Throughout history, including during the American Civil War, women had and made choices.  We can’t tell stories by downplaying women in our complicated and messy history.   Using women of the Civil War, as a vehicle, Tracy Garrison Feinberg and I discuss empowerment, agency, and purpose.  Women’s drive to improve society in many ways gives them power, and there is no boilerplate woman!  There is no single story that tells the entirety of the experiences and impact of women in history, and each one somehow turned the tide of history, even those whose names we don’t know.

On my podcast this week I spoke with Tracy Garrison-Feinberg, a fellow New York Historical Society Women and the Amerian Story ambassador. Our focus was women of the Civil War or superheroines, but I also noticed a pattern when I thought about our discussion and the many others I’ve had when talking about women’s history: that women’s stories matter and that a single story isn’t the entire story. To meet our representation and inclusion goals, it’s so important for all of us to teach many stories, not just one. Additionally, we can’t teach cliched or generally accepted stories. For example, almost all of us know the story of Harriet Tubman as an Underground Railroad conductor, but do we know that she carried a firearm on her journey? She was a soldier for freedom! She was also a spy for the Union Army, owned property, worked as an activist in the women’s rights movement, met and supported Ida B. Wells, and opened a charity home for elderly and impoverished Black people in her community. This just goes to show us, that when we think we know it all, we need to dig because there is more!

In our episode, Tracy and I talked about a strategy for analyzing images. Whenever I get the chance to do image analysis, especially with my younger students or with students who are still learning to read, I take advantage of it. Images are an excellent vehicle for learning history when documents are not the right choice for your group. Use the following questions to open up the conversation and keep it on track:

-What do you wonder? What do you see?
-What is this picture telling you?
-What questions do you have about it?
-What is going through the person’s mind and what is the person trying to tell you? (If you’re using a photograph)

Tracy likes using the WAMS image below to open her civil war unit: