|
|
|
Surveying Gender: Another Look at the Way We Teach United States History
Mary Frederickson
Miami University of Ohio
| MANY HISTORIANS agree that the United States survey has been in critical need of a new paradigm for some time, a paradigm in which chronology does not dominate and students can learn about multiple viewpoints and competing historical narratives, one in which gender and multiculturalism are expanded beyond male/female, beyond black/white/ brown. What would this new paradigm look like? I have a suggestion that might be useful to those of us concerned with changing the way we teach about the American past; those of us who want to let go of the chronological narrative that has served as the backbone of the United States survey course since it was first offered; those of us who are ready to give up the idea that teaching American history is a zero sum game in which if we add something new to the curriculum, we have to eliminate something else; those of us who are tired of what Kathi Kern has labeled "the tyranny of coverage."1 |
1
|
|
Linguist George Lakoff and philosopher Mark Johnson have argued since the late 1970's that metaphors are not simply poetic devices but the fundamental driving forces of our conceptual system. They believe that we think and act according to metaphor and that the concepts that govern our everyday functioning are metaphorical in nature. According to Lakoff and Johnson "the essence of metaphor is understanding and experiencing one thing in terms of another." They argue that "Metaphors may create realities for us, especially social realities.... [S]uch actions will, in turn, reinforce the power of the metaphor to make experience coherent." In this sense, they suggest that "metaphors can be self-fulfilling prophecies."2 I believe that when most of us teach American history we use the metaphor of a journey, and the mode of travel used most often on the journey on which we take our students is a train. This powerful metaphor has governed the way we conceptualize the survey course and the way our students come to understand history. If you think about it, the American Historical Association was founded in the heyday of train travel, and I believe this metaphor has permeated our historical consciousness and still dominates the way we teach about the American past. |
2
|
|
How does this work? Quite simply, actually. You have to have a ticket to get on the train, that is, you have to enroll in a United States history course. You can travel 1st, 2nd, or 3rd class, for some courses are better than others. There are stops along the way, usually every ten years or so. The conductor/professor makes sure the passengers/students don't get off the track, that they cover ground and keep moving across the landscape of historical knowledge. The problem with this metaphor, and the reason that after over a century of use it no longer serves us well, is that railroad tracks are unidirectional; you cannot turn right or left; you cannot take a side trip. You can travel from point A to point B, along one axis, but you do not have a range of motion; you are locked into place, moving from the beginning of the story to the end. And there is that schedule to keep, and pressure to arrive at each station on time. |
3
|
|
Over the last twenty-five years, scholars and teachers have worked diligently to transform the United States history survey course in order to make the past more relevant and accessible to a broader range of American students. These efforts have included designing new courses, writing new textbooks, and constructing creative ways to test students over the new material. In many ways we have been extremely successful in reshaping foundation courses in United States history, especially as far as gender is concerned. We can measure the ways in which new research in gender and women's history has been integrated into college and AP high school courses by examining textbooks, courses, and the AP United States history exam itself, which has been in Michael Johanek's words, "a faithful mirror," reflecting the curriculum completed by more than 200,000 high school students throughout the country each year.3 |
4
|
|
Clearly changes in the United States survey course have been remarkable in many respects. Classes once framed by political and military history, narrowly defined, have given way to courses which openly address the American past in terms of politics, foreign affairs, economic change and social transformation over 400 years. On the other hand, while transformations in the United States foundation courses are real, one must ask whether or not the ways in which gender figures into most survey courses has actually gone beyond the "add women and stir" recipe for curricular reform. Women make appearances in most survey courses now, but I would argue that representations of women in these courses remain limited, if not marginal. Despite the progress that has been made, I think that the difficult challenges of transforming the United States curriculum regarding gender lie not behind us, but ahead. Most importantly, I think we are at a point where we must work hard to protect the gains that we have made, even as we move ahead to promote more significant change. After twenty-five years of good work we still have miles to go before we can proclaim victory in terms of successfully re-gendering the United States survey curriculum. |
5
|
|
Why do I say this? Without question United States history textbooks available for college and high school students have changed dramatically in the last twenty-five years.4 If we do a simple measure of index entries referring to women, we can track the evolution of women's inclusion in survey texts. In 1963, the 1st edition of John Blum's The National Experience included six topical entries under the heading "women" in its index. The 8th edition of that work, published in 1993 included fourteen topical references to women. Tracing women's inclusion across the four editions of Nash and Jeffrey, et. al.'s The American People, we find a similar pattern. The 1st edition (1986) included fifty four topical references to women; the 5th edition (2001) one hundred twenty references. And so it goes with every text. So far not one textbook has reduced the number of references to women in later editions. The inclusion of women is continuing apace, following a clear logical positivist course. What is striking about United States history survey texts is that once you move beyond the indexes with their ever-increasing numbers of references to women, women become significantly less visible. Tables of Contents are particularly bad. If women appear at all, and usually they do not, they surface in 1830–1860 in sub-chapter headings such as : "Women, Families, and the Domestic Ideal," and make rare appearances in subheadings such as "Rebirth of Feminism" and "Feminism, Anti-feminism, and Women's Lives." That's it. Let me emphasize this: women do not appear in any form in chapter titles in United States history textbooks. If they appear in tables of contents at all, they emerge in chapter sub-headings and then only rarely. The exceptional textbook in this regard has thirteen references to women in subheadings (out of an average of 500 subheadings per text).5 If we look at charts in these texts, women disappear almost completely. An occasional chart illustrates, for example, the "Occupational Distribution of Working Women, 1900–1998" or "Marriages and Divorces, 1890–1997," but many texts do not have a single chart that incorporates data about women's lives. |
6
|
|
Maps are the category in which women fare the worst. Although maps appear at first glance to be gender neutral, when one looks at list after list of the maps included in survey texts, it is striking how gendered they actually are. War campaigns are mapped by the movement of soldiers, not the involvement of civilian populations; farm tenancy is mapped according to the number of male tenants; elections results are mapped with a presumption of universal suffrage, even in the many decades when the suffrage was anything but universal. The standard map including women shows pro- and anti- suffrage states. A powerful message is given to students in terms of what is important enough to appear on a map: land acquisitions (most in the years when in most states women could not, by law, hold property in their own name) are very important (many maps). Average number of maternal deaths in childbirth do not appear on maps or charts in any contemporary United States survey textbook. Paintings and photographs, on the other hand, often seem to be the vehicles by which women are brought into the survey text. |
7
|
Let's put the texts aside and examine survey courses themselves. The energy which historians from across the country have put into revising survey texts has been paralleled in the work that has gone into revising survey courses. This is important work, for these courses are the seed corn of our profession. At any one time in the United States, in four year colleges, community colleges and high schools, public and private, approximately three million students are enrolled in United States history courses. We have devised ingenious ways of teaching the survey, including upside down and backwards, but it remains a challenge to get from the enterprise of women's history which is often over HERE, to the story of the American past, which more often than not remains over THERE. The narrative of the American past which we tell in most survey courses is, despite all of the changes and enormous amount of work that has been done, still one basic story. Linda Kerber summarized it well a few years ago:
As teachers we inherit "survey courses" in which the lessons already seem to be well laid-out, marching in sequence from Columbus to as close to the present as we can get before the class sessions are used up. In face of the need to make our way efficiently...[we] adopt a structure [in which]: the Progressive Era is a time of great political innovation; Washington, Lincoln and FDR were the "great" presidents; the League of Nations failed, and the UN succeeded; matters related to women are less important than matters related to men.6
An analysis of United States history survey syllabi suggests that while significant changes have been made, the version of American history which is most frequently available to students is still dominated by male-centered stories and a gender-differentiated version of the past. |
8
|
|
Finally, the AP United States history exam, given each year to almost 200,000 students, offers a particularly useful measure of both what United States history students are expected to know, and by inference, what they are being taught. When compared with survey texts and course syllabi, the AP Exam, despite a major restructuring five years ago, has been slower to change and more difficult to revise. Why is this? I won't suggest, as critic Alfie Kohn did recently, that it's because "standardized testing has swelled and mutated, like a creature in one of those old horror movies, to the point that it now threatens to swallow our schools whole."7 But I will argue that the Advanced Placement system has grown like topsy until now a huge system is in place, resting on a canonical version of the United States survey.8 There is a powerful catch-twenty-two at work here: the exam cannot change until the courses change and the courses cannot change until the exam changes. At the interplay of these opposing elements is the site where the test development committee does its work, emphasizing new, previously untested areas of the existing canon, while encouraging teachers in the field to integrate more women's history into their courses. |
9
|
|
When considered as a whole, what do survey courses, texts and the exam offer American history students? Has the story of the past told to United States students become more inclusive over the last quarter century? As we evaluate the work of scholars, teachers and students, how can we better prepare to offer future students a history which both accounts for difference and contains an accessible version of the past? What do students take with them about gender? What kind of foundation are we providing? Most importantly, where do we go from here? What do we do with this great narrative of the American past? How do we disrupt it? Destabilize it? Transform it? |
10
|
|
What I want to argue here is that the time has come for us to change metaphors. As much as we might love train travel, it's past time to let go of this metaphor for the way we teach American history. Do we keep the metaphor of a journey and simply get a new conveyance? If so, what do we choose? A ship in which we could float from place to place? An airplane? We'd have range of motion in a plane, could swoop in for a closer look, go faster when we need to, slow down when we wish. Air travel might work; certainly it's an update from the train. But it's still a metaphor that depends on a scheduled departure and arrival time, one that takes students on a journey across the landscape of the discipline on a pre-determined flight path. Multi-dimensional navigation is key, but I think that we should give up the journey metaphor altogether. |
11
|
|
What are we going to put in the place of this tried and true concept? I want to suggest that we replace the metaphorical journey through the past with the metaphor, dare I say it, of a web. Yes, I mean a web; in fact, I mean the web. The computer started impacting our lives in the 1940's, before many of us were born. Since then it has transformed every aspect of our experience. Consciously and unconsciously it has transformed our world view. The future is now; our students already have crossed into this new world of digital technology, a revolution that many have argued is as profound as the Gutenberg discovery of moveable type is well underway.9 This new technology is in the process of changing the way we teach, write and, yes, think. The web is a metaphor that can enable us to change paradigms and teach the United States survey in a way in which gender and multiculturalism are expanded beyond male/female, beyond black/white/brown. A web-based approach to the survey promises the much needed paradigm shift we've been seeking, but how will this new metaphor operate? How will it change our thinking? How will it solve the problem of integrating women and gender into our surveys of the American past? |
12
|
|
I do not think this change will be difficult to make, in fact, the shift in metaphor is already well underway. Thousands of United States survey courses in colleges and high schools across the country use web-based materials: photographs, maps, primary documents, journal articles from the History Cooperative, virtual tours at sites ranging from Ellis Island to the Holocaust Museum and the Underground Railroad Museum and Freedom Center, Ed Ayers' "Valley of the Shadow" site, Jacquelyn Hall's Like a Family site, and the "Documenting the American South" Project at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Dozens of web sites now publish documentary projects for teachers and students of United States history. For example, Sklar and Dublin's "Women in Social Movements in the US" now attracts 10,000 visitors a month from ninety countries and is about to move into a partnership with an online publisher that will publish a broad array of new document projects and market the website to libraries. Kriste Lindenmeyer's article in the March 2003 Journal of American History is a wonderful guide to using online resources to weave women's history into the United States survey.10 In this regard the AP program, often considered an over-sized stepchild within the discipline, is ahead of the curve. The AP Central website has been enormously successful in terms of making on-line sources on women's history available to thousands of high school teachers across the country, and it also stands as a model for cooperative projects with both the Smithsonian and the Columbia University Department of History.11 |
13
|
|
But using web-based materials and changing the metaphor of the United States survey from a journey to a web are two different things. If we give up our well-worn iron and steel railroad tracks, with familiar stations like "Jefferson's Presidency", "Madison and the Coming of War," the "War of 1812" and the "Era of Good Feelings" along the way, won't we have confusion and chaos in the classroom? No, I do not believe so. In this regard most of our students have superb technological skills (they can IM faster than the speed of light), but they still need us to guide them through the vast array of information that they have at their fingertips. As my colleague Andrew Cayton suggested recently, we have witnessed a revolutionary democratization of knowledge, first through television and now through the internet. The role of scholars and professors is going to change from one of giving students defined narratives based on long hours of research in secured archives, to one of facilitation, of helping people make sense of the knowledge to which they now have access by themselves.12 |
14
|
|
Finally, I think it is important to come full circle and look at the web metaphor in historical perspective. Now at the cutting edge of scholarship in disciplines from history to cognitive linguistics to neuroscience, the web is also an ancient trope. Spider Woman, teller of tales, spinner of stories, appears in Native American oral tradition from Alaska to the great plains.13 In Pueblo tales, Spider Woman rules the earth and is the mother of all life; she creates order from chaos. As historians, we too create order from chaos and tell stories that transcend time and place. In order to reveal their full power, the stories we have to tell must reflect the complexity of the American past, in terms of gender and of race and ethnicity, at the same time that they speak to the internal continuities that we need to sustain us in a world in transformation. |
15
|
|
Notes
Thanks to Susan Hathaway Boydston, Judith P. Zinsser, Andrew Cayton and Timothy Donnelly for their contributions to the conceptualization of these ideas.
1.Ê "Gendering the History Survey Course: Three Views," in Perspectives: American Historical Association Newsletter, Vol. 34, No. 5 (May/June 1996), Kathi L. Kern, "To Feel As Part of History: Rethinking the U.S. History Survey," (7–8).
2.Ê George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 5, 146.
3.Ê Michael Johanek, A Faithful Mirror - Reflections on the College Board and Education in America, (College Board, 2001).
4.Ê Texts in the 1970's were firmly grounded in political history and included precious few references to women. By the early 1980's this began to change as social history became integrated into the curriculum. By the mid 1980's the focus changed in terms of integrated new work on ethnicity and immigration. From then until just a few years ago, things preceded apace as small groups of historians from across the nation collectively wrote extensive new texts addressing the problematic of the American past. By 1997, a short few years ago, a few books, led by Alan Brinkley's The Unfinished Nation, began to include a CD-Rom version of the text, which at that point very few students were interested in using. By 2002 the situation had changed dramatically and today there is a wide array of texts, most of which come with overheads, CD's, and their own webpages.
5.Ê Now, you are going to ask, "are men mentioned in chapter titles or subheadings in these texts?" That is a good question for the words "man" or "men" are not used as often as there are routine references to men. For example: presidents are routinely referred to by name in chapter headings and subheadings: Heading: "Progressivism and the Republican Roosevelt" or subheading: Senator Douglas and the Kansas-Nebraska Act, 1854 (from Kennedy, The American Pageant 12th ed, 2002).
6.Ê Linda Kerber, "The Challenge of 'Opinionative Assurance,'" National Forum: The Phi Kappa Phi Journal, (Summer 1997).
7.Ê Alfie Kohn, "Standardized Testing and Its Victims," Education Week (September 27, 2000).
8.Ê The AP system is more democratic in 2003 than ever before—and yet the irony is that as AP courses and the exam itself have become available to greater numbers and more diverse students from across the nation, elite high schools and colleges, including many that called throughout the 1970's and 1980's for more democracy in education and more diversity of opportunity are distancing themselves from the AP program. At the same time, high scores on AP exams (defined as a 4 or 5, which 20% of students achieve), are de rigour for admission to the nation's most elite universities.
9.Ê Norman Holland, "The Story of a Psychoanalytic Critic, An Intellectual Autobiography," <http://www.clas.ufl.edu/users/nnh/autobiol.htm>.
10.Ê Kriste Lindenmeyer, "Using Online Resources to Re-center the U.S. History Survey: Women's History as a Case Study," Journal of American History (March 2003), 1483–1494.
11.Ê <http://apcentral.collegeboard.com/>
12.Ê Andrew Cayton, "Imagining Southwest Ohio," American Studies Conference, Miami University, March 21, 2003.
13.Ê Susan Hazen-Hammond, Spider Woman's Web: Traditional Native American Tales About Women's Power (New York, 1999), 17–18.
|
Content in the History Cooperative database is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the History Cooperative database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.
|