According to a study conducted by the National Women’s History Museum in 2018, “Standards emphasize a small number of topics or eras that are commonly associated with being women-centric such as the Progressive Era and Woman Suffrage/Voting Rights.” These constrictive learning standards leave many to only be educated on women’s history during the suffrage movement, leading them to think that the only meaningful contributions women made to history happened during that very short window. Despite the belief that the omission of women’s history during other time periods is due to lacking female contributions, women have been at the forefront of countless political and social movements in the United States. Women’s activism did not stop after the ratification of the 19th Amendment in 1920. Suffrage groups such as the National Women’s Party (NWP) began a fight for equality post-enfranchisement. “The Suffragist,” the NWP’s newspaper was transformed into the “Equal Rights” in 1924, a new magazine dedicated to advocation for the new Equal Rights Amendment written by Alice Paul. While “The Suffragist” has its own Wikipedia page, “Equal Rights” does not. Most of the women’s history after the suffrage movement has been forgotten due to exclusive curricula, yet some of the most important developments in women’s rights movements occurred post-1920. The women’s movement was incredibly active during the 1960s with the National Organization for Women being founded in 1966, the Presidential Commission on the Status of Women being created in 1961 filing the Peterson Report on the Woman Question soon after, Betty Friedan publishing The Feminine Mystique in 1963, and the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964. The 1960s was a time of change in women’s rights and in women’s activism, yet it is forgotten. In a poll conducted by YouGov on knowledge of women’s history, only 15% of women were able to correctly identify the decade in which employment discrimination on the basis of sex became illegal. This means that 85% of women taking this poll were unaware of Title VII’s implications, a turning point in the women’s rights movement. People are far too unaware of the changes women have made in the course of history.

Though these contributions are grand, the stories of women are omitted nonetheless. The current omission of women can be attributed to a lack of resources, knowledge, and documentation of women’s history—institutionalized through deliberate distortion of historical texts and oral history. In the country as a whole and beyond academia, there is very little emphasis on female contribution. Fewer than five percent of national historic landmarks detail women’s contributions and only nine of the one hundred and twelve statues in the Capitol’s Statuary Hall are of women. The public omission of women sends an image to all individuals—beyond students—that women have not contributed to the fabric of America. Within academics, there are limited books on women’s history in America. In 1960, individuals had the choice of thirteen total books—only one of which was a general “overview” of multiple women in history. From 1960 to 1975, people could draw from twenty-one books on women’s history. This meant that very little women’s history was integrated into modern textbooks and curricula. According to the New York Historical Society Museum and Library, only thirteen percent of named historical figures in textbooks across the United States by 2013 were women. Moreover, high school teachers are typically confined to Advanced Placement or C3 curriculum to dictate their classroom teachings. Unfortunately, these curricula comprise no or very limited teachings on women’s history. State social studies standards in K-12 Classrooms name 178 individual women, and only 15 of these women are named more than 10 times. Of these 178 women listed in standards, White women are mentioned sixty-three percent of the time, African-American women twenty-five percent, Hispanic women eight percent, and Native American/Native Alaskan women only four percent of the time.