Women are Underrepresented in education.

In the past 20 years, numerous studies evaluating gender bias in K-12 History textbooks and National History standards have indicated that "history textbooks demonstrate significant gender imbalance and bias, with some texts containing less than 3% of pages devoted to females” (Sadker & Sadker, 1994). When women are included, they are not fully integrated within the text but are instead commonly treated as sidebar notes (Chick, 2006; Clark, Allard, & Mahoney, 2004; Sadker & Sadker, 1994). Along with those studies, a more-recent 2018 report from the National Women's History Museum found that "state standards do NOT address the breadth and depth of women's history, and that women's experiences and stories are not well integrated in US State History standards and that standards emphasize a small number of topics or eras... being women-centric such as the progressive era and women's suffrage/voting rights.”

Evidently, the problem of female representation has long persisted, yet changes have not been made—so it's time to take action!

You know about Paul Revere, but do you know about Sybil Ludington, the 16-year-old woman who rode all night on horseback to alert New York and Connecticut of the arrival of the British? If not, it's probably because the middle school curriculums address specifically covering Paul Revere's heroic alert to the colonials, but not Sybil Ludington's.  

Currently, WEAR Organization will be focussing on starting the process of amending the FCPS history curriculums for elementary and middle schoolers.

We hope to work with our curriculum makers at FCPS to balance the number of specific women mentioned, with the number of men mentioned. While we may remember learning about a few specific women, it is not nearly enough in comparison to the number of specific male experiences taught about. An example of this is in the 2015 VA studies curriculum for middle schoolers. While designating the significant people to be discussed during the revolutionary war, specific women, or even the broad term of "women" as a group, are nowhere to be found.

An excerpt from this curriculum: "[students must identify] the various roles of American Indians, whites, enslaved African Americans, and free African Americans in the Revolutionary War era, including George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry, the Marquis de Lafayette, and James Lafayette...". As you can see neither "women" as a larger group nor specific women such as Anna Maria Lane or Martha Washington are mentioned. This is a simple and concrete example of how women's experiences are currently being overlooked. Other examples include, no mention of women's roles as nurses in the Civil War, and no mention of how women were the ones taking care of the estates, industries, money, farms, and domestic duties while the men were at war. We want to increase the representation of women in history curriculums in FCPS middle and elementary schools through ensuring students learn about an equal number of specific female heroes, their experiences, and historical contributions, as well as the current male figures.

We also want to ensure that the difficulties women faced, as well as how they combatted them, fought for their rights, and won with such strength, are stressed in curriculums. Reports from USNews have shown that textbooks and curriculums skewed portrayal of women, primarily doing only domestic duties and being stereotypically "weak", adds to young women in schools being discouraged and unmotivated and leads to women not pursuing leadership-oriented, or other traditionally male-dominated fields. By teaching more about how hard women worked and contributed to society, we can encourage young women in FCPS to strive for higher achievements!

In order to stress on those topics, we want FCPS to add at least 1 book of their choice a year, that is written by a female author and is about any impactful female(s) in US History (or the history following the subject being taught), to the lesson plan of any unit in the curriculum. This book can be taken home for students to read on their own, or read aloud in class bit by bit, but should be integrated into the lesson plan to ensure a strong women's historical story is shared with the young students!

Learning history is all about learning from our past to be better in the future. But how can we stop repeating past mistakes if we don't educate our youth about these issues now?  We should learn about our history from as many angles as possible, including the experiences of the oppressed, and that means representing women properly. 

Not incorporating an equal amount of women's experiences, stories, innovations, and history further the oppression, and underrepresentation of women in today's society. So please sign this petition to help us properly integrate women's history into elementary and middle school curriculums in FCPS!