Letter from a Teacher of Feminist History

I have been teaching a nine-week unit on Women in History at Kaukauna High School in Wisconsin since the fall of 1970. I was simply asked to teach what I wanted to teach, and so I began. Students chose to take this course, from among seven or eight others, for the usual reasons students choose courses: it looked easy, I was a new teacher, and they had some interest in the subject. The first time I taught the course, I had students write papers on women from different periods, had the rest of the class read them, and supplemented this with lectures based on my own reading. The papers were remarkably good and the students enjoyed the course. We also read, in class, Maxwell Anderson\u27s Anne of A Thousand Days. They liked doing this also. What was communicated mostly, I think, was that there were women in history