Near the very start of The Taming of the Shrew, in the street before Baptista’s house, Kate exclaims “I pray you, sir, is it your will to make a stale of me amongst these mates” (1.1.57-58)? Apparently, she doesn’t want to marry. Although at this point in the play it’s hard to tell, the analysis and value we can take from this quote and many others throughout this play nearly endless.

At it’s simplest, this is what I have been studying in a modified (Covid) version of PLP. This time, instead of following a driving question, I would be following a sort of theme and by the end I would come up with my own. Only later on hearing the driving question “How can we use our study of “The Taming of the Shrew” to understand how much, yet how little, has changed for women?”Of course this question and investigation is a big one and to tackle it in this post, I’ll have to go back to the beginning of my learning this project.

When this project was first introduced to me, I was a little confused. For every other project up to this one, the teachers presented the class a driving question, something to work towards and ultimately answer. This time, no question. It seemed strange not knowing exactly why we were researching this or that but in the end, it was worth it. Essentially we would be creating a historical essay.  This post essentially details how a historical essay is made.

For me, I started to get more used to the project, and actually started really liking it a couple weeks in. I really like the mixture of literature and history which in this case was nice blend of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew and more modern essays, and other media surrounding suffragism and more modernly, feminism. This first part of the project was all about research and understanding the necessary back ground information. Around the time we begun “Is This Sexist or Not?” In this part of class my teacher would play a video and the class had to figure out if the video was sexist or not. We would consider context like age of the video, and who made it, but it can be hard to tell wether somebody is “joking” or not in their music video bashing women. I liked this part of class because it really made you think and vocalize your opinion and it often started some really great debates between people with two valid opinions.

Here are two of the “Is This Sexist or Not?” Videos. Comment below if you think they are sexist or not!

This first few weeks of class was a lot of research, write, repeat but because the question I would be formulating at the final milestone was so big, it required all of this background knowledge. I had to know what happened in The Taming of the Shrew, including exact lines and excerpts. I had to have background knowledge on women’s rights from suffragism (starting in roughly 1860) to modern feminism’s fight for equality in the final refutes of openly misogynistic governments. To cap off and show my knowledge, to prove I could move forward, a presentation on feminism in a mostly randomly selected time period. For my group members and I, the 1980’s.

With the 1980’s being a mostly quiet time period in terms of the progression of women’s rights, it was really interesting to research further. The closer I looked the more I realized even though the 80’s may not have headlined the 20th century for women, changes were still happening, women were still fighting for equality. The legalization of abortion in America, the first women in space and women finally starting to break free of their societal role as the one who cooks, cleans, and raises the kids all began to shift in the 80’s. It’s interesting how we associate certain time periods like enfranchisement for women as the times when all the changes happen, but in reality changes are always happening. Feminism and the push for equity and equality are a constant in our world. We as outsiders to feminism, perceive it differently as we only see progress when these major changes from their world collide with ours via the news, social media, YouTube, etc.

Finally, weeks of lead up research, assignments, and presentations came to an end as I began to formulate my thesis. Although theses are usually only a sentence or two, they must be the most time consuming, difficult sentences to make. These sentences aren’t adding support or even introducing a new idea, they are the basis of your entire essay. Everything you write could be amazing but if you have a bad thesis, your essay isn’t going to be good. I must have talked to Ms. Willmse ten times that day, trying to perfect it. There needed to be elements unique to ourselves but still focused on the topic. With many revisions I finally had made something I liked. “In the past, marriage has been an economic decision, contrary to modern day marriage, as a loving unification of two people.  This evidence illustrates the progress society has made towards equality, yet reveals our reluctance to change our most familiar societal institutions.” This thesis had all of the things I wanted and I was ready to make my first essay draft.

The essay itself wasn’t too big of a challenge, given the systems I had created to make sure it went smoothly. I had research, an essay outline, a finished thesis and my brain. I decided not to follow my outline too closely because as I wrote the essay I would find new evidence that supports my claims even more precisely. After writing and a few revisions I had my first draft done. I realized after critique, I would need much many more quotes, facts, and studies to back my essay up, especially if I wanted to call it a historical essay. After adding more backup to my essay, it was complete, that is everything you need to do to make a good historical essay.

In reflection. I must have done more writing, more critical thinking and more in depth analysis in this project than any other project ever. The sheer amount of things we crammed into this 5 weeks is unbelievable. The learning I have done is as well. It was at times a grind and for me personally, very difficult to stay focused, but I now feel like I am a noticeably better writer. I feels myself diversifying my writing as I write it and I can see many ways to go about saying one thing. You have to work hard to get better and you know what they say, “no pain no gain”. Difficult it may have been but thankful I am. This project was one of the best, educationally, and a great addition to my senior year.