little steps in the right direction?

[gorionine]

DD1 (y7) had a history project to hand in today. It was about medieval life. The last task of the project was called "History or Herstory?" They had to compare the condition of women and men in the mediaval days but in their conclusion had to reflect (shortly) on what it was like nowadays and whether equality had been achieved between genders.

I thought it was fantastic to get them start to reflect on this issue at this age.

Here is DD's conclusion, I was quite impressed by it [biased mum emoticon]

""Nowadays, men and women have the same rights and can choose the profession they want, regardless of their gender. Never the less, it is not uncommon for women to be paid less than men for the same job. Despite the fact that women very often work in paid jobs outside the house, the running of the household still mainly depends on them. However, this is slowly changing and some couples share the work they have inside and outside of the house. It is clear that women get a much better deal and have a lot more freedom and independence that they used to, but total equality has not yet been achieved.""

Keeping in mind that this task will have to be completed by both boys and girls I think it is a step in the right direction for the next generation. A bit of hope that even though as Dd says "women have a much better deal now" there is still room for improvement and starting to reflect about it in high school is very positive.

Thanks, What makes me even prouder is that it is really her own reflexion. To my shame I had never "actively" started a conversation on gender equality with her.

I also thought the title the teacher gave to the task was fantastic.

I second that, however it's a shame she had to use the made-up word 'herstory'

'History' is a gender neutral term - the fact that it sounds a bit like 'his story' is a coincidence. At least the organisers of Women's History Month seem to recognise this.

I think it shows how much influence a single feminist in an education position can have.

I have posted before about all the feminist books in our local library when I was growing up - there must have been a feminist librarian in there somewhere ordering them!

Thanks for that, David51. Obviously, there are no other 'made-up' words in the English language. The entire lexicon was carved in stone as the sedimentary rock was formed and is an entirely natural phenomenon. No human agency whatsoever.

Mmm.

I am possibly being unfair since we're talking about year 7, but this really reminds me of one of my students, who concluded an essay 'As we can see, for women in the middle ages things were still bad but they were getting better'.

It's trite, insulting to the memory of real people, and unfortunately can be twisted to suggest that human history (herstory) has always been following an upwards curve towards the present day.

Any time someone mentions "herstory" just ask if it's the study of the great himoes who created our himitage.

But that quoted passage in the original message--was that written by a 7-year-old? Don't spread it around, or everyone will want their kids in that school.

TeiTetua, Dd is 11 in year 7, not 7 years old

I just posted her conclusion but it was a longer work where she showed her outrage at learning that women even if they had some kind of independence, were losing it all when getting married, any buisness they could have had or land of their own suddenly became their husbands. She just could not believe that women were getting so little out of a society they were contributing to a lot. I think she is slowly starting to realise that as much better as it seems to be there is still differences in the way men and women are treated in todays society.

Do you think learning inaccurate history is ok so long as it stirs up plenty of feminist outrage?

LittleRedDragon

You're criticising this girl for something she didn't say. At least, there is nothing in the OP's quote to suggest that she thinks there has been a steady & continual improvement in the position of women, as you seem to imply.

David, I certainly don't mean to criticise the girl. She sounds amazing and no wonder her mum is proud. I'm just sad that she's being taught history this way. I didn't say that the girl said there had been a steady and continual improvement in the position of women. I said I was concerned that this kind of teaching of history can be twisted to imply that: that's very different. Sounds as if they girl is quite bright enough to recognize what's going on, and has written a very mature piece on how women today still don't have equality.

The fact remains that, if the teaching is as the OP says, it is inaccurate in the details. It's also, imo, a real shame to give children the idea that 'medieval women' are some kind of monolithic group of victims. I admit I'm coming at this feeling really fed up that lots of my students seem to have experienced a very strange kind of history teaching, which is nominally woman-friendly, but which could in fact be subtitled 'women as victims, 1066-1960'. I find it quite offensive and sad, if that's not an overreaction.

LittleRedDragon, I do not understand what you are outraged about. Teacher said nothing about todays condition for women, she gave them a project about life in medieval times and ask them to give their own feelings of whether things had changed much for women since these days. Where is the bit of innacurate history teaching you are on about?

own not own, sorry

A precision as well, it was mediaval village life.

gorionine, I'm upset because I'm not mad keen on this idea that women's history is a history of victimhood - is that so strange in the Feminism section?

As to inaccuracy, I'm probably reading it wrongly, but you said your DD had been taught women had possessions/businesses before marriage but lost them to their husbands on marriage - this isn't true of England at least. It's really only widows who could own property.

It bugs me more than it should, this kind of teaching, but can I try to put it in context? Imagine how you'd feel if you could skip forward 500 years and see people saying 'Oh, yes, women in the 20th century were all unbearably oppressed, children, please compare then to now. Imagine, they had no right to vote and couldn't buy houses without a male guarantor!' It might feel a bit patronizing, right? Both of those things were true in 1900, but things changed a lot over the course of even a century, and the middle ages is a much longer period of time.

There's a poster on MN called Christine de Pizan - she'd be the one to talk about this too! I just thing it's so disrespectful to the memory of women who weren't just oppressed and deprived of things.

I'm probably not explaining very well.

No I see what you mean now, It is my fault because I should have given much more precision to the actual date as medieval covers a very large section of history and what the information given by the teacher were.

My point with the OP was not to point at the story of women being a story of victimhood but to rejoice at the fact that the conceptt of reflecting on the condition of women was introduced early. Sorry that got a bit lost in my boasting of DD OP.

LRD has a fair point.
But I still find it heartening that the pupils in your DD's class were invited to consider the condition of women at all - now and/or then. I don't recall that subject every coming up in my history lessons, right up to A level.

I do not remember talking about women condition in school/further studies full stop (was educated in Switzerland though, not UK)

I'm sorry, I didn't in the least mean to nitpick at the girl's essay. As I said, I thought gorionine should be proud and she'd written a really mature piece. I'm sorry if that wasn't clear.

What I was upset about was that this girl, who is clearly very bright and knows her stuff with feminism, is being taught history in a way that I think is unfair to women. I'm really sorry that didn't come across though reading over my posts I'm not sure why. I honestly think she sounds great. I honestly think the history teaching is a bit crap.

dittany, there is lots of evidence that some women did great things in the middle ages. I think what can easily be silenced is the women who saw that they were living in an unfair situation and spoke out - people like Christine de Pizan. Don't you see that if you only ever say that women have been victims, you deny the women who spoke out any voice at all?

Dittany, thanks for all your nice comments on DD

FWIW, I do not think LRD criticised DD's work but more the teaching and I think it is due to the fact I only mentionned this particular task out of a very long project because to me it was relevant to the feminist topic while the rest of the project was less IYSWIM.

dittany, I don't think oppression is subjective either. I think though, what you're not acknowledging is a difference between treating women's history as a history of victimhood (which is what I objected to), and acknowledging that women were oppressed. Does that make sense?

I know women have historically been oppressed. But this does not mean that we should teach that women's historical identity is as victims. It's not.

I do understand where you're coming from. And I see that, as others have said, it's great that schools are teaching history about women at all, instead of just 'dead white males'.

But I'm really uncomfortable with teaching history like this. I don't like the idea that it's sensible to contrast 'medieval woman' with 'modern woman', even if that does allow children like gorionine's daughter to write insightfully about modern inequality. There are other ways to help her do that. Why not teach her about women who did great things?

I've had students who come from school saying they don't want to study women's writing, or women's history, because they imagine it will be a very boring study of the absence of writing or history. I really hate this, it feels as if what is happening is that women are being erased from history and silenced, when they'd already struggled so much to be heard in their own times.

I hope this makes some sense - I know I am really not explaining very well.

Btw, reading back, I didn't get this across:

The reason I picked up on the inaccuracy about women and property law isn't to nitpick. It's that I've got a suspicion that someone - probably the person who wrote the textbook, maybe the teacher - didn't actually care enough to get the facts right, in women's history. I know someone - not an old prof. set in his ways, either - who routinely taught that women in the middle ages didn't learn to read because they didn't go to school. My colleague pointed out that he was wrong, and his response was 'well, there's just very little evidence about women's literacy so I might as well tell them it didn't exist'.

This makes me furious - not just that he's wrong (there's quite a lot of evidence; it seems likely it was women - mothers - who taught reading), but that he didn't think it was important to get facts about women's lives right. It's an attitude that says 'well, we'll assume women aren't very important and go from there'. If you teach that in schools, you can't be too surprised if people take the message into their everyday lives.