March -- A Textbook Study of Women's History Month

“Women who seek to be equal with men lack ambition.”

–Marilyn Monroe

In 1987, Congress declared all of March to be “Women’s History Month.” During the past 30 years, schools and communities across the country have highlighted women’s contributions to history throughout the month of March.

Yet, “Women’s History Month” unintentionally reinforces the prevailing idea that when women do something, it is called “women’s history,” and when men do something it is called “history.” Kimberly A. Hamlin, NEH Public Scholar and associate professor of history at Miami University, says …

“Women’s History Month also allows state school boards and curricular committees to feel as though they are including women without doing enough to update textbooks and state standards, ultimately undermining the very goals that reformers and historians aimed to achieve with the designation.”

(Kimberly A. Hamlin. “The problem with women’s history month in 2020.”

The Washington Post. March 1, 2020.)

This revealing opinion sheds important light on the “textbook” view of women and their historical accomplishments. In 2017, the National Women’s History Museum issued a comprehensive report of state curricular standards. The researchers concluded “standards overemphasize women in their domestic roles without placing women’s activities in broader economic, cultural, or political contexts.” The report also found textbooks do not reflect current scholarship and just 15 women are named in more than 10 state standards. No Asian American women are included in any state standards.

As one might expect, textbooks vary widely by state. Hamlin explains …

“Students in California may learn, for example, that enslaved women were under constant threat of sexual violence from owners and overseers; students in Texas will not. While today’s textbooks certainly include more diverse perspectives than a generation ago, textbooks still generally present our shared national history as a story by and for white men.”

Textbooks barely scratch the campaign for women’s equality that resulted in the ratification of the 19th Amendment in 1920. Most do not explain why the 19th Amendment did not enfranchise many women of color or why African American women in the South were not enfranchised until the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

Women's activism? Hamlin describes a halfhearted textbook approach …

“Temperance leaders are depicted as Christian do-gooders who detested drunkenness and ribaldry, not as women who could no longer abide being raped by their drunken husbands and who feared the scourge of syphilis. Suffragists, to the extent they are covered at all, tend to be described as women who wanted to clean up politics with their womanly goodness — not as individuals who fundamentally understood that bodily autonomy and political autonomy are two sides of the same coin.”

Textbooks also overlook the role of unconventional activists like Helen Hamilton Gardener, born “Alice Chenoweth” (1853–1925). Gardener became known as the “Harriet Beecher Stowe of Fallen Women” for her bold campaign to raise the age of sexual consent for girls (in 1890, it was 12 or younger in 38 states).

President Woodrow Wilson eventually nominated Gardener to the Civil Service Commission, overseeing nearly 700,000 federal employees. This appointment made Gardener the highest-ranking woman in the federal government and a national symbol of what it meant, finally, for (white) women to be full citizens.

Before her rise to fame, Gardener was a school teacher who was run out of Sandusky, Ohio, for having an affair with a married man – a career-ending “offense” at the time. But, rather than retreat in shame, she moved to New York, changed her name and spent the rest of her life fighting for women’s rights.

Historical Note – Gardener began working with neurologist Edward C. Spitzka to refute Hammond's thesis of inherent inferiority of the female brain. Gardener ultimately produced a paper entitled "Sex in Brain" that was read to the 1888 convention of the International Council of Women in Washington, DC. In this work, Gardener argued that no connection between brain weight and intellectual capacity had been established and challenged Hammond's methodology of comparing the prized specimen brains of leading men with those of indigent women.

An important 2004 study of 18 popular high school American history textbooks designed to evaluate gender balance found 1,335 females were included throughout those texts, in comparison to 12,382 males. In illustrations, there were 616 pictures of named women and 3,505 images of identified men. However, the authors of that study did report the ratio of women-to-men increased from the 1960s texts to the 1990s texts. In addition, the number of women who were given at least a paragraph of text and the number of women in illustrations increased over this three decade period.

(R. Clark, J. Allard, & T. Mahoney. “How much is the sky? Women in American high school history textbooks from the 1960s, 1980s, and 1990s.”

Social Education, 68(1), 57-62. 2004.)

Current research supports that teachers should develop students’ understanding about the reasons for the gender imbalance in social studies textbooks. The teacher could introduce concepts (such as discrimination, diversity, prejudice, access, and stereotypes) that help explain why some groups (such as women, people of color, as well as the elderly, the disabled, children) have had fewer opportunities to be part of the dominant historical narratives that are typically featured in textbooks. The teacher could also lead students in an inquiry about the kinds of events, movements, and people that are privileged in history and the kinds that are downplayed or ignored.

(Kristy Brugar, Anne-Lise Halvorsen, and Sunshine Hernandez. “Where are the Women?” Social Studies and the Young Learner, 26, pp. 28–31. 2014.)

We are a long way from gender balance in our own United States' textbooks. And, oh, if you think that is just because males were so much more significance in the past, and that is the only reason women are so under-represented, you should do more research.

Sexism runs deep in 2020. Just consider a month being known as “Men's History Month.” How absurd. Instead, we commemorate feminine historical contributions once a year – one-twelfth of the whole. This is a purpose-driven, insignificant piece of the American pie, a slice filled with great controversy and repressed history.

“While progress has been made, women are still minor actors in most textbooks. When students study textbook accounts of the past to try to make sense of what, when, and how events happened and who was involved, their perceptions may be affected by these representations.

– Kristy Brugar, Anne-Lise Halvorsen, and Sunshine Hernandez