This Friday, September 2, 2011, Women’s Studies students and faculty will be out at Club Fair for the fifth year in a row. We made our Club Fair debut five years ago with an activity that I have warned students about during the first week of Women’s Studies 101 every semester since.
On August 25, 2006, the day before Women’s Equality Day, I asked my WMST 101 students a few key questions about American Women’s History and showed them this video clip to let them know some consequences of not knowing their own history. After seeing the video, students in the class decided to circulate the same petition at Club Fair that afternoon to see if their peers knew more than the High School students in the clip.
It still saddens me to report that approximately 160 RU students signed a petition to “end Women’s Suffrage” that day; even worse: most of them were women. Despite the fact that many of the students in my class did not know when American Women got the right to vote, or what the word “suffrage” meant, the students who took the petition out to Club Fair were still shocked by the number of people who were willing to sign it. Apparently, folks at The Tartan were appalled, as well, as they ran this story soon after:
Women’s Studies Club has moved on to a far more diverse array of activities since our beginnings in the Spring of 2006, many of which we will highlight at our table on Friday, but I will always look back on our first Club Fair with a sense of pride … and shock.
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