Teaching Feminism at Yeshiva

My Mom, born in 1959, speaks passionately about the feminist movement. Prior to Trump’s election, my sister and I rolled our eyes when Mom proudly recalled her days as a “women’s libber.” Mom’s generation had done the hard work. I was smug in my privilege. I had rights. I didn’t feel like opportunities had been denied to me based on my gender or that I’d clawed, fought, or even struggled much for equality. Feminism felt like a hazy history lesson I hadn’t paid attention to. I was vaguely literate in feminist theory from a few courses during college but I wasn’t being held accountable. There wasn’t a reason for me to take up arms.

Then Hillary Clinton lost the Presidential Election. When I woke up the next day, to a barrage of fearful indignant messages and panicked calls, Mom’s experiences and memories became instantaneously relevant. The American administration is currently run by a man who openly disparages women (and anyone he’s in the mood to target) and as a result, I no longer feel the same smugness I did before the inauguration in 2016. Like most of us living in America, I find myself constantly sorting through the reverberations of Hillary’s loss and what it revealed about the American psyche.

A year after Trump was sworn in, I started teaching at a Jewish Yeshivah, where gender roles are highly regulated. I was unprepared for the difference in treatment between boys and girls. Most of my female students will not go on to college. Most of my students are married by 19 or 20 and will likely have multiple children by 25. When studying Torah, girls and boys engage in different paths of learning. Boys have gym. Girls learn Israeli dance. Girls and boys lead markedly different lives, even during the course of the school day. They’re headed for much different futures.

The hostile environment from the top down in this country, paired with my daily experience working in a religious setting which controls gender roles has propelled me into greater awareness. I’m embracing increasing feelings of frustration and anger without immediately editing my responses. It’s fair to say I’m drifting towards a more overt feminist identity.

The teacher side of me wants to share with my students as I’m learning. How can I prevent these girls from taking their freedoms for granted as I did, while also remaining alert and engaged? How does one teach feminism to sixth graders at Yeshivah?

What has occurred to me is to teach the story of my hyphenated name, which generates a high amount of curiosity all of its own. “But why do you have two last names?” my students ask, genuinely puzzled.

“Did you get married this summer?” they ask, as if this is the only possible explanation.
I explain how when my Mom got married, she didn’t want to give up her name. She felt attached to her heritage and didn’t want to part with that aspect of her identity. I say, “My Mom is a feminist.”
I can’t teach my sixth-grade students about Florynce Kennedy or the Women’s March. But I do think there’s a chance my students might one day recall their teacher, the one whose Mom didn’t give up her name when she got married, the one who held on and defied a system. I acknowledge that this is optimistic, and furthermore, self-important. It’s likely these students will forget I exist. They’ll grow up, get married, and take their husband’s names.

But there are precious moments every day, small moments in the classroom that feel significant. This year, my students are reading Amal, Unbound, a young adult book loosely based on the story of Malala Yousafzai, the young Pakistani activist and Nobel Prize winner who fights for women’s rights in that part of the world.

“But why can’t she go to school?” my students ask. I feel lucky to witness the cogs turning in their brains as my students are faced with the ugly truth of inequality. Maybe my students will come of age in a world that continues to grow, evolve and question. A world that makes the best of dark period in history and moves forward.

Gloria Steinem has said hope is an unruly emotion, but hope is also a precursor to change. Hope allows me to dream of a place where my students can go on to achieve whatever it is, they dream–outside of the confines of societal, familial or religious pressures. Hope allows me to imagine my female students going on to do what they love.

But for now, I’m content in imagining someday soon my female students will have the option to choose gym instead of dance. I know they want to play basketball, just like the boys.