(also available at My Left Wing)
March is Women’s History Month, designed to put women back in our history books. Just as sad as the omission of women, I think, is that the few women who do get recognition are often the wrong ones.
When I was student teaching, the regular history teacher liked to tell me how her understanding of history was so much deeper than that of her 8th grade students. "These kids all know Betsy Ross made the flag, but they don’t understand she was risking her life to make that flag." She said this to me more than once, and she even said it to the class. I had to bite my tongue to keep from screaming.
The truth: Betsy Ross did not make the flag. That story was invented, apparently by Ross’s daughter, trying to increase the value of the house she inherited from her.
So why is Ross the most famous woman in American history? I blame conservatives. Teachers of history feel the pressure to include some women, but conservatives prefer not to glorify women in non-traditional roles. So they push a story about a woman contributing to history by sewing.
The women who changed the course of history seldom did it by cooking or cleaning. They did it through non-traditional work, and their contributions therefore are buried and forgotten.
A woman who made a real contribution to the American Revolution was Eliza Lucas Pinckney. When she died, George Washington asked to be a pallbearer at her funeral, so important was she in our nation’s birth. But she is widely overlooked today, partly because she was a businesswoman.
At age 17, Eliza Lucas (not yet Mrs. Pinckney) was left in charge of her father’s South Carolina plantation as her father left the country to put down a slave-rebellion on a plantation he owned elsewhere. In his absence, Eliza Lucas made all the business decisions for her plantation, including the decision to start growing indigo. A huge success, this made Ms. Lucas one of the wealthiest business leaders in the colonies. She later used her enormous wealth to help bankroll the American Revolution.
Her non-traditional role is one reason she gets ignored. Another, I believe, is the age at which she succeeded. Last month, I wrote an essay showing how teenagers in the Civil Rights Movement such as Barbara Johns and Claudette Colvin are forgotten even while older figures (ex. Rosa Parks) are glorified for lesser contributions. This ageism distorts the teaching of all parts of our history, and it makes it harder to pass any history on to our children.
Across America, K-12 students resist studying history because they find it boring. In my credentialing program, we were constantly lectured that we must include contributions by blacks to engage black students, contributions by Latinos to engage Latino students, etc. The professors always forgot to mention, however, that there is one minority to which all K-12 students belong: youth. It’s high time their contributions were remembered, too.