Survive: Women's Suffrage

We are framing our Social Action study around the societal cycle (survive, problems, organize, create norms, thrive) that we've been looking at since we started our Colonial America study in the spring of 4th grade.  Rather than looking at events chronologically, we're studying suffrage and Civil Rights through the lens of survival this week.  We started talking about Women's Suffrage yesterday.  First, we looked at several photographs from the 19th and 20th centuries and thought about the norms we saw.  We are looking at the norms that would eventually become problems, and the big question is, "Were women surviving?  Were they fully alive?"  Here are the norms we observed yesterday:

o   Women usually stayed at the house and did most of the cooking and cleaning.

o   Women were thought of as inferior to men.

o   Women were obsolete (not useful) outside of the home.

o   Women didn’t have power.

o   Women had limited freedom to affect their communities.

o   Women were supposed to be pretty.

o   Women didn’t have the right to vote.

o   Women always had to listen to the man in the house, whether it was their father, husband or son.

o   Women didn’t have as many rights as men.

o   Women were expected to get married.

o   Women were expected to have children.

o   Women were expected to agree with their husbands.

o   Women were expected to praise their husbands.

o   Women had to be feminine.

o   Women were talked about like they’re unimportant.

Today, we listened to two songs, Keep Woman in her Sphere and Oh, Dear, What Can the Matter Be?  You can listen to snippets of each song here (or buy them on iTunes if you're hardcore!).  We talked about the meaning and message of each song.  The conversation ended with a connection back to the idea of survival.  Here is a transcript of the conversation about the question, Were women surviving before they had suffrage?  Were they fully alive?

Rema: They were physically surviving, but their personality wasn't surviving.

Alexa: I thought that even though women were surviving physically, they weren't surviving mentally. We all have our own personalities and we can express it, but their personalities were suppressed.

Rose: They were surviving, but they weren’t surviving emotionally.  Women were cut off from society because they weren’t allowed to put their opinions to making a change to who could become president or who could become mayor.  They were being pampered without any real meaning.

Sasha A.: I disagree.  Even though they didn’t get to vote, women still played a big role because they had to make food for their family…  It wasn’t right that they didn’t get to vote, but they still played a big role.

Max: I kind of agree with Sasha, but I don’t think they were being cut off from society, they were being cut off from politics, and men were always more important

Sascha L.: I also want to disagree with Rose because even though they were sort of not allowed to be in politics, they still got to help in different ways.  They were allowed to tell their husbands what they thought, so the wife got to feel like they were helping at least a little bit.

Omri: I want to add on to Sascha L. because women weren’t allowed to do politics, but in the song that’s the only thing they were talking about, the vote.

Darien: I think they were surviving, because if they weren’t they wouldn’t be thinking about voting, they’d be thinking about something else.

Jessie: I agree with Darien.  If they were trying to survive, they wouldn’t even be able to stay at home.  They wouldn’t be worrying about cooking and cleaning.  Those are wants, not needs.  Voting is a want, not a need.

Braden: I agree with Darien that they were surviving, but they weren’t necessarily thriving because they didn’t get to vote and they didn’t get to have their say about things the way men did, and they were surviving, but they just weren’t as happy as they could be.