ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, April 6, 1997 TAG: 9704070014
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JUDITH E. HARPER THE BOSTON GLOBE
Women's history has made great strides and now is being recognized by academia, but it's a long way from being interwoven into the American narrative
Women's history has long been recognized as a rigorous, respected academic discipline. Today the vast majority of colleges and universities offer courses in women's history, many states either mandate or strongly support women's history instruction in the public schools, and women's history scholarship has received generous federal funding resulting in an explosion of trade and scholarly books on the subject.
Yet the role of women in shaping the nation is a long way from being integrated into the historical narrative.
In fact, women barely infiltrate the pages of mainstream American history: the encyclopedias, general reference works, traditional histories, and the bulk of textbooks at all levels. As for popular literature, one only need visit that hallowed enclave of contemporary culture, the bookstore, to witness the crux of the dilemma. A search of the average history section reveals that no volume of women's history shares space with what some still consider the only ``real'' history - the row upon row of Civil War and World War II tomes. Nor have women (except wives, daughters, and secretaries) elbowed their way into most political histories and biographies.
Whither books on women's history? To the back of the bookstore where nestled in the Women's Studies section, a few all-women histories and biographies are scattered among such offerings as ``Confessions of a Fast Woman,'' ``Fear of Fat,'' and ``Smart Women, Foolish Choices.''
Can one take heart in the inclusion of women in that other bellwether of popular culture, the American history textbook? For two decades, educators and women's history specialists have pressured textbook publishers to integrate women's history material into the body of each chapter of text. And the result? Women's history has been upgraded all right - from little boxes squeezed in the page margins, to half-page and full-page boxes, all the way to separate sections and chapters with titles such as ``Women on the Frontier'' and ``Women in the Progressive Era.'' Many experts maintain that not only is separate treatment not integration, but presenting women's history in isolation encourages teachers and students to skip over the new and unfamiliar material.
``What today's educators are demanding,'' said Margaret Moran, 26-year veteran of the textbook publishing industry and a vice president at Prentice Hall, ``is for women's history coverage to be infused into the narrative.''
And how does this infusion alter the treatment of historical events? Instead of examining, say, the role of women in the antislavery movement in a separate section, it analyzes the roles of both male and female abolitionists together, and how their united efforts shaped historical events. The result is a more accurate representation of the past.
Two textbooks that have made inroads toward achieving this infusion are Prentice Hall's high school text ``America: Pathways to the Present'' and Houghton Mifflin's best-selling, critically acclaimed college text ``A People and a Nation: A History of the United States,'' now in its fourth edition.
``Women's history must be tightly interwoven in texts and in classroom instruction because students come to American history classes believing that women's history is marginal at best,'' says Mary Beth Norton, co-author of ``A People and a Nation'' and a professor of American history at Cornell.
Yet achieving integration in textbooks is only a fraction of the challenge. A bigger hurdle is convincing teachers that women's history is much more than resurrecting a few unsung heroines every March.
``Most teachers have the misconception that all they need to do is to add a few women to the history they are already teaching,'' says Susan Hill Gross, director of the Upper Midwest Women's History Center in St. Paul.
And what is even more troubling, according to Gross and her colleagues, is the perception among social studies educators (approximately 80 percent of whom are male) that women's history is something that women teach to women and girls, and that women's contributions are not a legitimate part of the historical record. Gross and others attribute these attitudes to the prevalent cultural notion that women have had no impact on historical events, a myth reinforced by centuries of male-focused historiography.
Stephen H. Norwood, professor of American women's history at the University of Oklahoma, observes similar attitudes among historians in academia. ``Even though women's history has made enormous strides over the past 20 years, many historians haven't kept up with the scholarship, mostly because they believe that women's history is of peripheral importance,'' says Norwood, author of ``Labor's Flaming Youth: Telephone Operators and Worker Militancy, 1878-1923.''
``Many view women's labor history as not real labor history. If it's labor history, it has to be about males. If it's women's labor history, it's considered women's history and can be overlooked,'' he says. ``And what is even more demeaning to the discipline of women's history is the bias that only women should teach women's history and that any woman can teach it, whether she has expertise in the field or not.''
Gross, Moran and other specialists in women's history and curriculum transformation all emphasize that, at rock bottom, it is society that most urgently needs the overhaul.
Penny Colman, popular lecturer and author of ``Rosie the Riveter: Women Working on the Homefront in World War II,'' noted that unlike traditional male-oriented American history, women's history is not at all embedded in the popular culture. ``There's an incredible, systematic resistance to women's history out there,'' she said. ``You don't have to look far to find it.''
Just consider, said Colman, the recent debate in Congress (and among news columnists) over whether a statue of women's suffrage leaders Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott merited display in the Capitol Rotunda.
``Each of these three women suffragists devoted more than 50 years to the struggle to give half the population of this country the most basic right of a democracy,'' she says. ``When people have to stop and question whether they deserve to be represented in the exclusively male-statue bastion of the Capitol Rotunda, that's resistance.''
The statue, sculpted by Adelaide Johnson, was given to the American people by the National Woman's Party in 1921, the year after ratification of the 19th Amendment guaranteeing women the right to vote. The 104th Congress voted to relocate the statue from the ground-level Crypt, where it has been for 32 years, to a prime spot in the Rotunda. But the vote and the move - scheduled for May - have not come easily nor without controversy. The Woman Suffrage Statue Campaign has had to raise money to help cover the cost of moving the 8-ton statue.
The statue's impending relocation is, on one hand, a nod to the recognition that women's history has gained over the years.
And there are other signs of success; for example, in colleges and universities, scholars of women's history are legendary for their impassioned teaching. ``The scholarship being produced is of very high quality,'' says Norwood. ``It's a thrilling discipline to be immersed in.''
Most specialists, however, caution against viewing the gains of the last 20 years as a sign that women's history has achieved acceptance in contemporary culture. Change comes slowly, as Mary Ruthsdotter, cofounder and director of the National Women's History Project, knows. It's been 17 years since the project set out with the goal of ``writing women back into history.'' Despite some visible gains, that goal is still a long way from being met.
Web sites
For more information on women's history check out these web sites:
Women's History Magazine
http://www.Thehistorynet.com/WomensHistory/
Women's history sources
http://www.yahoo.com/social-science-/
What did you do in the war, Grandma?
hppt://www.yahoo.com/Arts/Humanities/History/20th-Century/World-War-II/wome n/
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