“This [curriculum] stresses the VALUE of young people to social movements, not just as additional voices but as actors in their own right.”
In 2020, the year of the women’s suffrage centennial, Stonehurst was honored to partner with the Waltham Public Schools to create new 8th-grade civics curriculum, “Anxious to Vote: Students, Workers and the Fight for Women’s Suffrage.” This curriculum is ready to share with students across Massachusetts.
A recent discovery prompted the project. In 2019, we were excited to find that the Paine family sold a piece of their estate to a prominent lawyer, suffragist and teacher who taught civics to workers studying at night schools in Boston and Waltham. It seemed like such an appropriate move for the Paines, who were social justice advocates with ancestors who helped establish the democratic foundations of this country. The Ida Estelle Hall house still stands on the edge of this property near two public schools.
In this new school curriculum, students will explore a fictional 1920 voting rights time capsule with items that Hall’s students might have encountered in local campaigns for women’s suffrage. They will hear directly from diverse voices of the past to discover how activists in the industrial city of Waltham worked together to fight for the right to vote.
The Friends of Stonehurst received support for this program through “The Vote: A Statewide Conversation about Voting Rights,” a special initiative of Mass Humanities that includes organizations around the state.
This program is funded in part by Mass Humanities, which receives support from the Massachusetts Cultural Council and is an affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
