Women have shaped history behind the scenes and some of us didn’t even realize it! Our school used to be an all girls school and now, since Women’s History Month is here, we are highlighting some of Barstow’s favorite traditions and women in history. Our peers will be telling us who their inspirational women are and how they feel about their representation.
“I think we should celebrate Women’s History Month particularly because women are underrepresented, specifically in history. Taking at least a month to specifically focus on women throughout history is needed in order to kind of level out the imbalance in an educational setting,” said Alec Seidel ‘27.
According to Alec, women’s history is vastly under focused on and is something that impacts all of us. In history we learn all about how men accomplished great feats, but so did women in those times. The only difference is that their efforts were recorded and studied, while women were ushered to the sides.
“We should celebrate [Women’s History Month] because it’s important to honor women for what they’ve done. Mostly, in history class, we just learn about white men and they just do random [things],” Shria Malay ‘27, brought up an excellent point that should be pondered on by all.
Many have heard about Paul Revere and his 20 mile, heroic ride to warn those that the British were coming. However, many don’t know about Sybil Ludington, a 16-year-old girl who did the same thing. She rode 40 miles, double what Revere did, and successfully warned the militia. She was even thanked by George Washington, but she wasn’t recognized until 1935. She was given her dues 160 years later and still, many don’t recognize her name.
Charlotte Turner ‘27 believes that Women’s History Month is also underrepresented, “It should definitely be talked about more and less than corporations being like, ‘This month, WOMEN’ and then they don’t do anything else. I think we should also not just have white women in this month because that is what tends to happen.”
We can’t slap the color pink on some packaging and call it representation. Women have done so many great things and we should be highlighting them and trying to find more about what they have done.
Other than Sybil, there are some more well known activists that our students seem to take a liking to. “Malala Yousufzai is my favorite women’s activist because she was very young and she was courageous and brave,” said Malay ‘27.
“Marsh P. Johnson was one of my [favorite activists]. Another one, I don’t really know much about her, Stormé DeLarverie,” said Turner ‘27.
When asked about the importance of teaching our next generations about women’s history, our interviewees had some interesting opinions. “It’s important to teach our next generations about women’s history because the next generation and the next people need to know about who did what and what they can do to improve, even though they’re all going to be robots by then. Feminist robots,” concluded Malay ‘27.
She explains that our future generations need to learn from our past and pay attention to what women do, because that is just as important as any other history.
