WOMEN IN WORLD AREA STUDIES:

The Women in World Area Studies (WWAS) program was developed to integrate women’s history into regular world area studies high school curriculum, focusing on the Robbinsdale and St. Louis Park school districts. Towards this purpose, WWAS developed lessons and curricula on the history of women in world cultures. Marjorie Wall Bingham and Susan Hill Gross were directors and in charge of research, writing, and pilot teaching for WWAS. They discovered a significant amount of unexamined material on the history of women in world cultures. This discovery, combined with the successful pilot teaching of the initial curriculum units, helped the WWAS project secure significant additional foundation funding.

The program grew from a three year project originally funded by a grant from the Title IV-C of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (United States Department of Health, Education, and Welfare) to a ten year program. It produced thirteen books (a series called Women in World area cultures), teachers guides, lesson plans, bibliographies, sound filmstrips, and videos on women in eight cultural areas commonly taught in Minnesota high school world history courses. Funders for the additional years of WWAS (1984-1987) included the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Northwest Area Foundation, the Japan Foundation, and the ISE Cultural Foundation of Tokyo.

Over 100,000 books from the WWAS series were purchased by school districts representing every state in the United States and by many schools in other countries. For example, the book on the history of women in Japan was purchased by a number of Japanese high schools.

WWAS ended in 1987.

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Records (1974-1987) include correspondence, grants, pilot teaching files, project files, workshops and presentation files, talks by Susan Gross and Marjorie Bingham, and a scrapbook of newspaper clippings.

Curriculum material (1977-1987) includes study guides, selected bibliographies, and the 13 books of the Women In World Cultures series by Marjorie Wall Bingham and Susan Hill Gross. Also included are 3 video recordings to go with this series.

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Availability:

The collection is open for research use.

Use and Reproduction:

Authors retain copyright in all published materials. For further information concerning copyright status and/or permission to publish, please consult the reference staff.

Preferred Citation:

[Indicate the cited item and/or series here]. Women in World Area Studies Organizational Records. Minnesota Historical Society.

See the Chicago Manual of Style for additional examples.

Accession Information:

Accession numbers: 15,712; 15,841; 16,381.

Location of Master Files:

Digital masters of the video material are maintained on the Society's secure digital collections storage servers and are managed and preserved in accordance with archival best practices.

The original videocassettes were disposed after the material was digitally reformatted into MOV files.

Processing Information:

Processed by: Alex Kent, August 2009.

Digital video transferred from the master videocassettes by the Minnesota Historical Society for preservation purposes, (June, 2019).

Catalog ID number: 006935629

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Organizational records of both the Upper Midwest Women's History Center and the Women Historians of the Midwest are also available in the Minnesota Historical Society manuscript collections.

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This collection is indexed under the following headings in the catalog of the Minnesota Historical Society. Researchers desiring materials about related topics, persons or places should search the catalog using these headings.

Topics:

Curriculum planning -- Minnesota.

Women -- History.

Teachers -- Minnesota.

Persons:

Bingham, Marjorie Wall, 1936-

Gross, Susan Hill, 1934-

Organizations:

Robbinsdale Area Schools (Minn.)

St. Louis Park High School (Saint Louis Park, Minn.)

Document Types:

Video recordings (physical artifacts).

Titles:

Women in world cultures.

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