March is right here, and so is Girls’s Historical past Month in america. Meaning it is time to put in your pondering caps and dive into the deeply wealthy historical past of ladies, each previous and current.
The origins of Girls’s Historical past Month stretch again to 1978(Opens in a brand new tab) when the Schooling Process Drive of the Sonoma County (California) Fee on the Standing of Girls organized a “Girls’s Historical past Week”(Opens in a brand new tab) in March. After an affiliation of ladies’s teams and historians, led by the Nationwide Girls’s Historical past Alliance (then the Nationwide Girls’s Historical past Undertaking), efficiently lobbied for nationwide recognition in 1980(Opens in a brand new tab), the week of March eighth turned Nationwide Girls’s Historical past Week. And in 1987, Congress handed a regulation declaring March Girls’s Historical past Month.
For too lengthy, girls’s tales and contributions have been ignored of our nationwide narrative, stated Jennifer Herrera, vice chairman of exterior affairs on the Nationwide Girls’s Historical past Museum.
“Historical past is barely as full because the tales we educate, share, and study. Girls’s historical past is thrilling and provoking and empowering, and by together with girls’s voices and girls’s tales, we’re telling a extra inclusive, consultant, and correct historical past,” she stated.
With all that in thoughts, robotechcompany.com reached out to varied organizations — together with the Nationwide Girls’s Historical past Museum, the Nationwide Girls’s Historical past Alliance, the New-York Historic Society’s Middle for Girls’s Historical past, the Nationwide Girls’s Corridor of Fame, and the Smithsonian Institute’s Girls’s Historical past Initiative — to curate a listing of participating sources that elevate the largely untold tales of underrepresented girls. We included digital media that function a variety of ladies from various cultures, sexualities, lessons, and fields.
Take a look at the beneath free on-line picks and add to your data of how girls have formed the world.
Feeling as if Washington D.C.’s museums ignored(Opens in a brand new tab) girls’s historical past, Karen Staser based the Nationwide Girls’s Historical past Museum in 1996. As a completely on-line museum, it is properly poised to spice up your data about girls who contributed to historical past from afar.
Within the museum’s Biographies(Opens in a brand new tab) part, for instance, you’ll be able to study each historic and modern girls who broke obstacles, together with poet Maya Angelou(Opens in a brand new tab), Supreme Court docket Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg(Opens in a brand new tab), the primary Native American United States poet laureate Pleasure Harjo(Opens in a brand new tab), and filmmaker Ava DuVernay(Opens in a brand new tab).
Its assortment of on-line displays(Opens in a brand new tab) discover themes inside girls’s historical past. It additionally profiles a few of the girls included inside its biographies, however contains extra visible components like photographs and drawings. You possibly can study the names and tales of ladies who had been an integral a part of NASA(Opens in a brand new tab), sympathize with the struggles Latina and Hispanic suffragists endured(Opens in a brand new tab), or delve into the fascinating lifetime of abolitionist Harriet Tubman(Opens in a brand new tab). And that is solely a style of what is out there.
In the course of the COVID-19 lockdown, the museum hosted the [email protected] collection, which supplied digital schooling, writer talks, panel discussions, and extra, all about trailblazing girls all through historical past. You possibly can nonetheless view recordings from previous occasions on the [email protected] webpage(Opens in a brand new tab).
You possibly can revisit the museum’s 2022 Girls’s Historical past Month Useful resource Toolkit(Opens in a brand new tab), which is meant for everybody “from people, educators, and college students, to small nonprofits and enormous companies,” the group explains. The toolkit contains hyperlinks to day by day actions, on-line studying sources, each in-person and digital occasions for the complete month of March, and even a Girls’s Historical past model of the sport Solitaire(Opens in a brand new tab), created by the Nationwide Girls’s Corridor of Fame.
The museum is launching its first bodily exhibit, “We Who Imagine In Freedom: Black Feminist DC”(Opens in a brand new tab), in 2023, hosted on the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library.(Opens in a brand new tab)
The Nationwide Girls’s Historical past Alliance pointed robotechcompany.com towards 26 animated documentary shorts, recognized collectively as UNLADYLIKE2020. Narrated by The Good Spouse actress Julianna Margulies and Lorraine Toussaint from Orange is the New Black, every includes a pivotal girl in historical past and engages readers with its sensible artwork, upbeat music, professional interviews, and vivid particulars.
Find out about Louise Arner Boyd(Opens in a brand new tab), the primary girl to steer scientific expeditions within the Arctic. Or hearken to gender nonconforming Gladys Bentley(Opens in a brand new tab), who sang the blues and performed the piano through the Harlem Renaissance. Or cheer on Gertrude Ederle(Opens in a brand new tab) as you watch her turn out to be the primary girl to swim the English Channel. She impressed greater than 60,000 girls within the U.S. to earn Crimson Cross swimming certificates within the Nineteen Twenties, a time when many Individuals had by no means swum earlier than.
Documentary filmmaker Charlotte Mangin created the collection as a result of she needed to share the tales of trailblazing however comparatively unknown girls, in time for the centennial anniversary of ladies’s suffrage in 2020. She instructed robotechcompany.com that by way of the collection, she hoped to focus on girls who had been typically the primary of their fields, notably these of coloration who confronted extra hurdles because of racism and sexism.
Mangin and her group assembled a board of 13 tutorial advisers to make sure historic accuracy and cultural sensitivity, and to assist choose the 26 girls featured within the shorts.
UNLADYLIKE2020 additionally provides a free historical past curriculum and lesson plans based mostly on the 26 girls profiled. This content material is suitable for college students in grades 6-12. You possibly can entry it on the PBS web site(Opens in a brand new tab). As well as, all movies and studying sources have Spanish subtitles(Opens in a brand new tab) out there for viewers. For Spanish variations of the documentary movies, go to the American Masters PBS YouTube channel(Opens in a brand new tab), the PBS LearningMedia website(Opens in a brand new tab), or the PBS Documentaries channel on Amazon Prime(Opens in a brand new tab). Discover accompanying studying sources in Spanish below “Assist Supplies for Use with College students” on the PBS LearningMedia web page for every video.
The Middle for Girls’s Historical past on the New-York Historic Society explores the lives of a variety of notable girls in American historical past from completely different cultures, sexualities, lessons, and races.
You possibly can entry a information to the group’s archives on-line, which permits guests to seek for girls’s historical past matters by eras in American historical past(Opens in a brand new tab), or by theme(Opens in a brand new tab), corresponding to arts and literature, schooling and instructing, and even the social lives of ladies all through historical past.
Its weblog(Opens in a brand new tab) discusses plenty of fascinating questions and matters, like if Surprise Girl was truly a feminist icon(Opens in a brand new tab), the historical past of the lady who pushed for a greater medical masks and whose designs impressed the N95 masks(Opens in a brand new tab), and Black girls’s integral roles in celebrating Juneteenth(Opens in a brand new tab).
The Middle additionally provides a library(Opens in a brand new tab) of quick animated movies that contact on “inspiring girls’s tales and key themes.” For instance, study Thomas(ine) Corridor(Opens in a brand new tab), a gender nonconforming individual residing in colonial Virginia, or Lorenda Holmes(Opens in a brand new tab), a spy in New York who sabotaged American battle efforts through the American Revolution.
As well as, the middle hosts its personal free digital curriculum website known as Girls & the American Story(Opens in a brand new tab), designed for all ages. The positioning shares a large scope of ladies’s historical past starting with the period of colonization(Opens in a brand new tab). The historical past classes cowl lots of data, however all of it focuses on the function of ladies and girls’s narratives ceaselessly ignored of historical past programs. Classes like these are nice for educators, in addition to mother and father, however are useful for nearly anybody interested by girls’s roles in American historical past.
The Nationwide Girls’s Corridor of Fame, a corporation devoted to “celebrating the achievements of distinguished American girls,” options a variety of icons, a lot of whom bucked societal gender norms to turn out to be the primary girl, or one of many first, of their fields. You possibly can examine every of those girls on the Nationwide Girls’s Corridor of Fame web site(Opens in a brand new tab).
Inducted girls come from fields as various as science, authorities, the humanities, enterprise, athletics, schooling, and philanthropy. For instance, examine Gwendolyn Brooks(Opens in a brand new tab), a celebrated poet from Chicago’s South Aspect, Marjory Stoneman Douglas(Opens in a brand new tab), a journalist and writer who fought to ascertain the Florida Everglades as a nationwide park, or Althea Gibson(Opens in a brand new tab), the primary Black tennis participant to win the All-England Championships at Wimbledon(Opens in a brand new tab). You too can watch previous induction ceremonies(Opens in a brand new tab).
The Nationwide Girls’s Corridor of Fame has additionally recorded the oral histories(Opens in a brand new tab) of some residing inductees. Hearken to former first girl Rosalynn Carter(Opens in a brand new tab) focus on her upbringing, give recommendation to younger kids about easy methods to attain their desires, and encourage them to do no matter they will to assist others. Or hear from Ruth Johnson Colvin(Opens in a brand new tab), the 106-year-old founding father of the Literacy Volunteers of America, now generally known as ProLiteracy Worldwide(Opens in a brand new tab).
A part of the larger community of Smithsonian museums and sources, the Smithsonian Institute’s Girls’s Historical past Initiative was tasked with “researching, disseminating, and amplifying the histories of American girls(Opens in a brand new tab)” after Congress enacted laws to create a Smithsonian American Girls’s Historical past Museum(Opens in a brand new tab) in December 2020.
As a part of this mission, most of the people was given entry to the initiative’s work. Its web site has a big selection of academic sources, corresponding to a deep archive of tales and digitized variations of things in its bodily assortment, together with objects that inform the tales of American girls by way of the years — like a home made quilt made by artist Viola Canady(Opens in a brand new tab), a pin belonging to astronaut Sally Trip(Opens in a brand new tab), and quite a few restored pictures(Opens in a brand new tab). You possibly can discover the archive by varied themes, like Activism(Opens in a brand new tab), Leisure(Opens in a brand new tab), and Public Service(Opens in a brand new tab). Every theme is accompanied by associated assortment gadgets, a dialog package for educators, academic movies, and even music playlists.You possibly can view digitized photographs of the entire objects together with their tales(Opens in a brand new tab).
The Smithsonian Institute hosts weekly digital occasions(Opens in a brand new tab) honoring the achievements of ladies and women, as properly, together with workshops (like its HERstory Zine Workshop(Opens in a brand new tab)), digital roundtables (just like the ongoing collection diving into the portrayal of Indigenous girls onscreen(Opens in a brand new tab)), and youth-oriented choices (like its Youth In Motion: Digital Futures for Girls collection(Opens in a brand new tab)).
All of those sources will doubtless broaden the ladies that come to thoughts when you consider historic milestones and, maybe, encourage the ladies and women in your life to understand greatness has no limits.
UPDATE: Mar. 3, 2023, 12:48 p.m. EST This story was up to date with extra data for Girls’s Historical past Month 2023.
UPDATE: Mar. 11, 2022, 2:15 p.m. EST This story was initially revealed in 2021, and was up to date with new sources and knowledge in 2022. Extra reporting by Chase DiBenedetto.
