Gender Equity: Still Knocking at the Classroom Door

Much of what U.S. students know about history is shaped by the textbook presentation of the subject. By high school, students should be exposed to an inclusive view of U.S. history. Previous research suggests that U.S. history has often centered on the stories of men, particularly from the perspective of white men in positions of power. It is important to continually assess how far textbooks have come in terms of including women—not just the quantity of such inclusion, but the quality as well. In our research, we use Banks' scale of curriculum integration to evaluate how well women's experiences during WWII have been integrated into high school textbooks. Our findings suggest that women are “counted” in the depiction of WWII; however, this inclusion lacks attention to women's agency during the war and to the unique experiences of African American women during the war. Without such explorations in the textbooks, the written version of history becomes an exclusive and distorted body of knowledge.