We're getting the message -- women did more than dust while the United States became a nation, grew, fought wars and discovered the wonders of denim and polar fleece. Better yet, we seem to be passing the idea along to our kids.
This month, Women's History Month, is part of the reason we're more aware of women's history and of the need for a different perspective on the history we thought we knew.
Through a combination of collective consciousness-raising, lobbying by activists, better textbooks, and especially the efforts of local practitioners, women's history seems to be slowly making progress, getting more than lip service in the schools. Not enough progress to please critics -- who complain that whether your child learns anything about women often depends on the interest of individual teachers -- but progress.
There are reasons for both sexes to be interested in women's history.
For men, without women's perspective, you miss things. There were 600,000 deaths, North and South, in the Civil War, notes Rhode Island College historian J. Stanley Lemons -- including an incredible one fourth of all the white males in the South. What's more, Lemons says, by the end of the war, 40 percent of Southern soldiers had deserted.
"They can't all go home," he says, and the dead didn't come back, either. The result: many Southern women either lost husbands or had no chance of finding a mate. Lemons says that is a good part of the reason the Civil War still has a powerful effect on America more than a century later.
"If you're studying the Civil War," he concludes, "you had better talk about the women." If you don't, you won't understand what happened.
For women, "Every time a girl reads a womanless history, she learns she is worth less," wrote the late Myra Sadker, who with her husband, David, researched how girls are shortchanged in American classrooms and worked as advocates for removing gender bias in schools.
This is also a particularly significant Women's History Month. Just 150 years have passed since a group of angry women met at Seneca Falls, N.Y., and declared that they, too, were created equal, but that the promise of the United States -- liberty and the pursuit of happiness -- had been denied them.
WOMEN SUFFER FROM a chicken-and-egg problem when they're considered from a traditional historical perspective. They often don't figure in traditional history because they were precluded from playing roles that could have attracted more notice.
"The trouble with women," says women's historian and teacher Jane Lancaster, "is that they tend not to be connected with big events until recently, because they were excluded from the political process. So the events that made the newspapers were not necessarily the ones that women were involved in."
For much of the nation's history, women were barred from traditionally male careers. The professions weren't available.
So, it was no accident that when economic and social changes brought upheaval in the 19th century, women were available to play a leading role in reform movements -- abolitionism, temperance, organized labor and any number of social welfare efforts. Says Lancaster, "At the forefront of all the movements to do something about social conditions in the 19th century were women."
But "as recently as the 1970s," recounts the National Women's History Project, "women's history was virtually an unknown topic in the K-12 curriculum or in general public consciousness." The effort to celebrate women's history, which began with the creation of a "Women's History Week" in Sonoma County, Calif., in 1978, spread across the country and in 1981, Congress declared National Women's History Week. It became a month in 1987, and now, 10 years later, it's a major event on the calendars of many history and social studies teachers.
"COMPARED WITH 10 YEARS AGO," says Cranston High School East teacher Barbara DeRobbio, Rhode Island schools are doing "a much better job, especially the men teachers," in teaching women's issues.
DeRobbio, a former vice president of the Rhode Island Social Studies Association, says high school teachers are increasingly interested in women's issues. Several years ago, she organized a statewide association convention around a keynote speech on teaching women's history, drawing a good crowd of her peers. Since then, she says, "It's come miles. Women's issues are much better covered."
Edward J. Neil has been teaching for 26 years, most of them in social studies at Providence's Central High School. Back in the 1970s, he says, "Mostly everything was pretty much European-oriented," with "a very heavy emphasis on the contribution of males."
One result, he says, was girls who were "totally out of it as far as what contribution women had made."
Neil, a social studies curriculum facilitator, is helping manage a rewrite of the Providence schools' expectations of what students will learn in social studies. He says a lot has changed since the 1970s, and more will change. "We're trying to make sure students gets as clear and complete a picture as they can of every single group in American society."
"We're getting better at it," he says. "You see a lot more emphasis and a lot more awareness" being paid to history beyond that of white males.
THERE ARE NO centralized standards or other way to discover who is teaching what to Rhode Island social studies students. With some exceptions, educators with statewide contacts seem to think the focus has shifted toward women's issues as part of a trend toward "diversity."
For instance, Steven Ruscito, a North Providence teacher and president of the Rhode Island Social Studies Association in which history teachers are included, says a two-year course his high school offers called "The American Experience" covers both history and literature.
The effect, he says, is automatically to bring women's issues and minority group issues to the fore. "You can't explain literature unless you bring in women and minorities," he says.
Women's issues seem to be getting more attention, Ruscito says, "but can we say that every community is paying as much attention to it as others? We can't say that with any confidence."
Women's issues also show up in a pair of activities that bring together students from across the state, such as the annual History Day competition and the annual Model Legislature, organizers of both events say.
Last year, for example, History Day entries included several on women who were not famous, such as Italian immigrants and women in the labor movement, along with women who are, such as Queen Elizabeth, Gloria Steinem and Indira Ghandi, says Marie Parys. The librarian at the Ferri Middle School in Johnston, Parys coordinates the statewide History Day.
ONE KEY TO PAYING more attention to women's history, educators say, is finding textbooks that pay more attention to it. Traditional textbooks largely ignored women, so teachers who wanted to include them had to rustle up their own materials. Sometimes that happened, but often it didn't.
That is gradually changing.
"There's really a lot being published today on women's history for adults and kids," says Barbara Eisenberg, education director at the National Women's History Project, created to encourage educators to recognize the history and social contributions of women.
"Publishers are constantly moving in the right direction, because they know we want more of that," says Ruscito, the social studies association president.
Ruscito, however, rates most publishers only "fair" on their textbook offerings, and those in the field say that a teacher who really wants to inject women's history into his or her curriculum will likely have to venture outside the textbook and find supplementary materials.
While acknowledging that publishers are adding women's issues to texts, Lancaster criticizes them for doing it "the cheap way," by plugging in a new section on the women's side of things rather than integrating that perspective into the book as a whole.
She does say, though, that some issues of interest to women are more likely to appear in texts now. For example, she says, there is more likely to be attention to child-rearing practices -- was breast-feeding widespread? were children handed to wet-nurses? were they swaddled?
Or, a teacher can write her own book.
One who did is Lancaster, a former history teacher at the private Lincoln School for girls in Providence who is now working on her doctorate at Brown University. Lancaster has earned a statewide reputation as a vigorous advocate of women's history.
Her book, as yet unpublished, is called An Ornament and Honor to Their Sex: New England Women from Valley Forge to Fenway Park. It includes profiles of New England women and selections from primary sources, such as contemporary newspaper articles and obituaries. She used it for a course in women's history she taught at Lincoln.
The women include Ann Franklin, left a widow with three children, who in 1735 took over her late husband's printing business in Newport, and Lizzie Murphy, from Warren, who played semi-pro baseball on men's teams from 1918 to 1935.
The text has been embraced enthusiastically by many teachers, although the response in other quarters has been flatter: "I gave a copy to the curriculum director in the Providence public schools," she says, "and haven't heard from him since."
Another avenue into the subject matter is a special project. One that gained national attention was an oral history project called, "What Did You Do In the War, Grandma?" conducted in 1988 by Linda P. Wood, the librarian at South Kingstown High School, and a group of ninth graders.
The 17 students interviewed 36 Rhode Island women who recalled their lives in the years before, during and after World War II. Twenty-six of the interviews are on the World Wide Web (at www.stg.brown.edu/projects/WWII Women/intro.html) where it is one of the sources promoted by the National Women's History Project.
One reason things don't change faster, even with enlightened publishers and the best of intentions, is money. School systems don't necessarily have the money to replace their old books. One frustrated teacher reported being stuck with a 15-year-old textbook, because, "We don't have the money to buy new ones."
Ironically, the availability of new media is putting even more pressure on book budgets.
"We are gradually upgrading," says DeRobbio, but she added that grants tend to be much more available for buying computer hardware, not books.
HAVE THINGS REALLY changed very much? Have they changed enough?
Lancaster is skeptical. "There is a certain amount of goodwill out there," she says, "but they forget" after Women's History Month is over. Women's history, she says, "shouldn't just have to happen in March, and it shouldn't just concentrate on the well-known heroines."
Lemons, the history professor at Rhode Island College, has been studying women's issues since he wrote his dissertation on them in the 1960s -- which is to say, before they were fashionable. Asked whether students are any more interested in women's issues now than they were, say, 20 years ago, Lemons says, "I don't think so."
Lancaster suspects that one reason women's issues aren't taught more in the schools is that boys don't like them and teachers acquiesce.
Boys, she observed, object more vigorously to "girl stuff" than girls do to "boy stuff." Her book was popular with the girls at Lincoln, Lancaster says, but she says some teachers elsewhere have told her, "I'd like to use that, but the boys wouldn't accept it."
Teachers, she suspects, take the path of least resistance, at the expense of women's issues.
PROPONENTS OF TEACHING women's history often admit to being of two minds on how to go about it. The main choices are teaching women's history as a separate course or integrating it into a general history course.
Colleges, of course, end up doing both, and high schools rarely offer courses specifically in women's history. Some teachers suspect that's just as well.
For example, there is a women's history course at Brown University being taught by a professor whose reputation for teaching and scholarship is excellent. It has 55 students -- only three of them men.
The trouble, Lemons says, is that, "If you isolate it, only those who are interested in it tend to take it. You need to put it into the larger context."
The same thing troubles Lancaster: "Women's history seems to be for women like black history is for blacks and gay history is for gays."
At the moment, Lancaster says, the field of women's studies is also suffering a bit from tension between the needs of elementary and secondary schools, and the direction of scholarship in the field at colleges and universities.
"The cutting edge stuff tends to be about gender and sexuality, much of which is just not what most school committees would like us to be teaching the young," Lancaster says. At the college level, she says, the traditional model, involving heroic women who overcame obstacles to succeed, is out of fashion. But that is what the schools often want.
In the end, no matter how many curriculum revisions or textbook rewrites there are, what matters is what happens in the classroom. There's no telling.
"Rhode Island has 39 (cities and towns) and everybody's on a different page," says Parys, the Johnston librarian. "It all depends on the teacher, on whether the teacher's interested."
Any teacher who's interested has a raft of material to choose from.
"There are whole catalogs of things dealing with women's history," says Lemons, the RIC women's history professor, leafing though some of his mail. "Evidently, people are buying it."
Then he takes a closer look at a catalog from the Oxford University Press.
"They've misspelled suffrage,' " he says with a sigh.
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