Thinking about Women's History Month

[smccormack]

My paternal grandmother, Theresa, came to the United States as a teenager from Ireland, settled in the Boston area and married an American-born man of Irish descent. Together they raised their children in the Boston suburbs. She was "famous" in her neighborhood for being the mother of eight sons and undoubtedly received minimal recognition for the countless hours of chores she undertook daily to keep the household afloat through the Great Depression and World War II. 

I think a lot about my grandmothers during the month of March as public attention turns briefly to women’s history. My maternal grandmother, Marion, wanted to be an artist, a profession that made no sense to working-class people hoping to marry their daughter to a man who could provide her a comfortable home. She painted as a hobby and I keep one of her works on a shelf as a reminder of not only her love for me as her first granddaughter, but also the opportunities that her generation of women were denied.

As a professor of US women’s history I see the value of all students learning about the many roles women have undertaken in the United States since our earliest colonial days. I worry, however, that students often see Women’s History Month as a time to acknowledge famous women while giving little thought to the quiet contributions made by women on a daily basis. A student once innocently commented that women “did the busywork” in colonial America: the domestic work, in other words. While their comment caused an uproar amongst students – particularly those who were shouldering household responsibilities while attending school – it provided a foundation for a conversation about reality versus perception.

A student publication at my college recently described famed anarchist Emma Goldman as “a strong woman.” I asked my students what made her “strong”: was she physically stronger than other women or was she “outspoken”? Perhaps, in the coded language sometimes used to criticize and condescend, “strong” meant she was “difficult.” Or it meant that she was politically-active in a time when women were not viewed as political agents. Would a woman who worked in a factory or as a domestic servant in early 20th-century America have been described as strong? Or did working-class women's daily grind pale in comparison to Goldman’s because their work was not political?

Women’s History Month is a fantastic time to have these conversations with students. Rather than focusing on the famous, ask your students to think about the lives of women through our national history. What kinds of challenges have they faced and how have they met with adversity? Such conversations provide an opportunity to help students to see how their personal experiences fit into the historical narrative. In other words, a woman does not have to be Oprah Winfrey or Rosa Parks or Margaret Sanger to have made significant contributions to her family, community, and the larger world. In fact, as I argued to my students, it’s the daily experiences of women that truly make the greatest marks on the time in which we live. If we can encourage this current generation of students to recognize the contributions of everyday women, then perhaps the accomplishments of the famous will become less remarkable and more commonplace.