Exploring Women's History

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Women's History Month provides an ideal opportunity for students to learn about and connect to the lives, struggles, and achievements of women in the past to better understand the world today.

First Ladies

Although women only secured the vote in 1920 when the 19th Amendment to the Constitution was passed, they exercised influence at the very highest levels from the founding of the nation. EDSITEment lesson plans Remember the Ladies: The First Ladies and Women in the White House reveal the important political, social and cultural contributions, including fighting for suffrage, accomplished by First Ladies.

A film on the life of First Lady Dolley Madison, funded partly by NEH, offers insights into the social and intellectual world of the first of America’s influential and charismatic First Ladies. This film is an episode in the long-running PBS American Experience series, whose website contains historical background about Dolley’s life and times, a timeline, and clips from the film. It also contains an interactive photo gallery of First Ladies throughout our 200-year history.

One of the 20th century's First Ladies, Eleanor Roosevelt, took on various roles, including political activist for civil rights, newspaper columnist, author, and representative to the United Nations—all of which are examined in Eleanor Roosevelt and the Rise of Social Reform. This lesson also features biographies of the women who rose to power in FDR's administration Molly Dewson, Mary McLeod Bethune, Lorena Hickok, and Frances Perkins

Further background on the experience of American First ladies is found at EDSITEment-reviewed website National First Ladies Library.

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Women Write their Own Script

"I had never lived out of my father's house, nor in any way assumed a separate life from the other children of the family... I had never been obliged to think for or take care of myself, and now I was to be launched literally on an unknown sea, travel towards an unknown country, everything absolutely new and strange about me, and undefined for the future..."

—Jessie Benton Fremont, A Year of American Travel, 1878

Jessie Benton Fremont's travelogue of her trip out west in 1849 reveals the social attitudes and assumptions about women's roles, racial prejudice, and class distinctions characteristic of the times. Although she had the unusual opportunity and rare privilege to travel for pleasure, Fremont faced and overcame many challenges as a woman traveling by sea and land across the United States in the mid-19th century. Her passionate descriptions of both external events and internal experiences and feelings throughout her "voyage into the unknown" give contemporary readers insights into the society and culture in which Fremont lived and into the mind and heart of one woman who met the challenges of her frontier environment with courage and determination.

The EDSITEment lesson plan Scripting the Past: Exploring Women's History through Film allows students to analyze Fremont's travelogue and adapt it to a documentary script. This lesson takes students through a series of steps that help them learn not only about the lives and times of the women whose stories they read and transform, but also about the processes of filmmaking and of interpreting narratives written by people of other times and places in a respectful and enlightening way.

In addition to the travel narrative of Jessie Benton Fremont, Scripting the Past includes links to the memoirs of four other women who defied their gender roles, their class distinctions, or both: Harriet Tubman, Marie Haggerty, Alice Hamilton, and Katharine D. Morse. Students can choose among these five historical figures, conduct research on their subject, and then adopt the perspective of the screenwriter to decide how to adapt written biography into visual and auditory representation in film.

The Long 19th century Struggle for Equality

Women's Suffrage: Why the West First?, asks students to find historical evidence to answer the question: Why were western states the first to grant full voting rights to women? Students research other women involved in the western suffrage movement in order to glean relevant facts from their biographies that support this claim. They then take a stand supported by the evidence they have collected on whether or not a single theory can explain this phenomenon.

Who Were the Foremothers of Women's Equality? explores sources that are useful for uncovering the names of women who contributed to the early Women's Rights Movement in the U.S. and assesses the significance of these individual's contributions.

Cultural Change examines both the political and cultural dimensions of the arguments American women used to gain the right to vote, while in Women's Equality: Changing Attitudes and Beliefs, they are asked to analyze archival materials contemporaneous with the birth of the Women's Rights Movement in order to appreciate the deeply entrenched opposition the early crusaders had to overcome.

Voting Rights for Women: Pro- and Anti-Suffrage explores the arguments for and against suffrage for women in the 19th and early 20th centuries, and gives examples of how those arguments were expressed in a variety of media.

EDSITEment offers other lesson plans that can help you bring women's history to life in your classroom.

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Women in World War

In Edith Wharton: War Correspondent students investigate the evolution of a woman journalist who succeeded in a traditionally "male endeavor" as they read chapters of her book Fighting France, From Dunkerque to Belfort.

A study of Edith Wharton's wartime poetry, Poetry of the Great War, brings greater insights into her powerful rendering of WWI battlefield experience observed firsthand.

A number of other women writers also covered World War I in both fiction and nonfiction accounts. Point students to the list of Women Writers and World War I on the First World War Web site for details.

During World War II, women's military careers and mobility literally "took off." Fly Girls: Women Aviators in World War II explores the contributions that the Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASPs) made during the war and how the WASP program enhanced careers for women in aviation.

An excellent online exhibit from the Library of Congress, Women Who Come to the Front: Journalists, Photographers and Broadcasters during WWII, explores war, women and opportunity in World War II, highlighting the experience of eight women who served on the front lines.

Women Novelists from Austen to Hurston

EDSITEment also has lesson plans and reviewed Web sites where your students can celebrate and explore the artistic contributions of women from different times and places. Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice: The Novel as Historical Source examines one of the great English novels of the early 19th century for the clues it offers about the status of women and the nature of class in a society transitioning from agricultural wealth to business and trade.

Pioneer Values in Willa Cather's My Ántonia explores Cather's novel and its strong female protagonist, discussing it as "an archetypal tale that fully illustrates the struggle of American pioneers." Kate Chopin's The Awakening is a powerful story about Edna Pontellier's struggle to find her place in society without compromising her artistic and personal desires, a topic explored in the EDSITEment lesson plan Kate Chopin's The Awakening: No Choice but Under?

Students might examine the relationship of women to rich folk traditions by studying the newly revised lesson Folklore in Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, or by examining the art of quilting, often a medium of expression for women, in the two EDSITEment lessons History in Quilts and Stories in Quilts. Through Picturing America students can also examine a number of anonymously-made Amish quilts, a quilt created by an Indiana housewife and one created by a former slave and her daughter at the end of the 19th century.

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Women Painters and Women in Art

Another work in the Picturing America collection is Mary Cassatt's enigmatic painting, The Boating Party (gallery, 14-a), which offers opportunities for learning about the artist and her ambitions. Finally, Eudora Welty's "A Worn Path" in Graphical Representation asks students to read the classic short story about an old woman's determination to bring medicine to her ailing son. Students then try their hands at visualizing aspects of the story in carefully considered "comic strips."

For further research about women artists and women in art consult the following EDSITEment-reviewed Web sites:

Women as American Masters

PBS American Masters, an EDSITEment-reviewed site, offers a wealth of biographical material including audio clips and photographs on many of the America's leading, 20th century women artists.

American Women's History and Cultural Experience

Library of Congress, American Memory Collection, features digitized primary source materials on Women's History
Library of Congress, Women's History page is a comprehensive guide to women's history in the library's collections
Chronicling America, an online archive of regional newspapers created by the Library of Congress and NEH to tap into articles on women's experience in America from 1880-1992
History Matters, an EDSITEment-reviewed site created by the American Social History Project / Center for Media and Learning (Graduate Center, City University of New York), and the Center for History and New Media (George Mason University) uses primary source material depicting ordinary women's experience in America
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George Mason University Center for History and New Media: Women in World History
Internet Women's History Sourcebook at Fordham University

ABOUT THE IMAGE

Cartoon showing woman in military uniform and small boy (symbol of "Puck") holding large pen. Both are wearing banners "votes for women." American Memory at the Library of Congress.

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