The last month or so I have been on a Sting kick. If you don't know who Sting is, then I am sad. He is a singer AND he used to be the lead vocals for the Police. Google it. Now, I have been listening to him for my whole life, because my lovely mother made me when I was younger. But around 13 or 14 I actually started to love his lyrics.
As you all know I have been teaching my students some amazing lessons inspired by my good friend Sunny, and I finished that today. So I am sitting on my couch waiting to go to a meeting, and I am listening to my favorite Sting song, "Moon Over Bourbon Street." The lyrics have been so mysterious sense I was in high school. And the best quote is. "I must love what I destroy, and destroy the thing I love." To me this is the epitome of how I feel about my five days of teaching. (Yes I am summing up my entire mini worksample with Sting lyrics).
I loved teaching my students about what women went through to gain the rights they should have had from the beginning. But the hard part, is that students DON'T want to learn about this topic. It has nothing to do with the teachers, or the way we teach our lessons, it's the topic itself. WHY IS IT SO NEGATIVE? Why do students think that I am a hairy-legged, crazy, man-hating teacher if I teach about women's suffrage? Yes I am a feminist, but I am a third-waver. I love inclusivity (is that a word?) and I shave my legs for comfort.
The sad point I am trying to make here is that we need to take suffrage back! As women and educators we need to take this topic back and make it fun for our students. We need to show to them that learning this stuff is important and not boring. That it is interesting and engaging. I am sick and tired of people making suffrage to be this terrible topic like the Civil War.
Suffrage as a topic in public schools is cursed and has some terrible notion behind it. I guess the sad fact is that we haven't come that far. Burning our bras in the late 60s and early 70s wasn't enough. Throwing out our Cosmopolitan magazines, protesting beauty pageants, and throwing away our makeup was not enough to get out from under the patriarchy. I am sick and tired of feeling bad for loving a topic that inspires me to change the world.
I am tired of males AND females putting such a negative connotation with Women's Suffrage. Clearly, they weren't raised to think critically about history and learning. Clearly, they (males AND females I am ranting at) are not on the same playing field as all the other scholars I know. Clearly my fellow fems and I need to start a new Third Wave movement to show that women's history is, oh let's say 51% of the WORLD'S history. Does that not make sense to anyone but me?
I am just starting to feel the pull from "the man," and I am beginning to think that is not okay. I am thinking from scratch here when I say we need to change that whole idea, of "the man," as well as attitudes towards women. We haven't reached equity if people still can't understand that women's history is important. And complaining about suffrage is the entire reason women wanted suffrage.
Well, at least that is what I think. Keep is classy, brassy and a little sassy . . .
