Parents' Corner
Women’s History is for All Ages
As parents, you have the opportunity to guide your children’s lives in a unique way. Giving them the tools on how to find information for themselves is a gift. Below are some suggestions to help you influence your children’s education in women’s history.
- Alert your children’s teachers and school librarians that March is National Women’s History Month. Offer help with putting up a display, organizing a program, or staging a short play for an assembly.
- Coordinate a children’s story hour at your local library, with volunteers reading stories about famous women in history. Provide copied pages from women’s history coloring books in the Women’s History Catalog for children to take home -- request our free mail-order catalog, or order by phone.
- Put on a long skirt and wide-brimmed hat and present yourself as a woman from history to a class or after–school group. Perhaps you were a woman who lobbied for women’s right to vote, trekked west during the Gold Rush, or prospected in Alaska? Now’s your chance to time travel! Guides from the National Women’s History Project are available — through our mail–order catalog.
- Ask for time on the agenda of a school board or parent-teacher meeting to speak about the value to girls and boys alike of observing National Women’s History Month. The National Women’s History Project office can supply you with information and talking points, or inexpensive videos that explain it all.
- Do the books and magazines your children enjoy focus equally on stories of girls or women in positive central roles? If not, help them write letters to the editors offering specific ideas for future editions.
- Ask children, girls and boys, to check on whether women of achievement are included in their history, literature and science class materials. If not, suggest materials to their teachers that will help balance their presentations. The students can write to the book editors with suggestions about women to include in future editions, too.