Getting Our Feet Wet: Women of Color and the National Standards for World History

Getting Our Feet Wet: Women of Color and the National Standards for World History Barbara A. Moss As a child I never loved history. In fact, I hated it. It was a domain in which I, as a person of color, had no place. When I peered into the "stream of human history," no famiUar-looking faces looked back. The images I did see were as unreal as the characters on television. The only people who looked like me, with whom I could have begun to identify, were either the anomalous slaves, briefly mentioned without names or faces, or George Washington Carver, whose creative genius was distilled to a couple of sentences about the peanut. My primary and secondary history education was woefully inadequate to instill in me a sense of positive self-esteem. That, fortunately, came from my famüy. I relate this nostalgic experience to explain that I was therefore predisposed to love the National Standards for World History just on the basis of its stated objective: Historical memory is the key to self-identity, to seeing one's place in the stream of time, and one's connectedness with all of humankind. Denied knowledge of one's roots and of one's place in the great stream of human history, the individual is deprived of the fullest sense of self and of that sense of shared community on which one's fullest personal development as well as responsible citizenship depends (2). Had it not been for my family and the black community in which I lived, I definitely would have remained on the bank watching the "great stream of human history" flow by. However, after having read the national Standards it appears that women of color are just beginning to get their feet wet in that stream of human history. To develop an accurate and just representation of any distinctive group, determined by race, class, or gender, is problematic for world history because of the magnitude of human events covered. Certain items must necessarily be omitted. Therefore those items that are included bear a great deal of cultural and historical weight. Students struggle to understand and remember whole cultures on the basis of a few events. Groups defined by gender, race, class, and nationality are often associated with distinctive events. Women, as a group, are vying with a stereotypically male-oriented agenda of conquest and the development of worldwide economic and poUtical systems. If students remember women in the midst of all the events involved 11997 Journal of Women's History, Vol. 9 No. 3 (Autumn) 144 Journal of Women's History Autumn in world history, the question arises, which women will it be? "Women" cannot be a generic term, circumscribed as it is by race, class, nationality, and age. Women of color are a subset of women, competing for attention with European men, men of color, and European women. How women of color are portrayed in terms of all people of color (a gender issue), and how women of color are portrayed in terms of other women (a racial issue), complicates the subject. To paraphrase Paula Giddings, it is significant to note "when and where they enter" and to which topics they are connected.1 I investigate here the frequency of inclusion and the images of women of color presented in the Standards, using the premise that students will remember that which is mentioned most often. The investigation is in two parts. In the first segment we focus on the "examples of student achievement " in the original version because they act as mirrors, reflecting the "elaborated standards" to which they were linked. Teachers were to present the Standards to students through "examples." I examine the specific instances in which the text mentions women and compute the number of assignments pertaining to women. This gives us a quantitative gauge of women's presence. In the second segment I look at broader implications of gender in the revised Standards, which were published without the "examples of student achievement." Reflecting the Standards: "Examples of Student Achievement" Era 1, "Beginnings of Human Society (before 4000 b.c.e.)" was the most inclusive one for women in general, since they were...