March is for Women…But so is every month!
Wrap up on Black History Month:
On February first, I promised a lot that I did not deliver. I haven’t stayed true to my word of featuring news stories about black history month. Trying to be a diligent blogger is one thing but trying to be an attentive wife, best friend, good daughter, an impending matron (hate that word) of honor (and oh yeah my day job) and blog diligently is even harder.
Still it would be hard not mention this story.
SO here’s my proposal, I’m going to write about notable African American women throughout this month…
WOMEN”S HISTORY MONTH!!!!
Before I go any further, you must go to the website for the National Women’s History Project. Go and read everything there. They recently redesigned their site and it rocks!
It’s only only appropriate to begin the celebration of this month by sharing how I first learned about women’s history.
From an essay I wrote in graduate school:
From the second grade on I remember national women’s history month as a part a regular part of the curriculum. It never occurred to me in 1988 that celebrating women’s history each year in March was a relatively new phenomenon. It just seemed so naturally that we would celebrate women’s history. In my second grade class, I remember my teacher, Mrs. Bigelow, giving us tests each month. Never a good test taker, I dredged these monthly horrors, as I never received above a B+. So that march, I remember sitting down with my mother and going over all the names of the woman who would be on the women’s history month test the next day.
My nerves were eased as soon as I realized this would not be the usual sit down at your desk test. Mrs. Bigelow had us sit around in a circle and asked us each a question. If we got our first question right we received an A and were done. I remember Mrs. Bigelow asking me who the first female pilot was to cross the Atlantic Sea. “Amelia Earheart” I said loudly sure of myself.
I received an A. It was the first A I received that year. As I grew older and moved from public elementary school in Washington DC to my private middle and high school in New York City, I started to notice subtle inconsistencies as my history teacher’s distrust of the textbooks became more than apparent. To supplement the blurbs in textbooks about women, we were given additional primary sources and essays for reading. As I grew older and graduated from high school and entered a liberal arts college, I found that I gravitated toward independent studies about women and feminism. It was only natural that I would decided to pursue graduate work in history.
