Education doesn’t only occur in classrooms, and for our culture to thrive, everyone has more to learn: about our history, about our nation, about each other, about ourselves.  Below are some of my suggestions for learning more about our history and culture during this year’s Women’s History Month. All of these resources share information or a story about a person or group who didn’t wait for an institution or the government to take the lead; they took the lead themselves, acting first as individuals addressing their own concerns.

Online

The Online Biographical Dictionary of the Woman Suffrage Movement in the United States
Hosted at SUNY Binghamton, this digital database contains hundreds of brief biographies of women who had local and state-level roles in the voting rights movements of the early 20th century. In addition to the more mainstream groups, the database has sections on black women suffragists and militant suffragists, who are often left out of narratives and documentaries.

Septima Clark’s Citizen Education Project
Born in South Carolina in 1898, Septima Clark was an educator and community activist. Her teaching career began in 1916, but her work with the NAACP led to her firing in the mid-1950s. She then joined the staff of the Highlander Folk School, where she had already been leading summer workshops. Clark understood that education did not only occur in classrooms and with children, and that the best kind of learning leads to real-world improvements for the people involved. Her work became the basis for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s Citizenship Schools in the 1960s. A search function is available, so an interested reader can look for people by name, by state, etc.

Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library
The iconic country singer Dolly Parton is well-known not only for her music and for her bubbly personality and over-the-top style, but also for her ground-level approach to human rights and philanthropy. Raised in the mountains of eastern Tennessee, Parton’s early experiences with hardship have not been forgotten, and she has been a vocal advocate for helping all people. Her project that makes books available to schoolchildren has reached millions of families in English-speaking countries all over the world.

Video

PBS’s The Vote
This two-part documentary from American Experience gives a strong overview of the Women’s Suffrage movement in the first two decades of the twentieth century. The movement led to the 19th Amendment, which guaranteed women the right to vote, and this documentary aired in October 2023 to honor the 100th anniversary of its ratification. Each episode runs almost two hours, and its webpage offers extras to the main program.

PBS’s Becoming bell hooks
This one-hour documentary aired in February 2024 and honors the life and work of the writer, educator, activist, and thinker. Born Gloria Watkins in rural Kentucky, hooks is described here as a “universal person,” which is accurate. In more than three dozen books, she explored a broad range of ideas and facets of life: Feminism is for Everybody, Belonging, Teaching to Transgress, All About Love. After a career that spanned more than four decades, hooks died in 2021 at the age of 69. The documentary offers snippets from her life as well as perspectives from people who knew her and others who simply knew her work.

Delores Huerta on Brief but Spectacular
Delores Huerta is widely acknowledged as the co-founder of the Farm Workers movement, alongside Cesar Chavez. Today, Huerta is an icon of organizing and social action. In this ten-minute clip, she discusses her ideas about immigrants and farmworkers, as well as racism, xenophobia, and other anti-immigrant sentiments.

Reading