I am so freakin’ excited to be teaching a women’s history course!!! And no, it’s not just for one token month of women’s history, it’s a whole high school history course y’all!

Below, check out a couple quotes from some historians on why they think women’s history matters:

Gerda Lerner: “Women’s history is indispensable and essential to the emancipation of women…Women’s history changes their lives.” (Lerner, 1986, p. 3).

 

 

 

Howard Zinn: “It is possible, reading standard histories, to forget half the population of the  country. The explorers were men, the landholders and merchants men, the political leaders men, the military figures men. The very invisibility of women, the overlooking of women, is a sign of their submerged status. In this invisibility they were something like black slaves (and thus slave women faced a double oppression.) The invisibility of women in history is a major problem. Without adequate attention to what women have experienced, educators run the risk of students assuming they played no role in history or in the creation of societies.” (Zinn, 1980, p. 103)

 

Margaret Crocco: “Even though women represent half the world’s population, and in that sense have experienced half of human history, their stories are often marginalized if not omitted entirely when world or American history is taught in the nation’s classrooms.” (Crocco, 1997)