High school feminist studies

The energy, imagination and information in this book respond to a deep-felt need to improve the heart of the high school curriculum-literature and language, history and social studies. We read literature, as one student put it, "to find out what to do with our lives." We read history to learn about the past so that we may understand the present and plan for the future. But what if women are omitted from the history recorded in textbooks? What if, as a study by Mary Beaven has indicated, the portraits of women provided in the high school literature classroom are harmful to students71 The high school years are critical for the future of females and males alike, not only for what they enable students to understand about human relations between women and men and among members of families, but also for what they enable students to envision of the world of work. For many students, these are the last years of required schooling, the years preceding important choices: marriage, vocation or college. Half don't or can't choose college, and a larger proportion of the talented who don't go on are women. Who controls those choices? What influence could or should the high school curriculum have on those students? Directly or indirectly, the courses described in this volume answer those questions.