Exploring Women's History
"I had never lived out of my father's house, nor in
any way assumed a separate life from the other children of the family... I had
never been obliged to think for or take care of myself, and now I was to be launched
literally on an unknown sea, travel towards an unknown country, everything absolutely
new and strange about me, and undefined for the future..."
--- Jessie Benton Fremont, A Year of American Travel, 1878
Jessie
Benton Fremont's travelogue of her trip out west in 1849 reveals the social attitudes
and assumptions concerning gender roles, racial prejudice, and class distinctions
characteristic of the times. Although she had the unusual opportunity and rare
privilege to travel for pleasure, Fremont faced and overcame many challenges as
a woman traveling by sea and land across the United States in the mid-nineteenth
century. Her passionate descriptions of both external events and internal experiences
and feelings throughout her "voyage into the unknown" allow readers of today insights
into the social and cultural context in which Fremont lived and into the mind
and heart of one woman who met the challenges of her environment with courage
and determination.
Women's History Month provides an ideal opportunity
for students to learn about and connect to the lives, struggles, and achievements
of women who came before, in order to better understand our world today. You can
use the EDSITEment lesson plan, Scripting
the Past: Exploring Women's History Through Film, to have students analyze
Fremont's travelogue and adapt it into a film script. This lesson takes students
through a series of steps to help them learn not only about the lives and times
of the women whose stories they read and transform, but also about the processes
of filmmaking and of interpreting narratives from people of other times and places
in ways that respect their lives while giving new meaning to our own.
In addition to the travel narrative of Jessie Benton Fremont, Scripting
the Past includes links to the memoirs of four other women who defied their
gender roles, their class distinctions, or both. Students choose among these five
historical figures, conduct research on their subject, and then adopt the perspective
of the screenwriter and decide how to translate the "real" woman into a representation
in film.
A related lesson, Women's
Suffrage: Why the West First? has students research other women especially
involved in the Western suffrage movement and supply some important facts from
their biographies that support the granting of full voting rights to women in
several Western states. Students take a stand, supported by historical evidence,
as to whether or not a single theory can explain why the Western states were the
first to grant full voting rights to women. EDSITEment offers several other
lesson plans that can help you bring women's history to life in your classroom.
Who Were the Foremothers
of Women's Equality? explores sources that are useful for uncovering the names
of women who contributed to the early Women's Rights Movement in the U.S. and
assesses the significance of these individual's contributions. Cultural
Change examines both the political and cultural dimensions of the arguments
American women used to gain the right to vote, while in Women's
Equality: Changing Attitudes and Beliefs students analyze archival materials
contemporaneous with the birth of the Women's Rights Movement to appreciate the
deeply entrenched opposition the early crusaders had to overcome. Voting
Rights For Women: Pro- and Anti-Suffrage presents arguments for and against
suffrage for women in the 19th and early 20th centuries, and gives examples of
how those arguments were expressed in a variety of media. All these lesson plans
offer innovative ways of learning about the role American women have played in
shaping the nation. For additional online resources to use in your class
discussions of women's history, visit the selection of websites listed to the
left. Here you will find a wealth of photographs, documents, and first-person
narratives that students can use to investigate the social, economic, and political
lives of women in America. In ways that no textbook
or secondary text can duplicate, these primary historical materials can also provide
students with insights into the personal motivations of women such as Jessie Fremont,
who in this passage from her 1849 travelogue reveals a lyrical and passionate
appreciation for the new sights and sounds she encountered in her voyage to the
West:
"I had never seen the sea, and in some odd way no one had ever told
me of the wonderful new life it could bring. It stays with me in all its freshness,
that first recognition of the ocean which came to me when I went on deck; that
grand solitude, that wide look from horizon to horizon, the sense of space, of
freshness, the delightful power and majesty of the sea--all came to me as necessities;
I loved it at the first look, and I am never fully alive without it; sometimes
I cannot get to it when I need it, but when I can, I go there, and am soothed
and calmed and comforted if I am in trouble; if I am happy, it is only there that
I feel completed by the exultant, abounding vitality and keen happiness which
it alone brings to me."
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