Two high school teachers are working to restore women to the narrative we teach ourselves and our students about U.S. history. Read the inspiring full story–and watch the video–on the Harvard Radcliffe Institute website. Then learn how you can help out!
Here’s an overview, also pulled from the website:
Since its founding 250 years ago, women have participated in the making of the United States—but crack open almost any high school history textbook, and you’d find a shocking scarcity of their stories. Faced with this gap, Kristen Kelly and Serene Williams, high school history teachers at Sacred Heart School in Atherton, California, set out to enrich their classes by adding women’s stories.
The pair applied for and received a 2022 Schlesinger Library Teacher Support Grant to do research to write women into a course they were teaching. There are few high school textbooks on US women’s history, so after reviewing box after box of primary source materials at the Schlesinger and discovering unheralded stories of women throughout, they created their own DIY textbook, copying documents and placing them in three-ring binders.
Our two teachers were so passionate about teaching this class that it was just infectious. Everyone in the course could see how excited they were, and we all got really into it to the point where students were volunteering after class. We started writing biographies on women who weren’t written about on Wikipedia yet. And once you started, you just couldn’t stop because it was just this incredible area of history that you’ve never had a chance to see before.
So with their class opening minds back home, the teachers returned to the Schlesinger in 2024, focused on building a case for the first standalone Advanced Placement (AP) course on US Women’s history… Advanced Placement exams, administered by the College Board, are taken by more than a third of all public high school graduates in the United States. But among the 38 different AP exams offered—from AP African American Studies to AP Physics C: Mechanics—never in the Board’s nearly 70 years has one focused on women’s history.
Their effort, the AP Women’s US History, or WAPUSH, campaign, is a grassroots effort fueled by both teachers and students. The campaign is quickly moving forward, but getting an AP course approved and in high schools is no small task.
[from the HP] We’d like to see the day when we never have to refer to “women’s history”, “black history”, “queer history”, etc., because putting a category name in front of “history” inevitably reads as a sub-category–a footnote, non-essential, not important to anyone outside that category. There’s “Women’s history”, a sideshow pushed by a minority population to prove something about themselves, and then there’s “History” which is presented as universally important, almost all-white, definitely all-male, yet somehow objective, value-free, and non-political.
We know we still have to work toward that day. So for now, supporting the effort to restore women’s actions to their rightful place in U.S. history is our mission.
