Teaching Gender History
to Secondary School Students

Kathleen M. Dalton and E. Anthony Rotundo

Teaching gender history to high school students requires a level of explanation that is usually absent in history survey courses and texts. Thus, students and faculty are unlikely to view the enterprise as basic or necessary knowledge. Although the scholarly world has come a long way toward recognizing gender as a central category of historical analysis, popular attitudes and the consciousness of adolescents lag far behind. So, each time we have taught gender history (and each time we have argued to keep it in the curriculum), we have had to make a case for why gender matters. We argue that gender as a cultural category affects a person's life chances, values, earning power, likelihood of committing or being a victim of crime, chance of being killed in battle, opportunities for education and professional advancement, and even life expectancy. We urge students to question gender prescriptions that they have been taught ("girls are . . . boys are . . ." statements), whether they come from teachers, family members, or public experts. We also invite them to look closely at the variety in gender populations and the motivation behind gender prescription. Though biological determinism in many forms, especially sociobiology, has won new popular audiences since the 1970s in the United States, high school students can look at the several sides to current debates and compare them to debates that surrounded biology's "just so stories" of the late nineteenth century. They can examine the debates among equality feminists and difference feminists and critics of feminism to explore what they have been taught and what remain their unanswered questions about gender. A basic requirement for making gender studies a presence in a high school is to convince curriculum planners and students that gender systems may be as powerful in shaping people's lives as are economic or governmental systems.1	1
We take it for granted today that history departments offer courses on gender as a basic element of their curricula. That is, we take it for granted if the departments in question are college or university departments. At the secondary level, such offerings are still rare. The history of gender is only now becoming an accepted part of the high school survey course, and even there it usually takes the limited form of women's history presented as the story of a pressure group demanding and gaining increased access to a political system that grows progressively more democratic. Gender, taken as a cultural construct or a way of ordering social and political life, does not yet have a regular place in the high school curriculum. Our efforts to introduce a course in gender history are far from unique, but they may be unusual enough to have instructive value.	2
The school where we teach, Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, is not a typical secondary school; neither does it fit the public image of the prep school. Over half the student body receives financial aid, with 10 percent on full scholarship. The formerly all-boys academy has been coeducational since its 1973 merger with Abbot Academy, a neighboring girls' school with a long and distinguished history. Of the current student body, 29 percent is nonwhite. The institutional culture and population of Andover, then, have lost the upper-class tone of a previous era. In its values and in the social composition of its faculty and student body, the academy can best be likened to private small colleges such as Wesleyan or Amherst—affluent, academically selective, upper-middle-class institutions newly composed for diversity.	3
When we arrived at Andover in the early 1980s, discussions of gender were hard to find on campus. No women's or men's groups for students existed. Very little women's history (and no history that viewed men in terms of gender) had made its way into the required United States history survey or the European, African, or Asian senior elective courses. The entire curriculum of the academy contained only one course related to gender, an English department elective on images of women.	. . .