POINT OF VIEW/ Suffrage and global citizenship

In 1911, renowned activist Charlotte Perkins Gilman spent the summer at Lark’s Nest in Woodstock’s Byrdcliffe community, historian Alf Evers states in Woodstock, History of an American Town. Gilman is credited with authorship of the moving Appeal to Liberty which was read by Edna Kearns at Long Island events and her suffrage journalism. In a suffrage newspaper special Kearns edited for the Brooklyn Times of June 7, 1915, she reported on the suffrage movement’s demonstration of large numbers of women who visited the Statue of Liberty in New York and read the Appeal to Liberty. Edna Kearns worked on the two New York State suffrage elections in 1915 and 1917. She picketed the White House with the National Women’s Party, served as congressional chair for suffrage leader Alice Paul on Long Island, and supported the civil disobedience of the National Women’s Party in its attempt to keep the issue of freedom and democracy alive, even when the issue became controversial after the outbreak of World War I. Suffragists boldly confronted U.S. President Woodrow Wilson and insisted that the U.S. couldn’t claim to fight for democracy abroad when democracy wasn’t assured for its own citizens at home.

Edna’s wagon reminds us that American government requires participation by the people it represents to maintain freedom.

One non-violent battlefront this year is in the realm of public education. The contents of the State’s core curriculum is undergoing major revision for the first time since 1996, and the potential results of this process — including the removal of social studies as a subject — are being discussed behind closed doors.

Around the corner from the current exhibit on the second floor of the capitol building is the Hall of Governors, a display of portraits of 56 of the all male former governors of New York State. Governor Andrew Cuomo has invested time and money in the reopening of the Hall and expanded historic displays throughout the state capitol building. “From Seneca Falls to the Supreme Court…” is expected to be up through the summer of 2012. The primary interpretative panel notes: “From education to healthcare to civil equality, women have been the driving force behind almost every reform movement in our state. While they many not have always been the individuals passing the laws, women were writing the policies, organizing campaigns and generating public awareness. For too long, these efforts have been minimized, omitted from the history books or forgotten completely.”

The prevailing national trend in education, however, is to lurch backwards. The New York State Department of Education is considering the option of adopting the new National Core Curriculum that focuses on improving test scores in English and math at the expense of social studies, history and citizenship. Peter Feinman, founder and president of the non-profit Institute of History, Archaeology and Education, deplores this possibility and advocates for a much broader curriculum to be adopted in New York State. After attending the March conference of the New York State Council for Social Studies, Feinman wrote in New York History on April 4, 2012: “The common core curriculum which should include citizenship as a goal and which should tell the story of how the people of the world created the greatest country in the world will be a battlefront where we determine the direction of America in the 21st century.”

“The Education Department hired several people who are working on it in private,” Feinman said in a telephone interview this week. “We don’t know much about it. They are ‘general’ discussions,’” he said. The current standards were established prior to 911 and prior to the election of Barack Obama.

“Will the curriculum continue to include global studies? Will we just be handed a document? We don’t know, and there is a lot of concern about it,” Feinman said.

While solutions proposed by the N.Y.S. Council for the Social Studies may or may not prevail at the political level, grass roots community activism is on the rise. This is how the suffrage movement began. Now, instantaneous global communication is fueling organizations like Occupy Wall Street. Women in Black have been protesting war for years in Woodstock and around the country. The Martin Luther King Day celebration in Woodstock in January, with its stories, life size puppets, music and performance art is an exciting example of creative citizenship. Local residents recently marched from Woodstock to Catskill carrying signs calling for freedom of expression and for the reinforcement of civil liberties.

Communication is key to sharing the heart’s desire to live our lives in accord with our deeply held values.