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