A Teacher with Daughters

I came across a set of images that caught my eye on my Twitter feeds. I tried to follow the trail back, and the Twitter search #itwasneveradress wasn’t stopping and led me back to 2015 to a STEAM conference. I guess I had missed this before. I have in the past looked at universal graphics with keener interest for what they show us about ourselves. How can one image possibly be representative for all?

I followed the stream, and it led me to a series of further images and ideas.

I decided to create an activity for my daughters. I thought they could draw or decorate the images with the same lens for altering the image.

And even the idea of whether to make a dark blue image on white or a white image on dark blue threw me. It was a knot of practical how to add content, to what do I want to represent the image I wanted them to start with. I settled for both.

I realized that the two images were slightly different. Should the head be connected to the body? What Am I changing by using the image with the head detached from the body? Could such a simple change be connected with the objectifying of a women’s body? What’s to be done when I see my daughters adopting looks and types of clothing that perpetuate images that I don’t want my daughters to be overly influenced by. I don’t trust the updated new skins toy companies are producing that are overlaying on top of old images.

I can’t necessarily afford special clothing to counteract stereotypes. To subvert somehow the male gaze. Where exactly do I stand on the princess images?

As I put the activity together, it got me thinking about my final social studies unit for my teaching credential. I created it with a partner and had scanned the pages before I tossed the several inch thick document. At the time, I used glued paper images and cut with scissors excerpts with handwritten bibliographic notes and documentation. How differently I would do this now.

There I zeroed in on Bloomers and Bloomerism. The alternative to the many pounds of materials and constricting type of dress that many women in certain parts of the United States had to endure.

I started looking at the photos, maps, illustrations, photos, and artwork.

It felt strikingly similar to so many things I’m confronting now.

Flags do have important meaning and no one has sole rights or ownership to them

There are many different ways to depict us with data, as opinion and beliefs change and develop.

Why was there East Coast resistance? Were western states more progressive?

And then I started to think about the core people and how I would like my daughters to relate to these important people — Elizabeth Cady Stanton was one of them and is where all my focus comes back to when I think of important words to think about and consider. I hope to pass to my daughters these positive role models. We’ve been reading Goodnight Stories for Rebel Girls, and I’m glad many of these people’s stories are told within the pages.

A set of quotes, all from one section of Solitude of Self, a speech given when Stanton was seventy-six years old before the House Judiciary Committee and the National American convention, and that’s all I need:

“Just so with woman. The education that will fit her to discharge the duties in the largest sphere of human usefulness, will best fit her for whatever special work she may be compelled to do.

“The isolation of every human soul and the necessity of self-dependence must give each individual the right to choose his own surroundings. The strongest reason for giving woman all the opportunities for higher education, for the full development of her faculties, her forces of mind and body: for giving her the most enlarged freedom of thought and action; a complete emancipation from all forms of bondage , of custom, dependence, superstition; from all the crippling influences of fear; is the solitude and personal responsibility of her own individual life.”

“No matter how much women prefer to lean, to be protected and supported, nor how much men desire to have them do so, they must make the voyage of life alone and for safety in an emergency they must know something of the laws of navigation”

She looks so intentional and alive to me in the pictures I’d copied. She looks like a contemporary only this is nearly 170 years ago.

And it was so much more . . .

The cartoon with the “gesture dismissively” feels like something from now. Where the face to face confrontations polarizes the feelings of many. Yet at that time with all the work for the amendments and all the opposition, we got it right! Whether the same is happening now is up to, us isn’t it?

With our responsibility to be citizens, is it that much more complex now then it was then?

Have we lost the ability to agree to disagree, or was it similar back then.

A chance to listen to others no matter if the individual is not expressing how we think or feel.

I know what team I want to be on when all is said and done. But I would want to wear pants. Doesn’t a dress preclude and influence the thoughts needed in order to take actions from a person doing so?

What was the most important part of this story? Susan B. Anthony knew.

She outlasted so many of her contemporaries and saw the passing of earlier important amendments, yet she didn’t get to see the 19th amendment’s passage. What must have been going through her mind with this staged photo? She always seems to look like she had a laser focus to stare down the immensity of the task and to bear down and see through the many decades of hard work ahead. This photo of her sitting at her desk looks like she’s immersed in a paper based Facebook including the wall and desk, and letters sent by mail to maintain the relationships along with intimate portraits carefully photographed. She knew that the people she shared the story of women’s suffrage with were the most important part of the journey.

I hope my daughters’ own journeys are filled with people who help them look with amazement at the world for all the possibilities that exist and are made possible by the amazing people who came before.

The Bibliography that follows is haphazardly organized with duplications, and I’m sure there are better sources of information from this assignment from 20 years ago. I’m so happy that much of the information is online and accessible.