How Feminism Should Be Taught in School (Part 1): How Feminism Should NOT Be Taught in School
I’m hoping this will be part 1 of many. I’m looking for questions, suggestions, and ideas, so feel free to add yours in the comments and I’ll try my best to incorporate them in further posts.
We’ve got the “why” feminism should be taught in school down, and we all seem to be in agreement on this fact. Now, how do we go about it?
In this post, I’ll start with how NOT to incorporate feminism in school: We should not, under any circumstances, treat women’s issues* as a box in the margin. This includes, but is not limited to: relegating feminism and women’s issues to a singular unit, making a few mentions about what is going on with the women of the time periods between war stories, teaching books and poetry by women in a condensed unit while teaching the “dead white guys” for the rest of the year. This makes women’s issues appear as just a tag to the canon and to history, not an integral part of either.
I am not saying that students should not learn about the wars and the voices of men throughtout history. I am, however, saying that women have a timeline and a canon of their own, not just a plug here and there. Think about the American Girl dolls. Remember when there were only a few of them before they were a multi-million dollar national company? Those dolls were so popular among girls because they had their own historical timeline, and the timeline that was taught in schools was just a backdrop to each doll’s stories. Perhaps having a women’s timeline and a men’s timeline running concurrently is a step in the right direction, although the true solution would be to have one huge timeline that incorporates everything.
Many teachers try to incorporate women’s issues and women’s writing in the curriculum, but often these important elements end up smushed between what’s always been taught. These teachers mean well, but the message they are really sending to young people – young girls in particular – is that women’s issues are important, but not important enough to take up the majority of the textbooks and the school years.
*This advice all goes for teaching the history and works of any marginalized people, not just women. Since this is a blog particularily devoted to feminism, I say “feminism” and “women’s rights,” but you can replace those with any group that experiences any sort of privilege.
Thanks for tackling this subject, Ashley. I think this type of “incorporation” of “women’s issues” into history and literature courses happens all the time and it’s really problematic, for the reasons you outlined very well.
Also, in History and English departments at many colleges and universities, women’s lit/history courses are often “electives” or taken after the Dead White Guys courses, which are of course required and considered the real meat of one’s scholarship. This is why, after majoring in English for almost three years (before being kicked out for financial reasons), when I return to college I’m changing my major to Women’s and Gender Studies.
Such a great idea for a series and I completely agree with what you have said in this post. I think one of the reasons I really got into Women’s and Gender Studies in college was because I barely had any of it in high school. The only exposure I had to it in high school was in the ways that you listed about. I’m not saying that I wouldn’t have been a WGST major if I had women’s studies in high school. Maybe I would have found it sooner, because I didn’t start taking WGST courses in college until my sophmore year.
The ways that you described above of NOT teaching feminism are just ways of further othering of women (and other oppressed groups). If women are only talked about as these add-ons, they won’t be seen as a true part of society, history, etc. I’m going to be really interested to hear your ideas more specifically on how to incorporate feminism into high school curriculum.
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