A High Schooler’s Modern-Day Crusade to Include Women in American History

By Sreya Sarkar

17-year-old Prasidha Padmanabhan, a high school junior, has shown us that if you want to see change around you, you have to bring it about yourself without waiting for anything or anyone.

In 2020 she founded Women for Education, Advocacy and Rights (WEAR), a nonprofit dedicated to advocating for the rights, equality, and representation of women. While the entire world was grappling with the pandemic, Padmanabhan, a student at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Fairfax County, Virginia, was appalled to see the tweets and social media trends in support of repealing the 19th Amendment. It disturbed her to see how despite advances in every field basic human rights for an entire gender were up for debate.

Born in Texas, Padmanabhan grew up not seeing many women in her history textbooks. The rare ones she found were only mentioned as side notes. She connected how this lack of well-rounded education manifests itself in public debates when women’s rights come up.

Over a phone call, she talked about her background and how it motivated her to be the person she is. Born to parents originally from India’s southern state, Tamil Nadu, Padmanabhan is bilingual. She speaks Tamil as well as English and finds herself inspired by her Indian ethnicity and culture. “Golu, the doll festival of Navratri is my favorite because it celebrates 'Devi', the divine feminine," she said.

She thirsted to read about the role of women in history but instead only found a sketchy version of Susan B. Anthony's role in the women's suffrage movement, a fleeting mention of Harriet Tubman in connection with the Underground Railroad, and a rather undetailed account of Rosa Parks in the context of the Montgomery Bus boycott. As she did her reading and research outside the school curriculum she noticed how many women’s stories, especially those about women of color were going untold in schools.

Padmanabhan grew determined to change this.

She started a petition on change.org in August of 2020 to integrate more women's history in Fairfax County Public School (FCPS) education, one of the country’s largest school districts. Now the petition has more than 5,000 signatures supporting it and her nonprofit has 150 members but the journey till now has not always been smooth.

“There was a lot of hesitancy at the beginning because both students and parents questioned the need for such an organization, and also the need for more women's history in the school curriculum. As it caught more attention, I got attacked online. Some students thought that I was challenging the established curriculum and it upset them but I didn't give up," she said.

She even got responses like "Women's history doesn't matter", "There are not many women that can be written about in history" and “We know all there is to know about women in the past.”

But gradually she won the support of the teachers at FCPS. Education specialist Deborah March at FCPS mentioned in a CBS Mornings show that Padmanabhan helped lift up the “individual stories and contributions on women.” She connected Padmanabhan to the teachers so that they could work together on adding women, especially women of color to the curriculum.

The 2020-21 virtual school year gave her the opportunity to partner with the teachers at Fairfax County. She would sit with them weekly, look at specific units in the history curriculum and add untold stories to embellish them. "When they started the Civil War curriculum that year, our resources were used," said Padmanabhan. WEAR has a diverse range of educational resources on its website. They have information on historical figures like Claudette Colvin, one of the pioneers of the first boycott movement in Alabama. On Susie King Taylor, who was born a slave in Georgia but later became a nurse in the civil war. On Zitkala-Sa, an indigenous woman who traveled across the US advocating for indigenous rights.

What’s even more unique about the initiative is that it doesn’t want to shine light only on women who have played positive roles but also on those who were on the other side. They have interesting stories of women who dressed as men and played important roles in the Confederate army.

WEAR has a unique all-student executive board of 8 members including Padmanabhan. Everyone on it is involved in developing history material and resources that aim at helping schools build a more inclusive curriculum. Right now their website is under construction but soon they will have more material and sign-up links for both students and teachers in case they are interested in becoming a part of this path-breaking endeavor.

In the future, Padmanabhan plans to broaden WEAR’s initiative targeted toward Fairfax County across other counties and eventually across other states. She knows that she will face roadblocks as she proceeds but she wants Americans to understand that eventually, women's history is also their history. Her ultimate goal is that every student across Virginia and across the country learns equally about women. "I don't ever want a student to ask the question—Why does women's history matter?" she stated on a CBS Mornings show. “I want women’s history to be history only.” It seems that it’s a concept still not established in the American psyche, but modern-day crusades like the one led by Padmanabhan can change that.