Bending the Future to Their Will: Civic Women, Social Education, and Democracy

This lively and thought-provoking collective biography uncovers the contributions of past women educators who promoted a distinctive vision of citizenship education. A distinguished group of scholars, including editors Margaret Smith Crocco and O. L. Davis, Jr., consider the lives and perspectives of eleven women educators and social activists_Jane Addams, Mary Sheldon Barnes, Mary Ritter Beard, Rachel Davis DuBois, Hazel Hertzberg, Alice Miel, Lucy Sprague Mitchell, Bessie Pierce, Lucy Maynard Salmon, Hilda Taba, and Marion Thompson Wright_concerned over the last century with issues of difference in schools and society. This volume's reconstruction of 'hidden history' reveals the importance of these women to contemporary debate about gender, pluralism, and education in a democracy. Characterized by views of education that were constructivist, customized, and transformative, their lives and ideas present an alternative model to dominant conceptualizations of education_one sensitive to the demands of pluralism within civil education long before the present-day debates about multiculturalism.

Table of Contents:
Chapter 1 Introduction Chapter 2 Considering the Source: Mary Sheldon Barnes, 1850-1898 Chapter 3 Lucy Maynard Salmon, 1853-1927: Historian, Teacher, Democrat Chapter 4 "Widening the Circle:" Jane Addams, 1860-1935, and the Re/Definition of Democracy Chapter 5 Shaping Inclusive Education: Mary Ritter Beard, 1876-1958, and Marion Thompson Wright, 1905-1962 Chapter 6 Lucy Sprague Mitchell, 1878-1967: Teacher, Geographer, and Teacher Educator Chapter 7 Bessie Louise Pierce, 1888-1974, and her Contributions to Social Studies Chapter 8 Rachel Davis DuBois, 1892-1993: Intercultural Education Pioneer Chapter 9 "Composing" Her Life: Hilda Taba, 1902-1967, and Social Studies History Chapter 10 Alice Miel, 1906-1998: Progressive Advocate of Democratic Social Learning for Children Chapter 11 The Search for a Coherent Curriculum Vision: Hazel Whitman Hertzberg, 1918-1988 Chapter 12 Courage, Conviction, and Social Education

About the Author :
Margaret Smith Crocco is associate professor of social studies at Teachers College, Columbia University. O. L. Davis, Jr. is professor of curriculum and instruction in the School of Education at the University of Texas, Austin.

Review :
Bending the Future to their Will provides an invaluable account of a group of women educators who were deeply concerned with questions of democracy and citizenship. In recovering the lives of these women from historical obscurity, this collection not only restores these women to their rightful place, it challenges us to rethink the accepted history of democratic educational thought in the United States. Historians of education and women, curriculum theorists, and social studies educators should read Bending the Future. We should heed the editors' advice to continue resurrecting educators lost to history and to continue asking what is left out of the social studies curriculum. As importantly, we should heed Hertzberg's recommendations that historians and social studies experts stop criticizing each other and start cooperating, discussing how to create a curriculum that effectively integrates these disciplines and teaches diversity without divisiveness. This book is a fine source to ignite that discussion. This volume is an important contribution to the history of education for democracy in the United States. The book is also an important contribution to the history of women and the history of ideas in the United States by restoring these women to their roles as public intellectuals in an important debate on democracy. Thanks to Crocco and Davis, we have a significant set of new heroines for social education in the US. This is narrative women's history at its best, stories told with strong undercurrents of gender and feminist issues. Contributors' chapters are so compelling that the text reads as a page-turning series of all too brief mysteries. I found myself exclaiming over and over, I didn't know that! Indeed from the scholarship and activism of Salmon, Wright, Taba and others, the field of social studies is now re-written.