ABSTRACT
Imagine a cool, sunny spring day. The sidewalks are still wet from a morning shower. The school playground is alive with activity. Every so often, a stray ball bounces against the classroom wall and giggles accompany its retrieval. Inside the classroom, you perch on a stool, surrounded by a group of adolescent girls-and listen. Undistracted by the background noise, the girls discuss the historical significance of women’s suffrage. One of the girls, Kiri, lifts up a picture of women voting. She reads the brief caption explaining that her island nation was one of the first in the world to grant women the right to vote, and says, “1893, eh? And why not before that?” Her classmate, Tiana, nods, equally unimpressed. “When did men first get to vote?” she asks. These two questions have not been asked by any other children in more than 150 similar interviews conducted in the United States, New Zealand, and Northern Ireland (Barton & Levstik, 1998). Yet it seems that they should have been asked. Why didn’t women have the vote? When and why did men get the vote? One of the places in the curriculum where these and other questions about gender and gendered relations might logically arise is in the social studies. Gender is explicitly addressed in the social studies standards documents in the United States and New Zealand (California State Board of Education [CSBE], 1988; National Council for Social Studies [NCSS], 1994), as well as by the American Textbook Council (Sewell, 1992), Social Education, and the like. Teachers are told, for instance, that “social studies
encourages students to acknowledge the experiences and viewpoints of a range of people that may be different from their own. By incorporating…gender perspectives…teachers will ensure that students have the opportunity to broaden their understandings of how people ‘see the world through different eyes’” (CSBE, 1988, p. 17).
