Six on History: Women's History is Every Month
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PHOTOGRAPHS, DIAGRAMS AND DOCUMENTS RELATING TO THE NEW YORK PORT OF EMBARKATION IN WORLD WAR II
"As we wrap up Women’s History Month, we want to emphasize that this history doesn’t have to be relegated to March. It should be discussed year-round. We also encourage educators to capture the fullness of women’s roles in shaping United States history. Rather than relying on stories about the same barrier breakers, dig a little deeper to acknowledge and celebrate women who were more likely to be erased or silenced.
While Women’s History Month serves as a way to elevate women’s roles in shaping American life, not all women’s stories are included in textbooks and mainstream narratives. Educators must teach students to interrogate how historical narratives are crafted and framed—to seek truth and tell complete stories. In an interview with Vice about her book, The World Made by Women: A History of Women From the Apple to the Pill, author Amanda Foreman put it this way: “The tools of oppression begin with the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, and that’s why you have to set the record straight.”
Womanhood can’t be narrowly defined because women are not a monolith—there is more than one way to be a woman. Students, with their diverse and intersecting identities, already recognize this. During women’s history month and throughout the year, we can share lessons and discussions that acknowledge people who look like them or have similar experiences. Doing so will help students not only push back and correct incomplete historical narratives but also identify gaps they find as they work toward finding those truths. If students can’t see their identity reflected in history books, it’s imperative that they understand it’s the recounting of history that is wrong—not their identity.
Part of setting the record straight about women’s history is acknowledging the common belief that all women conform to certain norms, behaviors, roles and aesthetics. Women who step outside of those boundaries are often ostracized or omitted from history books and other records.
But too often, narratives we hear during Women’s History Month don’t do enough to address this. Stories often don’t consider women’s gender expression, sexual orientation, race, ethnicity and ability as significant parts of their life’s story. Instead, observations in March tend to speak of women’s achievements only in the context of overcoming gender barriers, discrimination and violence.
It certainly is important to teach how women have resisted oppressive systems while being excluded from power. But it’s also imperative to include the many ways they show up as their authentic selves as they work to dismantle systems of oppression.
Teach Context Behind FirstsWe often don’t learn about women who’ve contributed significantly to science, human rights movements and the arts until movies are made about them. It’s important that their legacies go beyond exceptionalism and the stories of women who were the first to break barriers in their field.
It’s helpful to name systems of oppression to provide context about their stories. Naming oppressive systems is one way to help students recognize gaps in the retelling of history. It also illuminates why certain women’s stories weren’t deemed as valuable.For example, students could study why Black women scientists such as Marie Maynard Daly, Katherine Johnson and Mae C. Jemison were among the first Black women to excel in their field as late as the 20th century. They can recognize that while these women overcame both racial and gender barriers, the same systems that made it more difficult for them are still in place.
By training diverse women in science and tech to become leaders, the whole ecosystem benefits
Even when women’s lives are highlighted during Women’s History Month, it’s worth thinking about what kinds of stories get told. Recovering hidden history can be more than just teaching new names. For example, students may be familiar with Harriet Tubman’s work to free enslaved people and spy on Confederate sources, but the fact that she led the Combahee Ferry Raid—a successful military operation—is rarely emphasized in Women’s History Month narratives.
Throughout history, women exuded strength and courage while ignoring gender norms, like those who disguised themselves as men to fight in the Civil War. You can teach students to recognize hidden histories by teaching about the experiences women had during the Civil War, such as Tubman and Frances Clayton, who served in the Union Army alongside her husband.
Elevate Hidden StoriesWomen who expressed their authentic identities are also largely hidden from popular narratives. Another way women historically challenged patriarchal nuclear family structures was through the concept of Boston marriages—an arrangement in the 19th century where adult women established households together, for romantic love or a system of support. They also created networks for professional women and advocated women’s rights.
In our Queer America podcast, “Romantic Friendships: Boston Marriages (Part 2),” historian Susan Freeman explains, “Coupled women in so-called Boston marriages belong to a generation referred to as New Women, or they were one of the generations of New Women, pioneering opportunities for women in higher education and professions and in public life.”
It’s important students understand that this happened mostly in the Northeast, and among middle class or wealthy white women. Their privilege provided access to education and financial independence, making it easier to exercise autonomy. Highlighting this privilege helps students to see how some people within an already marginalized group can hold some power while others experience added layers of oppression.
The influence of queer women during the Harlem Renaissance can show a different way women have created space to live authentically. Their work to carve out space for the Black LGBTQ community in Harlem laid the blueprint for other LGBTQ communities of all races, genders and backgrounds across the country.
In the article “Black Face, Queer Space: The Influence of Black Lesbian & Transgender Blues Women of the Harlem Renaissance on Emerging Queer Communities,” Emma Chen writes, “During the Harlem Renaissance, not only did black culture and arts flourish, but lesbian/transgender black women were also able to create opportunities for freedom of expression and visibility which established the framework for an emerging black LGBTQ+ community and constituted an opening for recognition by some members within the straight community.”
Citing Blues Legacies and Feminism, Chen goes on to say that “blues woman openly challenged the gender politics implicit in traditional cultural representations of marriage and heterosexual love.”
Address AppropriationOne last figure to learn about and later introduce to students is Rosetta Tharpe, the godmother of rock-and-roll. In the late 1930s, before Little Richard, Chuck Berry or Elvis Pressley, Tharpe, a Black, openly queer woman, introduced a distinct style of music that blended gospel, blues and jazz and included electrifying guitar playing. It was rare at the time for women to play the guitar, let alone in the thrilling way in which Tharpe played.
While many contemporary rock-and-roll stars laud Tharpe as an inspiration for their music, students may question why her story was largely absent from historical accounts of American music history for several decades. For the latter part of the 20th century and going into the 21st century, many Americans had not yet grasped that rock and roll was not the creation of white men, but Black artists like Tharpe. Her rejection of gender norms, her sexuality and race all played a part in being relegated to the history margins. She wasn’t inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame until 2018.
The list of women who don’t fit neatly in a patriarchal, heterosexual, feminine narrative is long. Their contributions to their communities and our country as a whole are paramount. And these achievements certainly aren’t limited to women we find in history. Look in your community or encourage your students to look into their families to find remarkable, inspirational women.
We hope you’ll take some time to consider how we celebrate and elevate all women who show up in different ways. As educators, you can inspire your students to see more women who were just as impactful as their male counterparts—not just during a commemorative month, but year-round."
" Two weeks after guards at Lowell Correctional Institution brutally beat a mentally and physically disabled woman, former inmates at the women’s prison are taking to social media to protest inhumane conditions and physical and sexual abuse that inmates say they have suffered for more than a decade.
On Saturday morning, a vigil was held outside the compound, the second in recent weeks, in part to protest the beating of Cheryl Weimar, a 51-year-old inmate who was slammed to a concrete floor, kicked and dragged by guards on Aug. 21. The attack left her paralyzed from the neck down. She remains hospitalized, hooked to a breathing apparatus, her lawyer, Ryan Andrews, told the Miami Herald.
One former inmate, Jordyn Cahill, also used YouTube to voice her disgust over the attack, detailing the sexual abuse Cahill herself said she had been subjected to during her eight years at the facility, ending in 2013. She named at least 11 correctional officers, including supervisors, alleging in graphic detail that they had groped, sexually attacked and extorted her for sex. In one incident, she said, an officer with a foot fetish refused to give her toilet paper unless she allowed him to play with her feet.
One of several Lowell activist groups, Change is Now, also produced an emotional video that was online, posted on Facebook, that includes photographs of women who have died at the prison, through abuse or medical neglect.
“Lowell Correctional family, friends and formerly incarcerated have sat silent long enough while our daughters, sisters, mothers, aunts, grandmothers and other women incarcerated in Lowell Correctional Institution have been harmed in one way or another,’’ the group said in a press announcement about Saturday’s protest.
“We will stand together united in silence as we scream for help for the women who remain incarcerated inside of Lowell Correctional Institution.’’
The beating of Weimar happened at Lowell, the largest women’s prison in Florida and the second largest in the nation. The state facility, run by the Florida Department of Corrections, is located in Central Florida, north of Orlando, and has a long history of human rights violations, some of which are the focus of an ongoing probe by the U.S. Department of Justice.
On Saturday, Andrews was finally permitted to take photographs of Weimar’s injuries, two weeks after guards at the prison broke her neck and assaulted her after she told them she couldn’t clean a toilet because of a hip condition. Frightened that they were going to harm her, she declared a mental health emergency, but the officers ignored her pleas and began beating her, Andrews and several sources with knowledge of the attack told the Herald.
Initially the Florida Department of Corrections refused to allow Andrews to take photographs of her, and he had to file a court petition in order to force the agency to permit him to document her injuries. She is suing the agency.
Word spread quickly throughout Lowell after the attack. Unlike all-male prisons, the female inmates at Lowell form bonds that continue after they are released, and women on the outside have for years advocated for those on the inside who are subjected to abuse, medical neglect and, at times, inhumane living conditions.
The latest beating is under investigation by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement and the Department of Corrections. None of the officers has been charged or fired.
State Rep. Dianne Hart, D-Tampa, said she has been stunned by the amount of abuse, medical neglect and horrible living conditions she has discovered. Over the past few months, she has visited 31 of the state’s 50 institutions. The agency has nearly 100,000 inmates and is the third-largest prison system in the nation.
“I know these are prisons, not country clubs. I understand that. But these inmates should be treated fairly,’’ she said. “I hear from people every day about how they are not getting proper medical treatment, how they aren’t getting education and how they are treated poorly.’’
"Twenty years of war in Afghanistan are over. What comes next is 20 years, or even more, of recriminations and blame for why the war ended as it did. Scholars and partisans still argue over the reasons America lost in Vietnam, so why should Afghanistan be any different?
On the plus side, the debate promises to be far more interesting. When it comes to Vietnam, partisans debate rules of engagement, bombing strategies, funding levels, and the Tet Offensive. With Afghanistan, the question could be: did gender studies cause America to suffer its most humiliating defeat ever? Cockburn wishes he was joking.
Traditionally, nations have waged war by mustering armies, defeating their enemies in battle, and despoiling their lands and cities. Only after total victory is the process of remaking a society feasible.
But America in Afghanistan sought a shortcut, and by ‘shortcut’ Cockburn means ‘something that takes ten times as long but doesn’t look as nasty for TV cameras’. America hoped that with enough half-baked social engineering in the half of Afghanistan it controlled, it would eventually be rewarded with victory, and Afghanistan would become the Holland of the Hindu Kush. On Ivy League campuses, students are taught to decry ‘colonialism’, but the Ivy League diplomats who sought to remake Afghanistan in Harvard’s image were among the most ambitious practitioners of it in world history.
So, alongside the billions for bombs went hundreds of millions for gender studies in Afghanistan. According to US government reports, $787 million was spent on gender programs in Afghanistan, but that substantially understates the actual total, since gender goals were folded into practically every undertaking America made in the country.
A recent report from the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) broke down the difficulties of the project. For starters, in both Dari and Pastho there are no words for ‘gender’. That makes sense, since the distinction between ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ was only invented by a sexually-abusive child psychiatrist in the 1960s, but evidently Americans were caught off-guard.
The initiatives piled up one after another. Do-gooders established a ‘National Masculinity Alliance’, so a few hundred Afghan men could talk about their ‘gender roles’ and ‘examine male attitudes that are harmful to women’.
Police facilities included childcare facilities for working mothers, as though Afghanistan’s medieval culture had the same needs as 1980s Minneapolis. The army set a goal of 10 percent female participation, which might make sense in a Marvel movie, but didn’t to devout Muslims. Even as America built an Afghan army that ended up collapsing in days, and a police force whose members frequently became highwaymen, it always made sure to execute its gender goals.
But all this wasn’t just a stupid waste of money. It routinely actively undermined the ‘nation-building’ that America was supposed to be doing. According to an USAID observer, the gender ideology included in American aid routinely caused rebellions out in the provinces, directly causing the instability America was supposedly fighting. To get Afghanistan’s parliament to endorse the women’s rights measures it wanted, America resorted to bribing them. Soon, bribery became the norm for getting anything done in the parliament.
Instead of rattling off anecdotes, perhaps a single video clip will do the job. Dadaism and conceptual art are of dubious value even in the West, but at some point some person who is not in prison for fraud decided that Afghan women would be uplifted by teaching them about Marcel Duchamp:
- "Mr. Everett, perhaps without due caution, advocated, last summer, the affirmative of this question. With his accustomed eloquence, he urged on the attention of Suleiman Bey the fact of the equal participation of the sexes in the public school system of Boston, while omitting to explain to him that the equality is of very recent standing. No doubt, the eminent Oriental would have been pleased to hear that this public administration of the alphabet to females, on any terms, is an institution but little more than a half-century old in the city of Boston. It is well established by the early deeds and documents that a large proportion of Puritan women could not write their own names; and in Boston especially, for a hundred and fifty years, the public schools included boys only. In the year 1789, however, the notable discovery was made that the average attendance of pupils from April to October was only one half of that reported for the remainder of the year. This was an obvious waste of money and accommodations, and it was therefore proposed that female pupils should be annually introduced during this intermediate period. Accordingly, school-girls, like other flowers, blossomed in summer only; and this state of things lasted, with but slight modification, for some forty years, according to the School-Superintendent’s Third Report. It was not till 1828 that all distinctions were abolished in the Boston Common Schools; in the High Schools lingering far later, sole vestige of the “good old times,” before a mistaken economy overthrew the wholesome doctrine of M. Sylvain Marechal, and let loose the alphabet among women."
