A local organization is trying to bring more attention to women’s history in the classroom. Remedial Herstory provides free lesson plans and resources on women’s history to educators, including primary sources from women in different time periods.
The founders, Kelsie Eckert and Brooke Sullivan, found that women’s stories were largely missing from history classes.
One way they identify the lack of women’s history lessons is the 'Eckert Test,' named after Eckert and modeled after the feminist film test from Alison Bechdel. The Eckert Test evaluates whether a lesson has the perspectives of two women in history who have different backgrounds and opinions on an issue.
NHPR’s Morning Edition host Rick Ganley spoke with Eckert about the test and her goals for future women’s history curriculum. Below is a transcript of their conversation.
Transcript
What's missing in the classroom that you're trying to address with Remedial Herstory?
Oh, so many things. Studies show that between 5 and 20% of high school and middle school curriculum is spent on women's history, women's topics, [and] women's biographies. And our motto is, ‘women are half of humanity, they should be half the content in the classroom.’ We're trying to create tools so that there are no barriers for teachers to use these resources.
There's something on your website that we saw called the Eckert Test.
Yeah, that's me!
It's modeled after the Bechdel test. Can you explain that?
So the Bechdel test is the feminist movie test. And it was a comic strip that Alison Bechdel created in the 1980s, basically satirizing the media for really poorly representing women in film. And we essentially were like, we need that same thing. Because when women do pop in, it's like this radical woman in a man's world who is out on a limb doing something. And there are dynamics playing out in women's history between women that are really interesting and should be talked about.
Just a couple examples: you've got the suffrage movement where you have [a] mostly white elite group of women who have made history books like Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Alice Paul, Susan B Anthony. And they are being criticized and challenged by their Black sisters like Mary Church Terrell and Ida B. Wells-Barnett. And those women are saying, ‘But what about lynching? What about including Black women? What's going to happen when white women get the vote?’ And so those dynamics make the suffrage movement even more interesting because you can get into the dynamics of race and class. And it lets you feel how heart wrenching some of the way that our nation doled out suffrage to people.
You can take the Equal Rights Amendment: you've got feminists on one side promoting it, [and] you've got Phyllis Schlafly and the Stop ERA movement on the other side. Both of these groups are advocating for women. I think that's interesting. And we need to talk about those things and give legitimacy to both sides.
If you were to walk into a high school history class, say five years from now, what would you hope to see?
I would hope to see women being talked about in every lesson. I know that in every era of world history, I have been able to find women to talk about, and it's aligned with the same narrative we all teach. But I think there's a lot of women that we don't realize are there because we haven't been taught about it. The first person to chronicle world history was a woman, Enheduanna. She was in Mesopotamia. She's Sargon of Akkad's daughter. You know, the first history of the American Revolution was written by a woman, Mercy Otis Warren. Her book that she wrote was passed around Jefferson's cabinet. And she's the biggest critic of the Constitution. Every teacher talks about the Constitution in their social studies classes. So why not read a criticism of the Constitution from a woman's perspective?
So I think there's like there's so many easy ways that you can get women's voices in. But I don't think enough teachers know that those things are there. So part of what we're doing at the Remedial Herstory project is just making that very available to people.
