“As you see, we keep the paper damp so that we get a good, clean imprint,” said the man in 18th century dress. The group of schoolchildren on a field trip to Colonial Williamsburg, the living history museum in Virginia, pushed into the printer’s shop to get a better look.
Using a wooden cover to compress the paper against two sections of typeface, the man slid the apparatus underneath a press, pulled a lever and slid it out again. “There you go! Two pages of fresh newsprint,” he said.
“Now,” he went on, “Who do you suppose did this kind of work in Colonial times? Could a woman do this?”
“No way!” said a forthright girl in a pink coat. The children around her shook their heads, to show they agreed.
“Why not?” asked the man. “Your teacher there, do you think she could do this work?”
“Um, no?” the girl replied, less certainly. The teacher arched an eyebrow and smiled.
“Well, take a look here at this newspaper. See that name? Clementina Rind. She was a widow. Thomas Jefferson himself asked her to do some printing for him!”
The children looked a little blank at this, but they could hardly be blamed for their ignorance.
Since long before these 10- and 11-year-olds were born, schools have been hammering in a paradox: That women, historically, haven’t been allowed to do anything and that women, historically, have done all kinds of neat things but received insufficient recognition.
Women’s History Month (which started as a week in 1978 and ends today) arguably only adds to the confusion by inflating commonplace achievements and celebrating relatively marginal figures chiefly on the basis of their sex. The result of decades of enthusiastic historical revisionism is successive phalanxes of children who haven’t the foggiest, either way.
But patiently, quietly, the people who staff museums try to teach what schools have failed to impart. At Old Sturbridge Village, a living history museum in Massachusetts, I once saw a fellow in period dress addressing a group of families. Gesturing to the village bank, he asked: “Were women allowed to own property in the early 19th century?”
You can guess the answer. “Of course not,” responded the poor indoctrinated souls.
“Oh, but of course they were!” the man cried, and went on with his presentation.
In the wheelwright’s shop at Colonial Williamsburg, meanwhile, a different set of children watched as several smocked men shaped wooden spokes for carriage wheels.
“I want to do that when I’m big,” said a little boy.
“Me too,” said a little girl.
That was the cue for one of the costumed historians to revise the revisionists. “Would she have been able to work in a shop like this, in the 18th century?” he asked the older children in the room, and you could tell that he knew what they’d say.
They shook their heads, no.
The man compressed his lips in what almost looked like disappointment. “Girls and women participated in all the trades,” he said, and went back to his work.
Meghan Cox Gurdon’s column appears on Sunday and Thursday. She can be contacted at [email protected].
