What happens when women are more than footnotes in textbooks

motivate

so

nearly two years ago when i was just

short of being a 13 year old

i was on a televised trivia show that

brought together some of the most

conceited high school students onto one

stage

at the time my teammate and i had just

won our quarter final round

when we heard the team we had just won

against say the words

i can’t believe we lost you girls

and as i’m on a bus ride home i think of

how time and time again

i find the same scene that

a lack of a y chromosome always gets my

opposition

grinding their teeth they often find

that

nothing is more embarrassing than losing

to a girl but

i disagree what’s really embarrassing is

upholding these exhausted notions that

somehow women

picking up roughly half of the

population and in

all their historic intellectual glory

are less intelligent than men and always

doomed for lower positions in society

but given the era we live in i find it

astounding that this belief is still so

widely spread from the multitude of

opponents i’ve had

all of different ages and passports thus

i invoked somewhat of an investigation

as i looked into

why you’re so conditioned into believing

something evidently wrong

i went through articles and lectures on

imposter syndrome something especially

prevalent in women and women of color

and i go through timelines of minorities

begging for crumbs of representation

i realized

the answer has always been my history

book right next to me

this is where question comes to light

who are we without our history

when women are erased from textbooks and

another white man takes their place

why are we surprised our boys grow up

not knowing women

could also be change makers and young

girls unaware of the advancement they

may be able to make

when history curriculums in their

entirety become

unrepresentative of the demographics

that exist

in a classroom history and of itself

becomes a distant wig concept

for all those students could care and

for all i could care

history is a fairy tale they’d rather

not read

the authors it was like they were aiming

for a specific audience that is clearly

not them

and as a result of all these

deficiencies and history curriculums

worldwide as young girls some of us once

were do not hear about women who defy

tradition and norm women like scientists

female thinkers or revolutionaries

they’re generally limited to two parts

due to this underrepresentation

first we see that a woman succumbs to

these norms

we see this often in rural areas women

live in silence or they carry

internalized misogyny and uphold the

patriarchy

by perhaps insulting women who take the

step to become something more

and my mind primarily circles back to a

specific type of desi

auntie that may make your dreams seem

unachievable

these women may lean in and whisper to

one another

what does she think of herself the

second part we see

is that women may dare to be something

more or they may inhibit the belief that

women

can be something more but they live with

some form of imposter syndrome which is

a universal concept that i myself have

suffered from for far too long in my

life

essentially a voice inside your head

that tells you

you don’t deserve to be here in the

first place and that you should just

stop your efforts become something

bigger

in their entirety

for me imposter syndrome is a walk on

what’s supposed to be a sturdy bridge

but something in your head telling you

that the next step is impossible

at least for someone like you

and we’ve already established what the

implications are

so what is the future where women are

taken from footnotes or

nothing at all to paragraphs and

chapters what

happens when generations of women are

taught

from the very beginning of their formal

education that

someone like them was actively a part of

sowing the seeds of their nations of

technology and other various

progressions

at this point i would like you to use

your imagination

what do you think it would look like

when diversity bleeds into previously

restricted curriculums when

women stop mass reporting loud

enunciations of

irresolute ideas and there aren’t girls

like me asking

why are boys so embarrassed to lose to

girls

here’s what we can aim for when we

rewrite a few words in our history

lessons

a world where women are no longer

underrepresented in technological

positions despite making up

tens of millions of individuals in the

labor force

perhaps because we learn how some of the

first programmers were women our books

lived the lives of

adel lovelace or grace hopper and we are

told going to technology

is a viable choice it is not entirely a

boys club

the same goes for leadership politics

engineering and media

places where we need women’s voices to

be heard that are

and have been actively showcased as

invalid choices for jobs when i was

younger

to the lack of examples in my history

book and agents of the patriarchy

talking down to us for having relevant

aspirations

so when our erasure of women in

mainstream history has allowed

this regressive mindset to continue to

rock the brains of our youth

effectively shackling them to doubt

themselves or others

and when the answer to fixing our

insufficiencies

stands so explicitly in front of us

why haven’t we just let in the tour of

impactful women into our history

textbooks

let’s break the cycle thank you