http://gnn.com/gnn/netizens/whm/ruthsdotter.html (PC Press Internet CD, 03/1996)
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The events centered around March 8, International Women's Day, and soon
gained nationwide attention. Based on the Sonoma County model, Congress
proclaimed the week of March 8 as National Women's History Week in 1981.
Teachers and others from all over the country inundated the California
group with requests.
The group chose a name to reflect its national scope and expanded its
materials to include brochures, tapes, videos, and speeches on women in
American history. Members trained teachers around the country,
encouraged librarians to add books on women, and encouraged everyone
they met to think about what women were doing at times in history when
men were getting the attention.
In 1987, Congress proclaimed all of March as Women's History Month. The
National Women's History Project is considered
the preeminent source
for information on U.S. women's history. It now has 13 full-time staff
and a mailing list for its catalogue of 250,000.
Last month, GNN's Don George visited the Project for a chat
with Mary Ruthsdotter, a founding member.
GNN: As you look back over the years since you began as a very small group, what kind of a difference have you made? Ruthsdotter: One measure of the difference we're making is the sheer quantity of women's history information that we ship out. The UPS guy had to have a second truck set up the other day because there was so much leaving. And you know it's going someplace! GNN: Do you see changes in the way American history is being taught? Ruthsdotter: Oh, yes. It used to be that boys and girls alike would go to do an extra credit report and they'd pick one of the presidents or they'd pick Amelia Earhart because there wasn't anything else on the shelves to inspire them, to give them a name of somebody to do a report about. Now the names of women are out there, and in large measure it's because we got those books on to the shelves or got the publishers to make those books available. A woman in Indianola, Iowa, has been following our work for five years and really admiring what we're doing. One day one of her children came home from school with a list of people to choose from for an extra credit report. The list was something on the order of 80 names, three of which were women -- Betsy Ross, Sojourner Truth, and Harriet Tubman. The mother went ballistic. She called us immediately and said she'd do a Web site for us. This is her professional business. She had wanted to do something beyond writing a check, and here's her kid faced with the same old thing all over again. So we will have a much better presence on the Web than we would have with our own limited resources.
GNN: When did your Web site open? Ruthsdotter: March 1. We'll have a small presence for a while. On May 1 we plan to unveil the whole flowery show. GNN: What will be on your Web site? Ruthsdotter: We'll have information about our organization, its purposes and its services. I hope that we'll have quotes from famous women that you would want to cross-stitch on your pillowcases. We would change those periodically. We'll have women's history IQ tests, on all the hidden topics of women's history and the hidden individuals. This is one I love. Everyone knows John Hancock signed his name -- in large writing -- across the Declaration of Independence, putting his revolutionary life on the line. But who was trusted to print this secret, signed document? Somebody had to print it: Mary Katherine Goddard. They figured she wouldn't snitch. She had this real revolutionary history, and so she published it. She was definitely on their side. If the British came, they could pretty much count on her to eat the document.
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| "Each time a girl opens a book and reads a womanless history, she learns she is worth less." It's a little play on words there, but it's really true. |
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GNN:
Are you the sole national organization devoted to women's
history? Ruthsdotter: There are other organizations that service different aspects of the women's history interest. One is the Upper Midwest Women's History Center. Their focus is on International Women's History. They also do teacher training sessions on the whole question of gender equity, women's history and such. At state and local levels, a wonderful array of organizations have started. There's a woman from West Virginia with a bright yellow school bus that says Women's History Museum on the side. It has profiles of six women sitting in the seats. She's filled the bus with artifacts of the six women and she does performances about them all over the country. GNN: You must have built up a large archive of information on American women by now. Ruthsdotter: We've gathered about 5,000 volumes of strictly women's United States history information. We also have 1,500 hanging files of biographies and photographs of individual women, perhaps a comparable number of topic files and files of photographs. We sell a lot of things through our catalogue -- placemats, balloons, stickers, CDs, records, books, and videos, all of which we guarantee to be interesting. No more boring history quizzes. Interesting, multi-cultural, and historically accurate, those are the standards we put everything up to. GNN: Is that where your funding comes from? Ruthsdotter: About 80 percent comes consulting and from the sales of materials through our catalogue. Most of the rest comes from direct contributions, people simply sending us money. We only do one solicitation a year and that's at Mother's Day. We ask people to contribute in the name of a woman who has been important in their lives. It gets people thinking about Mother's Day as an opportunity to honor teachers and best friends and aunties and piano teachers, as well as Mom. We send an acknowledgement card to all the women honored who are still living. GNN: Are people more receptive now than when you started? Ruthsdotter: Oh, yeah, the concept makes sense to people a lot more quickly now. Our approach is enthusiastic. "What have women actually done?" is our focus. Sometimes it's personal -- she had seven children and they loved her dearly, and when she died they were bereft. Sometimes it's that she organized the local library and the local hospital and where would we be today without them. Or she led the women's suffrage movement in the state, or without her the Equal Rights Amendment never would have been introduced in Congress. At every level women have made contributions and all of them are valid. You just have to ask, "What were the women doing?" and it brings good stories. GNN: What other help can people give you? Ruthsdotter: The one thing we need is for everybody to be aware that women have a history and that it's an interesting one. They can help by announcing that -- whether they know the facts behind the concept or not. They can get all of the facts they need from us. Wherever they are they can start putting women and history together in people's minds. They can encourage their children to always ask what were the women doing when a particular subject is being addressed. Because women were doing something involved with that topic. We just have to realize that we're only seeing part of the picture when we're hearing about the Civil War for instance and General Sherman does this and General Lee does this. Well, what were the women doing? Oh, gee, I don't know, let's find out.
GNN: You have a real passion for this. Where does that come from? Ruthsdotter: My family on my mother's side has always been politically active. In 1933, my grandfather left the farm in Iowa and followed Franklin D. Roosevelt to Washington, D.C., to be on the committee to reformulate agricultural policy. When I was in second grade, I stuffed my first envelope. When I was in fifth grade I watched my mom make a public service announcement in Tucson, Ariz., for a local candidate. He was the guy who had hung wallpaper in our dining room and he was running for a public office. So I just knew that grassroots stuff mattered. When I was 4 years old my mom took me down to see Harry Truman go by in a parade. She knew the poor guy didn't have a chance, but he was a Democrat and there ought to be somebody there to see him go by.
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| Hundreds of thousands of Girl Scouts get this multicultural coloring book of strong women from United States history. It's dynamite. |
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GNN:
Do you have family yourself? Ruthsdotter: I've been married 31 years. I have a daughter who's going to graduate school. GNN: Have you seen changes in your daughter's life, in the way women's history was presented to her as opposed to how it was presented to you? Ruthsdotter: Well, she lived a blessed life in terms of her elementary education, she went to the UCLA lab school, and they had a notion all along that girls and boys had to cut the same path. So she didn't come against some of the stuff that young girls do. When she left there -- it stops at grade six -- and went out into real life, she was pretty astounded. Girls going into junior high, typically, scale back their personalities. The bright girls start hiding their cleverness. At first it was real hard on her, and the second year was real hard on me, because I could see it happening to her. For the first time ever I resorted to bribery. I told her if you and your girlfriends all just try your darndest and get your President's physical fitness award, I'll take you to see the "Rocky Horror Picture Show." It changed things totally. They could all do it, they just didn't want to be embarrassed by showing that they could do something in front of the guys. I don't know if that's still the issue; I'm afraid it might be. If they can start off stronger, they have a better chance of staying strong, so we're trying to make that part possible. Then as they go through a brain-dead phase, we help to pick them up at the other side and show them the strong side of themselves again. GNN: Is there a particular project you feel especially good about that happened as a result of what you're doing? Ruthsdotter: As a cookie-sale prize, hundreds of thousands of Girl Scouts get our multicultural coloring book with 16 pictures of strong women from United States history and a little biography at the bottom of what those women did. It's dynamite. Another one that I'm really proud of is a video about the history of Mexican-American women in the United States that we produced. This is a story that is really unknown. The history of black women is more prominent because of their own determination to take their place and to tell the story of the women who have come before them. Until recently Latinas have not had access, or seen it as appropriate to try to gain access, to the publishing world. I spearheaded a project to do a video about this topic, which came out very nicely. It was the Smithsonian Institution's center point of their Hispanic Heritage Month program, to which they invited all of Congress. We got additional funding and we mixed it entirely with a Spanish narration, and it's wonderful.
GNN: What is next on your plate? Ruthsdotter: Right now we're producing a seven-minute video, sort of an inspirational piece about women's history. We're getting this Web site up. We probably will be the central organizer for the 150th anniversary of the women's rights movement in the country. It started in 1848 in Seneca Falls, New York. We're putting out the 1997 national Women's History Month poster. We always write a speech that goes along with it, so people wherever they are can get a dynamite speech. We sell it to them for $5 and for 15 minutes they can be the expert.
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| When I discovered that women had actually done something, I was astounded. I started thinking about why I did not know that. That's what gave me the fire for Women's History Month. |
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GNN:
You really seem to appreciate the value of history. Ruthsdotter: It took me 11 years to complete my baccalaureate degree for a lot of different reasons. I had no interest in taking a history class but there was a requirement. I had to go to summer school at night to do it, and I didn't really change my attitude about history. But when I discovered that women had actually done something, I was astounded. I started thinking about why I did not know that, having bought a pretty snappy education and paid close attention. I knew it was political, and I knew that girls shouldn't grow up thinking what I thought, having drawn a short straw, being born a woman, being born female. That's what gave me the fire for Women's History Month. GNN: It's hard for me to imagine what it must feel like to be brought up like that, to feel invisible. Ruthsdotter: (Authors) Myra and David Sadker have a very good quote. It's on the cover of our brochure: "Each time a girl opens a book and reads a womanless history, she learns she is worth less." It's a little play on words there, but it's really true.
National Women's History Project
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Copyright (c) 1996 Global Network Navigator, Inc., ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
In the late 1970s, a group of women got together to design teaching
materials and activities for a local Women's History Week in Sonoma
County, California, an hour's drive north of San Francisco.