Monthly Highlights – March 2022

Blog Posts

• "What is Women's History and Why is it Important?" by Vanessa Madrigal-Lauchland

Featured Teaching Resources 

1. Women and the Continuing Fight for Equality
   1. As this unit moves through the four waves of feminism, students will investigate how feminism has changed and evolved over time, who is represented and not represented, and how race, class, and gender play a role in feminist practices. Through analyzing a variety of primary source documents and photos gathered from different periods of American history, students will be able to formulate an answer to the guiding question: Why are women still fighting for equal rights today?
   2. HSS Standard:
      1. 11.5.4 Analyze the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment and the changing role of women in society.
      2. 11.10.6 Analyze the passage and effects of civil rights and voting rights legislation (e.g., 1964 Civil Rights Act, Voting Rights Act of 1965) and the Twenty-Fourth Amendment, with an emphasis on equality of access to education and to the political process.
2. Women’s Roles in the American Revolution
   1. When we think of the historical agents involved in the war, we initially think of the men who fought as Loyalists and Patriots. However, this inquiry set will ask students to consider how women were directly involved in the war effort through their participation as soldiers, partners, and assistants to their families and communities, and as symbols of independence and freedom. 
   2. HSS Standard:
      1.  5.6 Students understand the course and consequences of the American Revolution.
3. Women’s Suffrage
   1. This inquiry set is designed to provide context for students to be able to address with nuance and perspective the question, Why did women want the right to vote, and how did they convince men to grant it to them? Women in California won the right to vote in the 1911 election, nearly a decade before the national suffrage amendment passed.
   2.  HSS Standards: 
      1. 11.2 Students analyze the relationship among the rise of industrialization, large-scale rural-to-urban migration, and massive immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe.
      2. 11.2.9 Understand the effect of political programs and activities of the Progressives
      3. 11.5.4 Analyze the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment and the changing role of women in society.
4. Labor Organizing and the Garment Industry
   1. This set uses the garment industry as an example of why and how laborers organize for worker protections. The primary sources include women who organized and fought for their rights as workers. 
   2. HSS Standard: 
      1. 12.4 Students analyze the elements of the U.S. labor market in a global setting. 
5. Comfort Women
   1. This inquiry set addresses the Japanese military’s creation of a system of sexual slavery that provided comfort women for Japanese troops throughout Asia and the  Pacific.  Your attitude of respect, statements of support for the victims, and reminders of critical historical details and context will go a long way to helping students face this difficult topic.
   2. HSS Standards:
      1. 10.8 Students analyze the causes and consequences of World War II.
      2. 10.8.6 Discuss the human costs of the war, with particular attention to the civilian and military losses in Russia, Germany, Britain, the United States, China, and Japan

Current Events 

1. Teach-In: Invasion of Ukraine
   1. California teachers are invited to join a special conversation between UC Davis Professors of History and German / Russian about the Russian invasion of Ukraine on Wednesday, March 2, from 4:00 - 5:30 pm.
2. Championing Local History through a Social Justice Lens
   1. Dr. Márquez will discuss her new book: La Gente: Struggles for Empowerment and Community Self-Determination in Sacramento (University of Arizona Press, 2020). The book examines how la gente, or everyday people, grappled with the ideologies, strategies, and political transformations of the Civil Rights era.

Educator Spotlight

Chrislaine Pamphile Miller teaches history to middle schoolers on the central coast area of California. She earned her Ph.D. from CSU Monterey Bay, where she developed her dissertation, "Blessed are the Peacemakers: African American Emigration to Haiti, 1816-1826." Chrislaine uses her skills in teaching, research, and writing to develop lessons that engage her students in unique and challenging ways. Her lesson on Ban Zhao (featured in our blog) helps students engage in historical empathy:

Basketball Belles:  How Two Teams and One Scrappy Player Put Women's Hoops on the Map by Sue Macy.  Story of the first women's basketball game at the collegiate level.  California story and great tie into the anniversary of Title IX.

Beautiful Shades of Brown:  The Art of Laura Wheeler Waring by Nancy Churnin.  Story of Laura Wheeling Waring, a Black artist who didn't see any artists or paintings of people who looked like her.  Her portraits hang in the National Portrait Gallery.

Born to Ride:  A Story About Bicycle Face by Larissa Theule.  Great story of the cross-section of bicycles and women's suffrage.

Classified:  The Secret Career of Mary Gold Ross, Cherokee Aerospace Engineer by Traci Sorrell.  First female engineer at Lockheed.

Emmy Noether:  The Most Important Mathematician You've Never Heard Of by Helaine Becker.  Let's hear it for girls who like math!

Exquisite: The Poetry and Life of Gwendolyn Brooks by Suzanne Slade.  First Black person to win a Pulitzer Prize for poetry.

The Fearless Flights of Hazel Ying Lee by Julie Leung.  Great challenging barrier story about Women Airforce Service Pilots during World War II

The Girl Who Could Fix Anything:  Beatrice Shilling, World War II Engineer by Mara Rockliff.  Story of Beatrice Shilling who worked as a mechanic for England during WWII.

Marjory Saves the Everglades:  The Story of Marjory Stoneman Douglas by Sandra Neil Wallace.  Story of Marjorie Stoneman Douglas, environmental journalist.

Mumbet's Declaration of Independence by Gretchen Woelfle.  Story of Mumbet, an enslaved woman in the 1700s who successfully brought a lawsuit against her owners to be free and chose the name Elizabeth Freeman.

The Oldest Student:  How Mary Walker Learned to Read by Rita Lorraine Hubbard.  The amazing story of Mary Walker, who was born into slavery, and learned to read at the age of 116.

Ona Judge Outwits the Washingtons:  An Enslaved Woman Fights for Freedom by Gwendolyn Hooks.  Current obsession in our Fifth Grade Group.  Great story of a courageous woman.

The Only Woman in the Photo:  Frances Perkins & Her New Deal for America by Kathleen Krull.  The first woman to serve in a presidential cabinet and the mastermind behind Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal.  

Planting Stories:  The Life of Librarian and Storyteller Pura Belpre by Anika Aldamuy Denise.  First Puerto Rican librarian in NYC.

The Quickest Kid in Clarksville by Pat Zietlow Miller.  Story of Wilma Rudolph.  (Pair with Wilma Unlimited)

Sharice's Big Voice:  A Native Kid Becomes a Congresswoman by Sharice Davids and Nancy K. Mays.  Story of one of the first Native American women elected to Congress, and the first LGBTQ congressperson to represent Kansas.

Shirley Chisholm is a Verb! by Veronica Chambers.  Not only a great biography of Shirley Chisholm but a bonus Language Arts lesson too!

Someday is Now:  Clara Luper and the 1958 Oklahoma Sit-Ins by Olugbemisola Rhuday-Perkovich.  Gotta love a teacher story!

The Tree Lady by H. Joseph Hopkins.  Story of Kate Sessions who helped design Balboa Park in San Diego

Unbeatable Betty:  Betty Robinson, the First Female Olympic Track & Field Gold Medalist by Allison Crotzer-Kimmel.  Great story about the first woman to win a gold medal in track and field.

Voice of Freedom:  Fannie Lou Hamer by Carole Boston Weatherford.  Love, love, love Fannie Lou!

Recent Scholarship

1. Corrie Decker (2014) - Mobilizing Zanzibari Women: The Struggle for Respectability and Self-Reliance in Colonial East Africa
   1. The experiences of African women in the era before independence remain a woefully understudied facet of African history. This innovative and carefully argued study thus adds tremendously to our understanding of colonial history by focusing on women's education, professionalization, and political mobilization in the East African islands of Zanzibar.
2. Marilyn J. Westerkamp (2021) - The Passion of Anne Hutchinson: An Extraordinary Woman, the Puritan Patriarchs, and the World They Made and Lost
   1. Anne Hutchinson, deeply centered in her spirituality, heard in the word of God an imperative to ignore and move beyond the socially prescribed boundaries placed around women. The Passion of Anne Hutchinson examines issues of gender, patriarchal order, and empowerment in Puritan society through the story of a woman who sought to preach, inspire, and disrupt.
3. Katherine M. Marino (2019) - Feminism for the Americas: The Making of an International Human Rights Movement
   1. This book chronicles the dawn of the global movement for women's rights in the first decades of the twentieth century. The founding mothers of this movement were not based primarily in the United States, however, or in Europe. Instead, Katherine M. Marino introduces readers to a cast of remarkable Latin American and Caribbean women whose deep friendships and intense rivalries forged global feminism out of an era of imperialism, racism, and fascism. Marino's multinational and multilingual research yields a new narrative for the creation of global feminism.
4. Heidi Tinsman (2014) - Buying into the Regime: Grapes and Consumption in Cold War Chile and the United States
   1. Buying into the Regime is a transnational history of how Chilean grapes created new forms of consumption and labor politics in both the United States and Chile. After seizing power in 1973, Augusto Pinochet embraced neoliberalism, transforming Chile’s economy. The country became the world's leading grape exporter. Heidi Tinsman traces the rise of Chile's fruit industry, examining how income from grape production enabled fruit workers, many of whom were women, to buy the commodities—appliances, clothing, cosmetics—flowing into Chile, and how this new consumerism influenced gender relations, as well as pro-democracy movements.
5. Ellen Hartigan-O’Connor and Lisa G. Materson (2018) - The Oxford Handbook of American Women's and Gender History
   1. The Oxford Handbook of American Women’s and Gender History boldly interprets the history of diverse women and how ideas about gender shaped their access to political and cultural power in North America over six centuries. In twenty-nine chapters, the Handbook showcases women’s and gender history as an integrated field with its own interpretation of the past, focused on how gender influenced people’s lives as they participated in migration, colonialism, trade, warfare, artistic production, and community building