Good o'le School
When I first glanced at the assignment, I figured the point trying to be made was to have me look back at my life and realize how little I knew about the history of women in our society. After reading most of the other posts, I realized my high school must have done a pretty good job with teaching me about women’s history. So I started to think of specific examples of this. In my world history class, I remember taking a few weeks out of the year to evaluate what was going on in the world through the eyes of a woman. We usually did this with a series of videos, group projects, or writing assignments that focused on an era we were covering at the time. But what did each of these assignments have in common? Each assignment required us to learn about the information via media like the web, or television. I learned about the history of women in our society through the media, not because my teachers were lazy, but because our textbooks were just too pathetic. Bits of women’s history is scattered throughout the book, but how often do you make it through a full history textbook in a year? So from events in history involving Susan B. Anthony and Alice Paul to more recent events such as the WNBA and the issues with abortion, the media has been my “teacher”.
I was also able to find information about women’s history in a class where I least expected it; Spanish. An important aspect of understanding Spanish is to understand the masculine vs. feminine form of nouns. Men and women are complete opposites when it comes to Spanish-speaking countries. But where women had their movement in the United States, there was no movement for the women in Spain. I believe that if a student wishes to understand the true history of women, they need to learn about feminism and its history throughout the world. Each generation of students has the opportunity to see feminism evolve over and over again in countries where women are still seen as the submissive being. So I think it is important for students to be in touch with the media in order to learn about new developments and movements occurring around the world.