campuses around the world, and the field of women’s history was born. Today, much research and scholarship is available to us, but very little has trickled down to the primary and secondary classrooms. There are a number of reasons for this. Lack of conversations between academic historians and K-12 teachers, and the fact that today, only 40% of secondary history teachers are women (University of Connecticut), and only 35% of PhDs in history are earned by women.(Slate). Among male historians, only 6% choose to write about women (Slate) and only 7% of outdoor statues in the US recognize the accomplishments of women (Smithsonian). 28% of recent biographies are about women (Slate). In textbooks, men are named four times as frequently as women (Eckert). State standards are a bit better, naming women at a rate of one for every three men (National Women’s History Museum). Fewer than a quarter of historic figures listed in state standards are women (National Women’s History Museum), and most secondary educators teach about women less than once a month (Cicely Scheiner-Fisher). Despite these grim statistics, so much is now known about women’s history, and it’s a failure of the process of educating educators that so little about women’s history is taught.
This book provides a foundation for further exploration. We will introduce you to some of the major players and a few lesser known ones. We will help you see some of the major issues and debates that animated women to act on their own behalf and in the interest of others over time. Once you are armed with a basic knowledge of women’s history, you will be prepared to look more deeply into history and locate the stories of even more women.
This book will help you to see the myriad ways women transformed and were transformed, not just by addressing traditional “women’s topics” but all of history. For every historical period, we challenge you to ask, “Where are the women?” Imagine a world where people of all genders know the significance and history of women and the ways that gender and sexuality have created our own gendered dynamics. Imagine the ways that this deep understanding of gender can promote gender equity. Women are half of history, they should be half the content in history classes.
Creating an Inclusive History
This textbook is dedicated to enhancing the ability of K-12 teachers to introduce women’s history into their curricula by telling the stories of women and providing carefully-selected primary source material. The textbook follows a familiar periodization of world and United States history taught in schools for easy inclusion, however some timelines and titles have been amended to center women’s lives. Three other guiding principles were used throughout: center women, show women’s diversity, and represent as many groups as possible.
Center Women
Women, their interests, and challenges are not only unstudied but underrepresented in historical storytelling which perpetuates the devaluing of women and their work today. Students need to see themselves in history, and half the population leaves high school with just a small handful of un-behaved and white historical models. When secondary teachers do teach women’s history, it is often oversimplified feminist, or even sexist, ideals. Both perspectives perpetuate the cycle of devaluing women’s traditional contributions and acknowledging the ways women have sat outside of the ideals imposed on them. Our world is plagued with continuing gender discrimination, unequal treatment, and violence against women. History allows societies to see patterns in the past. History informs the present. Without women’s history, society is doomed to repeat the past. It’s not as easy as saying, “Let’s just put women in.”
James Loewen, author of Lies My Teacher Told Me, calls traditional history “heroification,” or selecting people to put on a pedestal and honor. This process does not reveal the truth about history—events do not happen in a vacuum. Few leaders act alone. When male historians selected the heroes they wanted children to read about, they tended to select people who looked and reminded them of themselves. Loewen called heroification a “degenerative process” because it distorts the real lives, works, and effects of those historical figures. To really see our leaders is to understand that then, as now, they were not monolithic; they contained parts we like and parts we don’t like. If we heroify them, it makes our current roundup of leaders difficult to cope with.
Another scholar, Nel Noddings, writing for Theory and Practice, critiqued the way women were being added to history textbooks. She explained that the outcomes were somewhat mixed, ranging from positive to absurd. She said that while women were included, it often took some imagination to understand why. In many cases no white man with such peripheral involvement in an issue would have been included—so why were these women? Although women appeared in illustrations, they were still absent from the written content around the image—illustrations were added of women to say women’s history was being taught, but it was less than tokenism.
Women’s history, when presented as pop-up history, sheroifies and the biases of the historian are on full display. The most common women taught in school include radical feminists like suffragists, not average women. Noddings warned that including women in such a way makes an age-old error of measuring female success by a male standard. This approach “obscures contributions” made by women in fields ignored by the social studies curriculum. Noddings argued that women's history should not adhere to traditional approaches, which merely highlights a handful of notable political or social figures as representative. In women’s history these “notable” women do not exemplify the majority of women's history. Their contributions seem like deviations from the norm in a society largely dominated by men.
Many of the women who do make history class were radical in their time. As a result they often advocated for rights and were embroiled in politics—this has left us with the false idea that women’s history is about a special interest group. Women are not an interest group—they are half of humanity!
When women do “make history,” it is often women who ventured into so-called male spheres to engage in politics. This phenomenon is why Susan B. Anthony is easier to recall than other women. Yet those women are exceptions, not the norm. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich insisted in a personal communication with RHP Executive Director, Kelsie Eckert, that any women’s history be grounded in economics. In her piece titled, “The Care Tradition: Beyond ‘Add Women and Stir,’” Nel Noddings argued for “Homemaking” to be included with historical conversations about the economy. Navigating the dichotomies of nature and nurture, private and public, and the way women have been relegated to one side of that line in history to justify their exclusion from the human narrative about the very public social world that was male dominated have forced the Remedial Herstory Project and other women’s scholars to redefine the natural and private world for inclusion in history. Therefore, the economy of homemaking stands alongside women’s social and political activism in the narrative of women’s history created for the video series. Emphasis on women’s economic contributions brought in the stories of lower or working class women who actively contributed to the success of the economy and whose work then, and by historians has been undervalued.
Women’s Diversity
Our traditional telling of women’s history has been satisfied to summarize women’s contribution to world history with: women were meanwhile serving in their traditional role of tending the home. We have summarized an incredibly diverse half of humanity and, in effect, buried the stories of women who did not tend the home and devalued those who did—neither are acceptable or reflect much critical thought. Could one do the same for all of men? Of course not. Men were meanwhile… What is the end of the sentence? There isn’t one. And there isn’t one for women.
Women are equally diverse, opinionated, and different. To say all women were doing anything in unison fails to acknowledge women as human beings with innate differences. Miles wrote, “There could be as many histories as there are women to write them.” Reducing women to what was traditionally valued is not only inaccurate for how many lived, but, importantly, gives us an excuse not to acknowledge their contributions, which were greater than they are given credit for. Not all women were wives and mothers—and for those who were, those titles were not all that defined them.
If women are mentioned in media or school, it is often as a sidebar to the main narrative—yet women are central to the story. Pop-up, or sidebar, history leaves us with the impression that all women agree with one woman’s perspective. This textbook aims to remedy that.
Representation Matters
Girls can become what they see and this motto is taken to heart when considering the breadth of the female experience across time and space. Great effort was made to expand the narratives beyond the elite, middle class, white narratives so often dominant in women’s history. Most of that was navigated by centering economic history throughout the narrative. As the textbook was outlined and written, the question kept being: who is represented and how?
The study, “Where are the women?” by the National Women’s History museum found that when women made state social studies standards they often emphasized women’s domestic roles and responsibilities. The lack of women in science was a noted failure. Therefore, scholars from disciplines beyond history were included on our team, like experts on climate science, indigenous studies, religious studies, and medical history. We recruited scholars with special expertise to review certain chapters or entire sections. Every chapter was peer reviewed and copyedited by multiple scholars.
World history should be global, so effort was put in to representing every region of the world, not just Europe. For world history, our research and consulting team included world historians, military historians, scholars of religious studies, African studies, Indian studies, Latin American studies, and Chinese history. We aimed to balance the regional and cultural representation through the text. Each of the major world religions is addressed.
US history impacted and was impacted by so many groups of people, in power and those without, recorded and less documented. In the US series, the authors worked to include women of different classes and races, as well as women from across the US states, rather than the typical over-emphasis on women in eastern states. Our research team included anthropologists, military historians, indigenous studies scholars, medical historians, western historians, 19th and 20th century historians.
Throughout it was important to us to out some well known figures in history so students across the LGBTQ+ spectrum could see themselves in the history, and especially since so many prominent feminists were LGBTQ+. Queer figures were included as far back in time as possible and across regions of the world.
The Eckert Test
Remedial Herstory applied the "Bechdel Test" for films to the history curriculum and this textbook; it's called the Eckert Test. The Eckert Test emerged from frustration over how many times teachers fail to bring a female perspective into their history lessons. The Eckert Test is a system to hold educators accountable to a more comprehensive and diverse women’s history.
How does it work?
The test is this: 1. There are two women in the lesson. 2. Those two women have different opinions. 3. They represent different backgrounds: racial, sexual identity, ethnic, religious, generational, or economic. At first many teachers just started adding women’s sources to the inquiries, or lessons, they already have. This is called "pop-up" history and it forces one woman to represent and speak for all women. There isn't WOMEN’s diversity. Men get to be diverse and have disagreements in history, but women who pop into history classes don’t get that luxury enough.
Not everyone can name two women from every era, but they could name two men and isn’t that the problem? It’s challenging, but with research it is doable in EVERY period and region of the world as far back as you can go, even Mesopotamia. Start with Kubaba the first woman monarch in world history and Enheduanna the first priest, historian, and poet (male or female) EVER, and you're off to a great start.
But, do we know enough about these early women to have a colorful debate or discussion in a history class? Yes. In almost every case, enough is known to work with these women, their stories, their ideas, or their legacies.
Teaching With Inquiry
A textbook should only be the start of one’s introduction to the historical past. Undoubtedly the authors here have made claims that a reader, upon their own review of the evidence, would disagree with. Therefore, let this textbook inspire future research, inquiry, and debate. Inquiry is the essence of history.
The inquiry-model is a model for teaching that is student centered and gets the students puzzling through a compelling question. Students, rather than the teacher, examine the evidence and draw conclusions based on social studies skills and ways of knowing taught by the teacher. In history, students actually get to become historians themselves by analyzing primary material and deciding what is knowable based on the evidence available. In the other social studies subjects students use the skills of political scientists, economists, anthropologists, geographers, etc to answer questions. This question-driven approach get's the students thinking rather than the teacher pontificating.
The inquiry model is current practice in social studies and history education. Students should be working with the primary material themselves to more deeply understand the information presented. For every period and region of world history, the Remedial Herstory Project has developed inquiries to support teachers and students in engaging with the ideas and lives of women in the past.
Inquiry is so helpful for diversity, equity, and inclusion, because a question like "Was the American Revolution revolutionary?" can be answered more deeply and meaningfully with diverse sources. Students can review American and British sources to get some variety of perspectives. Poor and wealthy American sources will also have differing viewpoints on the success of the revolution. But the failures of the Revolution are even more illuminated when the voices of women, Black, and Indigenous peoples are included. Students learn to work with primary material, evaluate which sources are most credible, and ultimately decide whom they most agree with.
In the inquiry-model, the development of historical understanding is driven by a compelling question. A compelling question is one that is debatable, important, narrow, enduring, and of course, researchable. Teachers guide students as they form these questions and move toward enough contextual knowledge where they are ready to try and answer the questions. Once the compelling question is established, students and teachers discuss the best ways to pursue the question. What sources of information would be helpful? How might one find those sources? And what further questions do those sources illuminate?
There are myriad ways to approach an inquiry in the classroom. Sometimes students are turned lose to find answers, other times the teacher facilitates the entire inquiry supporting the emerging and hopefully diverging opinions of students. In the Remedial Herstory Project’s approach, sources are preselected and students use them either independently, in groups, or as guided by the teacher to investigate the question. These lessons are designed for teacher flexibility. Packets could take between 15 minutes and almost 2 hours depending on the lesson and grade level. Teachers can have students complete the packets as a group, it can be facilitated by the instructor (which could be helpful for younger learners), they could do it as a moving, outdoor activity, or it could be homework before an in class seminar. Below are some suggestions for how to teach with them.
Strategies for Inquiry
Independent Work: The most straightforward would be to introduce the topic and inquiry. Then pass out the packet and have students independently respond to the questions.
After students work through the sources, the teacher has lots of choices for what they do next. They can end with the packet or extend the learning with an activity. Consider one of the following:
Myra Pollack Sadker once said "Each time a girl opens a book and finds a womanless history, she learns she is worth less." It’s basic math. Women are half of humanity, they should be half the content in history classes. But sadly they have not been… and Remedial Herstory is here to fix that.
Women’s history gives us a window into the broader study of gender and sexuality over time. Inclusive women’s history encompasses the study of gender and gender nonconforming people. It allows us to reevaluate the gendered biases in the study of history and to truly examine sources, cultures, and communities. Why do so many historians conclude that skeletons buried with weapons are male? Because the historical profession is dominated by male historians whose assumptions about gender permeate their scholarship. We learn more about the historical dynamic when we challenge those biases and make room for women in the historical narrative.
Historical scholarship tends to be dominated by diplomatic, military, and economic events that tend to minimize the importance of women in society. But history is the study of the past, and it is important to be aware of who wrote history and how the gender of the historian dramatically affects the nature of the narrative. Whatever the epoch, whatever the event, we know women were there. As the study of the documented past, history is enriched by the inclusion of details derived from an abundance of documents by women and about. We know women lived, felt, thought, acted, changed and were changed by history. But why are aspects of history in which women played dominant roles not included? Where is medical history? The history of child rearing? The history of economic activi\ty characterized as women’s work?” These histories, and many more, are crucial to understanding the past and the present.
Women held, seized, and wielded positions of power--and challenged people in power-- in the diplomatic, military, and economic spheres in every period of history. But those women and their stories are absent from our cultural understanding of the past. Women have been and continue to be monarchs, empresses, and presidents all over the world . Women, especially poor women, have always worked outside the home. With the emergence of what we now call social history, the stories of working women are being told with greater frequency.
Beginning in the mid-twentieth century women’s history programs emerged across college campuses around the world, and the field of women’s history was born. Today, much research and scholarship is available to us, but very little has trickled down to the primary and secondary classrooms. There are a number of reasons for this. Lack of conversations between academic historians and K-12 teachers, and the fact that today, only 40% of secondary history teachers are women (University of Connecticut), and only 35% of PhDs in history are earned by women.(Slate). Among male historians, only 6% choose to write about women (Slate) and only 7% of outdoor statues in the US recognize the accomplishments of women (Smithsonian). 28% of recent biographies are about women (Slate). In textbooks, men are named four times as frequently as women (Eckert). State standards are a bit better, naming women at a rate of one for every three men (National Women’s History Museum). Fewer than a quarter of historic figures listed in state standards are women (National Women’s History Museum), and most secondary educators teach about women less than once a month (Cicely Scheiner-Fisher). Despite these grim statistics, so much is now known about women’s history, and it’s a failure of the process of educating educators that so little about women’s history is taught.
This book provides a foundation for further exploration. We will introduce you to some of the major players and a few lesser known ones. We will help you see some of the major issues and debates that animated women to act on their own behalf and in the interest of others over time. Once you are armed with a basic knowledge of women’s history, you will be prepared to look more deeply into history and locate the stories of even more women.
This book will help you to see the myriad ways women transformed and were transformed, not just by addressing traditional “women’s topics” but all of history. For every historical period, we challenge you to ask, “Where are the women?” Imagine a world where people of all genders know the significance and history of women and the ways that gender and sexuality have created our own gendered dynamics. Imagine the ways that this deep understanding of gender can promote gender equity. Women are half of history, they should be half the content in history classes.
Creating an Inclusive History
This textbook is dedicated to enhancing the ability of K-12 teachers to introduce women’s history into their curricula by telling the stories of women and providing carefully-selected primary source material. The textbook follows a familiar periodization of world and United States history taught in schools for easy inclusion, however some timelines and titles have been amended to center women’s lives. Three other guiding principles were used throughout: center women, show women’s diversity, and represent as many groups as possible.
Center Women
Women, their interests, and challenges are not only unstudied but underrepresented in historical storytelling which perpetuates the devaluing of women and their work today. Students need to see themselves in history, and half the population leaves high school with just a small handful of un-behaved and white historical models. When secondary teachers do teach women’s history, it is often oversimplified feminist, or even sexist, ideals. Both perspectives perpetuate the cycle of devaluing women’s traditional contributions and acknowledging the ways women have sat outside of the ideals imposed on them. Our world is plagued with continuing gender discrimination, unequal treatment, and violence against women. History allows societies to see patterns in the past. History informs the present. Without women’s history, society is doomed to repeat the past. It’s not as easy as saying, “Let’s just put women in.”
James Loewen, author of Lies My Teacher Told Me, calls traditional history “heroification,” or selecting people to put on a pedestal and honor. This process does not reveal the truth about history—events do not happen in a vacuum. Few leaders act alone. When male historians selected the heroes they wanted children to read about, they tended to select people who looked and reminded them of themselves. Loewen called heroification a “degenerative process” because it distorts the real lives, works, and effects of those historical figures. To really see our leaders is to understand that then, as now, they were not monolithic; they contained parts we like and parts we don’t like. If we heroify them, it makes our current roundup of leaders difficult to cope with.
Another scholar, Nel Noddings, writing for Theory and Practice, critiqued the way women were being added to history textbooks. She explained that the outcomes were somewhat mixed, ranging from positive to absurd. She said that while women were included, it often took some imagination to understand why. In many cases no white man with such peripheral involvement in an issue would have been included—so why were these women? Although women appeared in illustrations, they were still absent from the written content around the image—illustrations were added of women to say women’s history was being taught, but it was less than tokenism.
Women’s history, when presented as pop-up history, sheroifies and the biases of the historian are on full display. The most common women taught in school include radical feminists like suffragists, not average women. Noddings warned that including women in such a way makes an age-old error of measuring female success by a male standard. This approach “obscures contributions” made by women in fields ignored by the social studies curriculum. Noddings argued that women's history should not adhere to traditional approaches, which merely highlights a handful of notable political or social figures as representative. In women’s history these “notable” women do not exemplify the majority of women's history. Their contributions seem like deviations from the norm in a society largely dominated by men.
Many of the women who do make history class were radical in their time. As a result they often advocated for rights and were embroiled in politics—this has left us with the false idea that women’s history is about a special interest group. Women are not an interest group—they are half of humanity!
When women do “make history,” it is often women who ventured into so-called male spheres to engage in politics. This phenomenon is why Susan B. Anthony is easier to recall than other women. Yet those women are exceptions, not the norm. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich insisted in a personal communication with RHP Executive Director, Kelsie Eckert, that any women’s history be grounded in economics. In her piece titled, “The Care Tradition: Beyond ‘Add Women and Stir,’” Nel Noddings argued for “Homemaking” to be included with historical conversations about the economy. Navigating the dichotomies of nature and nurture, private and public, and the way women have been relegated to one side of that line in history to justify their exclusion from the human narrative about the very public social world that was male dominated have forced the Remedial Herstory Project and other women’s scholars to redefine the natural and private world for inclusion in history. Therefore, the economy of homemaking stands alongside women’s social and political activism in the narrative of women’s history created for the video series. Emphasis on women’s economic contributions brought in the stories of lower or working class women who actively contributed to the success of the economy and whose work then, and by historians has been undervalued.
Women’s Diversity
Our traditional telling of women’s history has been satisfied to summarize women’s contribution to world history with: women were meanwhile serving in their traditional role of tending the home. We have summarized an incredibly diverse half of humanity and, in effect, buried the stories of women who did not tend the home and devalued those who did—neither are acceptable or reflect much critical thought. Could one do the same for all of men? Of course not. Men were meanwhile… What is the end of the sentence? There isn’t one. And there isn’t one for women.
Women are equally diverse, opinionated, and different. To say all women were doing anything in unison fails to acknowledge women as human beings with innate differences. Miles wrote, “There could be as many histories as there are women to write them.” Reducing women to what was traditionally valued is not only inaccurate for how many lived, but, importantly, gives us an excuse not to acknowledge their contributions, which were greater than they are given credit for. Not all women were wives and mothers—and for those who were, those titles were not all that defined them.
If women are mentioned in media or school, it is often as a sidebar to the main narrative—yet women are central to the story. Pop-up, or sidebar, history leaves us with the impression that all women agree with one woman’s perspective. This textbook aims to remedy that.
Representation Matters
Girls can become what they see and this motto is taken to heart when considering the breadth of the female experience across time and space. Great effort was made to expand the narratives beyond the elite, middle class, white narratives so often dominant in women’s history. Most of that was navigated by centering economic history throughout the narrative. As the textbook was outlined and written, the question kept being: who is represented and how?
The study, “Where are the women?” by the National Women’s History museum found that when women made state social studies standards they often emphasized women’s domestic roles and responsibilities. The lack of women in science was a noted failure. Therefore, scholars from disciplines beyond history were included on our team, like experts on climate science, indigenous studies, religious studies, and medical history. We recruited scholars with special expertise to review certain chapters or entire sections. Every chapter was peer reviewed and copyedited by multiple scholars.
World history should be global, so effort was put in to representing every region of the world, not just Europe. For world history, our research and consulting team included world historians, military historians, scholars of religious studies, African studies, Indian studies, Latin American studies, and Chinese history. We aimed to balance the regional and cultural representation through the text. Each of the major world religions is addressed.
US history impacted and was impacted by so many groups of people, in power and those without, recorded and less documented. In the US series, the authors worked to include women of different classes and races, as well as women from across the US states, rather than the typical over-emphasis on women in eastern states. Our research team included anthropologists, military historians, indigenous studies scholars, medical historians, western historians, 19th and 20th century historians.
Throughout it was important to us to out some well known figures in history so students across the LGBTQ+ spectrum could see themselves in the history, and especially since so many prominent feminists were LGBTQ+. Queer figures were included as far back in time as possible and across regions of the world.
The Eckert Test
Remedial Herstory applied the "Bechdel Test" for films to the history curriculum and this textbook; it's called the Eckert Test. The Eckert Test emerged from frustration over how many times teachers fail to bring a female perspective into their history lessons. The Eckert Test is a system to hold educators accountable to a more comprehensive and diverse women’s history.
How does it work?
The test is this: 1. There are two women in the lesson. 2. Those two women have different opinions. 3. They represent different backgrounds: racial, sexual identity, ethnic, religious, generational, or economic. At first many teachers just started adding women’s sources to the inquiries, or lessons, they already have. This is called "pop-up" history and it forces one woman to represent and speak for all women. There isn't WOMEN’s diversity. Men get to be diverse and have disagreements in history, but women who pop into history classes don’t get that luxury enough.
Not everyone can name two women from every era, but they could name two men and isn’t that the problem? It’s challenging, but with research it is doable in EVERY period and region of the world as far back as you can go, even Mesopotamia. Start with Kubaba the first woman monarch in world history and Enheduanna the first priest, historian, and poet (male or female) EVER, and you're off to a great start.
But, do we know enough about these early women to have a colorful debate or discussion in a history class? Yes. In almost every case, enough is known to work with these women, their stories, their ideas, or their legacies.
Teaching With Inquiry
A textbook should only be the start of one’s introduction to the historical past. Undoubtedly the authors here have made claims that a reader, upon their own review of the evidence, would disagree with. Therefore, let this textbook inspire future research, inquiry, and debate. Inquiry is the essence of history.
The inquiry-model is a model for teaching that is student centered and gets the students puzzling through a compelling question. Students, rather than the teacher, examine the evidence and draw conclusions based on social studies skills and ways of knowing taught by the teacher. In history, students actually get to become historians themselves by analyzing primary material and deciding what is knowable based on the evidence available. In the other social studies subjects students use the skills of political scientists, economists, anthropologists, geographers, etc to answer questions. This question-driven approach get's the students thinking rather than the teacher pontificating.
The inquiry model is current practice in social studies and history education. Students should be working with the primary material themselves to more deeply understand the information presented. For every period and region of world history, the Remedial Herstory Project has developed inquiries to support teachers and students in engaging with the ideas and lives of women in the past.
Inquiry is so helpful for diversity, equity, and inclusion, because a question like "Was the American Revolution revolutionary?" can be answered more deeply and meaningfully with diverse sources. Students can review American and British sources to get some variety of perspectives. Poor and wealthy American sources will also have differing viewpoints on the success of the revolution. But the failures of the Revolution are even more illuminated when the voices of women, Black, and Indigenous peoples are included. Students learn to work with primary material, evaluate which sources are most credible, and ultimately decide whom they most agree with.
In the inquiry-model, the development of historical understanding is driven by a compelling question. A compelling question is one that is debatable, important, narrow, enduring, and of course, researchable. Teachers guide students as they form these questions and move toward enough contextual knowledge where they are ready to try and answer the questions. Once the compelling question is established, students and teachers discuss the best ways to pursue the question. What sources of information would be helpful? How might one find those sources? And what further questions do those sources illuminate?
There are myriad ways to approach an inquiry in the classroom. Sometimes students are turned lose to find answers, other times the teacher facilitates the entire inquiry supporting the emerging and hopefully diverging opinions of students. In the Remedial Herstory Project’s approach, sources are preselected and students use them either independently, in groups, or as guided by the teacher to investigate the question. These lessons are designed for teacher flexibility. Packets could take between 15 minutes and almost 2 hours depending on the lesson and grade level. Teachers can have students complete the packets as a group, it can be facilitated by the instructor (which could be helpful for younger learners), they could do it as a moving, outdoor activity, or it could be homework before an in class seminar. Below are some suggestions for how to teach with them.
Strategies for Inquiry
Independent Work: The most straightforward would be to introduce the topic and inquiry. Then pass out the packet and have students independently respond to the questions.
- Partner Work: Having students independently complete the lesson but work with a partner. This can help support diverse learners.
- Station Work: Put the documents up on posters or on tables spread out around the room. Pass students only the questions. Students move to each document station in shifts. This is a great strategy for kinesthetic learning.
- Think, Pair, Share: Some lessons would be better taught as a "think, pair, share," where a student only examines one document from the lesson and answers the questions. Teachers can distribute documents based on student ability. They then group up with students who looked at different documents and teach the group about their source while learning about others. At the end, the group can pull the information together to answer the big analysis questions.
- Team Work: Depending on how you want to extend the lesson, you may want to consider letting students work in teams. Maybe they are about to debate this? Break them into teams and they can do the packets together.
- Kinesthetic Lesson: Take the class on a walk. Stop every few minutes in a quiet and open space and dissect one of the documents in the packet. The teacher could read it and pose the guiding questions to students. The class hosts a brief discussion then continues on the walk. While walking, students are instructed to engage with their peers on the overarching question.
After students work through the sources, the teacher has lots of choices for what they do next. They can end with the packet or extend the learning with an activity. Consider one of the following:
- Discussion: Consider facilitating a discussion of the analysis questions. Ask students to share their response with someone, or if they already worked in a group, ask them to nominate someone to represent their group to the class as a whole. Capitalize on differences between group responses. Why did one group answer differently than another? What impacted them or stood out more?
- Four Corner Debate: Consider a "four-corner debate." In the corners of the room tack up a piece of paper with four differing and possible answers to the inquiry question. After students complete the lesson packet, pose the question to the room at large and ask students to move to the corner of the room (or in between locations) that represent their answer. Then, ask students to explain their choice. As students discuss they are allowed to move closer or further from ideas. This is a great strategy for kinesthetic learning.
- Socratic Seminar: Consider doing a "socratic seminar" to extend the learning and get students to question what they still don't know or understand. Start with the inquiry's question. Students should be encouraged to answer one another's question directly, but also to answer the question with another question. This continues the conversation and gets at more rich ideas. The teacher should try to say as little as possible and let the students lead the dialog. One strategy for this is to seat students in a circle. Give each of them a cup and 2-3 tokens. When a student makes a substantive contribution to the discussion the teacher will walk over an place a token in the cup signaling that they have contributed. Students will become aware of who has spoken and who has not, and leave space for one another.
- Structured Academic Controversy: Consider turning the lesson into a "structured academic controversy." Take the overarching question and turn it into a "debate." Students can choose or be assigned a side in the debate and use the documents provided to argue their "answer" to the overarching question. They can argue over interpretations and credibility of some documents.
- Reacting to the Past: Consider doing some role play with your class. Reacting to the Past is an active learning pedagogy of role-playing games designed by Barnard University. In Reacting to the Past games, students are assigned character roles with specific goals and must communicate, collaborate, and compete effectively to advance their objectives. Reacting promotes engagement with big ideas, and improves intellectual and academic skills. Provide students with a set of rules about staying in character and what types of things they must know about their character. Students should be provided with a packet of role sheets with instructions on their individual goals and strategies for game play. Students can use sources and information from these activities, and can search for more details online about their individual character. Reacting roles and games do not have a fixed script or outcome. While students are obliged to adhere to the philosophical and intellectual beliefs of the historical figures they have been assigned to play, they must devise their own means of expressing those ideas persuasively in papers, speeches, or other public presentations.
Is learning women’s history a form of feminism
$0.00
In this inquiry, students will analyze the works of numerous female historians as they define what women’s history is. This lesson plan uses the work of Cornelia H. Dayton, Lisa Levenstein, Aparna Basu, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, and Gerda Lerner. Included with this item is: the lesson plan, a modified version of said lesson plan at the middle school level, a lesson specific powerpoint, as well as two teacher resources which help answer each lesson plan. If you modify any of the materials please feel free to send them back to us, so we can see where you made changes!
Is women’s history redundant
$0.00
In this inquiry, students will read secondary sources on ancient Rome in order to analyze how women are integrated in historical narratives. The first source is written by the History Channel and mentions Lucretia, Julius Caesar, Julia, etc. The second source, also written by the History Channel, features Calpurnia, Ovid, the Vestal Virgins, etc. Included with this item is: the lesson plan, a modified version of said lesson plan at the middle school level, a lesson specific powerpoint, as well as two teacher resources which help answer each lesson plan. If you modify any of the materials please feel free to send them back to us, so we can see where you made changes!
Why Study Women's History
$0.00
In this inquiry, students will read from two Arkansas newspapers published May 16, 1891, to analyze the difference between writing for and by women compared to men. The New England Women’s Press Association is mentioned. Included with this item is: the lesson plan, a modified version of said lesson plan at the middle school level, a lesson specific powerpoint, as well as two teacher resources which help answer each lesson plan. If you modify any of the materials please feel free to send them back to us, so we can see where you made changes!Â
What is the best way to periodize women’s history
$0.00
In this inquiry, students will examine the periods of history and determine if they are structured well with regards to including turning points for women and girls. The source used is Gisela Bock, Challenging Dichotomies: Perspectives on Women’s History. Included with this item is: the lesson plan, a modified version of said lesson plan at the middle school level, a lesson specific powerpoint, as well as two teacher resources which help answer each lesson plan. If you modify any of the materials please feel free to send them back to us, so we can see where you made changes!
Book Recommendations from the Remedial Herstory Project for Teaching Women's History
Teaching Women’s History: Breaking Barriers and Undoing Male Centrism in K-12 Social Studies challenges and guides K-12 history teachers to incorporate comprehensive and diverse women’s history into every region and era of their history curriculum.
Providing a wealth of practical examples, ideas, and lesson plans – all backed by scholarly research – for secondary and middle school classes, this book demonstrates how teachers can weave women’s history into their curriculum today. |
A Primer for Teaching Women, Gender, and Sexuality in World History is a guide for college and high school teachers who are teaching women, gender, and sexuality in history for the first time, for experienced teachers who want to reinvigorate their courses, for those who are training future teachers to prepare their own syllabi, and for teachers who want to incorporate these issues into their world history classes.
|
Clio in the Classroom is full of essays that provide concise, up-to-date overviews of American women's history from colonial times to the present that include its ethnic, racial, and regional changes. It looks at conceptual framework keys to understanding women's history and American history, such as sexuality, citizenship, consumerism, and religion. The text also offers concrete approaches for the classroom, including the use of oral history, visual resources, material culture, and group learning.
|
A major new work by a leading historian and pioneer in women's studies, The Creation of Patriarchy is a radical reconceptualization of Western civilization that makes gender central to its analysis. Gerda Lerner argues that male dominance over women is not "natural" or biological, but the product of an historical development begun in the second millennium B.C. in the Ancient Near East. As patriarchy as a system of organizing society was established historically, she contends, it can also be ended by the historical process.
|
From Medusa to Philomela (whose tongue was cut out), from Hillary Clinton to Elizabeth Warren (who was told to sit down), Beard draws illuminating parallels between our cultural assumptions about women’s relationship to power—and how powerful women provide a necessary example for all women who must resist being vacuumed into a male template.
|
US Herstory Textbook Table of Contents
United States History
- Early North American Women
- Women’s Cultural Encounters
- Women’s Colonial Life
- Women’s American Revolution
- Republican Motherhood
- Native Women Forced West
- Abolition is Women’s Ticket
- Women and the West
- Women and the Civil War
- Women and Reconstruction
- The Rise of NAWSA and NACWC
- Women and Expansion
- Women Laborers and Activists
- Progressive Women
- Women and WWI
- Woman Suffrage
- The New Woman
- Women and the Depression
- Women and WWII
- Post War Women
- Women and the Civil Rights Movement
- Women and the Cold War
- Reproductive and Sexual Freedom
- The Feminist Era
- Women at the Millennium
- 21st Century Women
- Women in a Gender-Polarized Time
Berry and Gross tell a survey of black women in the United States.
|
Susan Ware tells a short introduction to women's history in the United States.
|
Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz tells a survey of indigenous people in the United States.
|
Gail Collins tells a survey of Women in the United States.
|
Through Women’s Eyes: An American History with Documents was the first text to present a narrative of U.S. women’s history within the context of the central developments of the United States and to combine this core narrative with written and visual primary sources in each chapter.
|
World Herstory Textbook Table of Contents
World History
- to 15,000 BCE Before Gendered Constructs
- to 15,000 BCE Great Goddesses?
- 10,000 BCE The Agricultural Revolution: A great mistake?
- 4000-1000 BCE Domesticating Women in the First City-States
- 800-400 BCE Founding Myths and Women’s Place
- 800-300 BCE Asian Philosophies and Women’s Place
- 100 BCE - 100 CE Women and the Roman Empire
- 100 BCE - 100 CE Women and the Han Empire
- 0 One Male God over Women
- 100-500 Women Travelers and Merchants on the Silk Road
- 500-900 The Age of Queens and Empresses
- 700-1200 The Golden Age of Islam
- 900-1500 Women in Feudal Europe and Japan
- 900-1200 Women Crusaders and Stabilizers
- 1200-1400 Pastoral and Mongol Women
- 1300-1500 Renaissance and Ottoman Women Thinkers
- 1000-1600 Gender Dynamics in New Worlds
- 1000-1600 Women Explorers and Leaders
- 1500-1600 Women and the Reformation
- 1500-1800 Virgin Encounters in the New World
- 1600-1850 Gender, Sexuality and the Slave Trade
- 1700-1850 The Enlightenment and Women
- 1700-1850 Cloistered Women in Asia
- 1850-1950 Women's Industrial Revolution
- 1850-1950 Women’s Lives under Imperialism
- 1900-1930 Women's Worlds in Collision
- 1930-1950 Women and the Global War
- 1950-1990 Decolonization
- 1950-1990 Transnational Feminism
Women in World History brings together the most recent scholarship in women's and world history in a single volume covering the period from 1450 to the present, enabling readers to understand women's relationship to world developments over the past five hundred years.
|
The history of the world is the history of great women, their names should be shouted from the rooftops and that is exactly what Jenni Murray is here to do.
|
Recording the important milestones in the birth of the modern feminist movement and the rise of women into greater social, economic, and political power, Miles takes us through through a colorful pageant of astonishing women
|
There are two volumes by these authors. Presenting selected histories in Asia, Africa, Europe and the Americas, this work discusses: political and economic issues; marriage practices, motherhood and enslavement; and religious beliefs and spiritual development. Primary readings are included.
|
A trailblazing, conversation-starting history of women’s health—from the earliest medical ideas about women’s illnesses to hormones and autoimmune diseases—brought together in a fascinating sweeping narrative.
|
Gendering Economics Table of Contents
In Fairy Play, Rodsky interviewed more than five hundred men and women from all walks of life to figure out what the invisible work in a family actually entails and how to get it all done efficiently.
|
Caroline Criado Perez investigates this shocking root cause of gender inequality in Invisible Women. Examining the home, the workplace, the public square, the doctor’s office, and more, Criado Perez unearths a dangerous pattern in data and its consequences on women’s lives.
|
A renowned economic historian traces women’s journey to close the gender wage gap and sheds new light on the continued struggle to achieve equity between couples at home. Drawing on decades of her own groundbreaking research, Claudia Goldin provides a fresh, in-depth look at the diverse experiences of college-educated women from the 1900s to today.
|
In Smart Women Love Money, Finn paves the way forward by showing you that the power of investing is the last frontier of feminism. Finn shares five simple and proven strategies for a woman at any stage of her life, whether starting a career, home raising children, or heading up a major corporation.
|
Gendering Government Textbook Table of Contents
Government
Women and Politics is a comprehensive examination of women's use of politics in pursuit of gender equality. How can demands for gender equality be reconciled with sex differences?
|
Caroline Criado Perez investigates this shocking root cause of gender inequality in Invisible Women. Criado Perez unearths a dangerous pattern in data and its consequences on women’s lives.
|
Women and Politics in a Global World is the only text that offers a cross-national and comparative examination of the impact of women on politics--and the impact of politics on women.
|
Hillary Rodham Clinton reveals what she was thinking and feeling during one of the most controversial and unpredictable presidential elections in history.
|
Gendering Literature
Coming Soon...
On This Date in History Calendar:
How do you use OTD events in a classroom setting? Try one of these:
How do you use OTD events in a classroom setting? Try one of these:
- Have a bulletin board or white board in your classroom designated for historic anniversaries. It can be a nice spot for fun facts!
- Turn the OTD event into an entry question or brain teaser. You could ask, what is significant about this event in relation to the period? How significant would that event have been in it's time?
Click "Add to Google Calendar" above to get these updates on your device every day.
*This calendar was built in collaboration with our friends at Herstory on the Rocks and Director of Professional Development Lauren Connolly. Thank you!
*This calendar was built in collaboration with our friends at Herstory on the Rocks and Director of Professional Development Lauren Connolly. Thank you!