This week, a conservative think tank decided that Texas History curriculum is too far-fetched, even for their standards. Click here to read the Chronicle’s coverage of the story.

As most of you may know, I teach Women in Politics at the University of Houston. I like to call the first portion of the class “Her” story. Due to the knowledge base of my students, now an entire generation who have been schooled under standardized testing, I spend a significant part of my class focusing on women’s history.

In fact, I had planned to write today about the simple joy I experience from introducing the students to amazing women from history and then leading them up to 1920 when American women secured the right to vote.

Just to share more of this experience – I find that a handful of students may have heard of Susan B. Anthony. “His” story has painted her as the “leading suffragist”. I don’t want to minimize her role in any way but there were many others along the path. A handful of students may have heard of Sojourner Truth, most from special study during Black History month or a rare history teacher. None of them have heard of Alice Paul, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and certainly not the Grimke sisters. Although, this semester I had a rare group of students who had taken a great history class at UH where they had met some of these women.

I assure you that most of these women do not appear in the Texas revised “his”story standards.

As I end my lecture by showing Iron-Jawed Angels, the movie that traces the radical arm of the suffragist movement, I shed tears. The emotion of a well-produced HBO documentary helps convey the lengths women went to win their right to participate in the American political system.

It is touching to watch the students as they see the characters they have come to enjoy during the movie suddenly be arrested and sent to a workhouse prison. The ladies then embark on hunger strikes and protests and are mistreated for their actions.

I always wrap this section of the course with the question “Did you have any idea this is what people went through so you could have the right to vote?” NO! They do not.

Hopefully, the course creates voters for life!