Entry bubble March is Women's History Month

By: Jim | February 29, 2008 | Category: General

suffragettes in front of Cleveland headquarters office

Hi, everybody. I’m Jim, the newest – and oldest – member of the blog team.

Some of you out there are wondering why a guy would be writing about Women’s History Month. Let’s just say I try to be a bit non-conformist. Back at San Diego State, the idea of taking a year of “western civ” and similar classes to meet my graduation requirements wasn’t appealing. I enrolled in classes that I hoped would be interesting and unusual. Women in American History was one of those classes. On looking back at my working class Ohio upbringing, I bet my parents thought I was becoming some sort of radical.

It turns out that I really enjoyed the class because we weren’t simply memorizing lists of dates and events. The class was more interesting because some of the ideas we discussed in the classroom were borne from women’s first-hand accounts of everyday life and its challenges—like a pioneer woman’s diary entry about how she had to sift the worms out of the flour to make the day’s bread. I was surprised to learn that that in 1851, my home town Akron, Ohio was the site of a women’s rights convention, the one in which escaped slave Sojourner Truth made her noteworthy “Ain’t I Woman” speech.

Speaking of surprises, I got one while I was on USA.gov’s History, Arts, and Culture page looking for some additional Women’s History Month information. There’s actually a Women’s Rights National Park. The National Register of Historic Places has a travel itinerary of places where women made history. Sounds like a road trip is my future.

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