NaBloPoMo: Nancy Reagan
November 6, 2009emily 1 Comment »A week ago, I was teaching my class about early nineteenth-century middle-class women and their baby steps into the world of politics via benevolent organizations. I wanted them to understand that when we think about women and power in history, we have to think about power in a slightly different way than we do for men. So I asked them to write the names of ten men in American history and ten women in American history. The only rules were: these folks have to be dead, they have to have had a significant link to American history (by which I mean that Michael Jackson or Anna Nicole Smith don’t count), and they have to be famous in their own right (it wasn’t enough to say “Mrs. Lincoln” or “Mrs. Madison”). When it became clear that they were struggling, individually, to come up with enough names (COUGH), I brought everyone together as a group and had them call out names while I wrote them on the board. It was easy for them to come up with enough men; we could have come up with enough to fill the entire board. But for the women, they really started reaching, which led to some interesting conversations:
Them: “Florence Nightingale!”
Me: “Not an American.”
Them: “Martha Washington!”
Me: “Not famous enough in her own right.”
Them: “Nancy Reagan!”
Me: “Not dead!”
Them: “REALLY???”
Really. Sorry, Nancy, my students know not what they say.
Posted on November 7th, 2009 at 11:13 pm
Wow. First of all, I bet you are a great teacher. And secondly, I’m going to reveal my stupidity and tell you that I don’t think I could complete the assignment, nor was I 100% sure that Nancy Reagan was still alive.
Have I ever admitted that history was never my strongest subject?