Hey, hi, and hello. Welcome back to my blog where not all those who wander are lost (J.R.R Tolkien). In this post I’m going to be reflecting on our most recent PLP project. This project was probably the fastest project we have done so far in PLP. In the 3 weeks we had for this project we were tasked to create a book for kindergarteners that talked about powerful women. The driving question for this project was: How do we encourage children to support women’s rights? Now before I dive into answering this question I’m going to talk a bit about what we did through the course of this project.

One of the things we discussed a lot in this class was how women have been depicted through the years of film and television. We watched ‘Taming of The Shrew’ and ‘10 Things I Hate About You’, we also analyzed scenes from ‘Golden Girls’, ‘SNL’, and ‘Sex and The City’. After watching these we pin pointed that many times in media women were depicted in stereotypes. Anything thing that we noticed was that women were often depicted as not having any emotions and their characters didn’t have very good character arcs. After discussing how women are poorly depicted in media Kaia and I talked about certain movies and tv shows that have actual good representation, like legally blond, Erin Brockovich, Thelma & Louise, Hidden Figures, and etc.

During this quick project we also learned about the different waves of feminism. The first wave of feminism was the suffrage movement. The suffrage movement was when women were advocating for the rights to vote and run in elections. This then moved into the late 1910s with the First World War women gained jobs and if you had a next of kin in the war you could vote. However with this improvement involved a set back of unfair work. Women were not treated equally to men as they got paid less and were not receiving of the same opportunities as men. The second wave of feminism was during the 1970s. The Equal Rights Act (ERA) was drafted in 1923 and has been adapted over the years. The key message of this Act is “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex. The Congress shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.” In 1972 this was passed by Federal Government, but it is not enacted. The third wave of feminism started in the 90s with Anita Hill’s testimony regarding sexual harassment by Clarence Thomas. There is no clear end to the third wave as many believe it still might be happening. However we might be in the fourth wave of feminism which is focusing on sexual harassment, body shaming and rape culture.

After learning about how women have been depicted over the years of film and reviewing the waves of feminism it was time to start our project. For this project we could be in a group of up to 3 or 4 people. I was in a group with Ally and Kaia. We decided that our book would focus on the suffragette movement with the inspiration of workplace protesting.