Teaching Gender History to Secondary School Students

Abstract

Teaching gender history to high school students requires a level of explanation that is usually absent in history survey courses and texts. Thus, students and faculty are unlikely to view the enterprise as basic or necessary knowledge. Although the scholarly world has come a long way toward recognizing gender as a central category of historical analysis, popular attitudes and the consciousness of adolescents lag far behind. So, each time we have taught gender history (and each time we have argued to keep it in the curriculum), we have had to make a case for why gender matters. We argue that gender as a cultural category affects a person's life chances, values, earning power, likelihood of committing or being a victim of crime, chance of being killed in battle, opportunities for education and professional advancement, and even life expectancy. We urge students to question gender prescriptions that they have been taught (girls are boys are . statements), whether they come from teachers, family members, or public experts. We also invite them to look closely at the variety in gender populations and the motivation behind gender prescription. Though biological determinism in many forms, especially sociobiology, has won new popular audiences since the 1 970s in the United States, high school students can look at the several sides to current debates and compare them to debates that surrounded biology's just so stories of the late nineteenth century. They can examine the debates among equality feminists and difference feminists and critics of feminism to explore what they have been taught and what remain their unanswered questions about gender. A basic requirement for making gender studies a presence in a high school is to convince curriculum planners and students that gender systems may be as powerful in shaping people's lives as are economic or governmental systems.1 We take it for granted today that history departments offer courses on gender as a basic element of their curricula. That is, we take it for granted if the departments in question are college or university departments. At the secondary level, such offerings