THOUSAND OAKS : Students Honor 5 Key Women From History

For 23 girls at Banyan Elementary School in Thousand Oaks, the experience of playing dress-up and pretend will be meaningful as well as fun next week.

The girls, like others in Thousand Oaks elementary schools throughout the week, will be acting out the roles of five important women in history as part of the Women’s History Project sponsored by the American Assn. of University Women.

Jill Lewis, the project’s co-chairwoman, said she was pleasantly surprised to find that the girls didn’t sign up to perform monologues in front of classmates just so they could wear frilly costumes.

“They were saying, ‘I want to be an attorney when I grow up, so I want to be Vilma Martinez,’ ” Lewis said, referring to one of this year’s subjects, a Latina activist lawyer.

The AAUW started the project eight years ago to make students aware of the often-overlooked accomplishments of women in history, Lewis said. The association researches and writes monologues about five different women each year and distributes them to Thousand Oaks schools.

Jessica Arsenian, 11, said she wanted to play Ida B. Wells-Barnett, a slave-turned journalist in the late 19th Century, to raise awareness about women’s accomplishments.

“In history books, you don’t see women or any history about women,” the sixth-grader said. “I think people should know about it, so I decided to teach them about it.”

At some Thousand Oaks elementary schools next week, adult volunteers will enact the women’s lives in the monologues, which last several minutes. But Banyan Principal George Coyle said he liked the idea of involving students in the project beyond just watching.

After a dress rehearsal this week, Coyle told the girls, “When you walk into those classrooms, you’re going to be teaching other kids about women in history they may never read about and may never hear about otherwise.”

Judy Paullus, whose daughter will portray turn-of-the-century architect Julia Morgan, said the project provides a valuable new perspective on history for youngsters--and even adults.

“I’m embarrassed to admit I hadn’t heard of most of these women and I considered myself fairly educated,” Paullus said after watching the dress rehearsal.

Other women who will be portrayed in the project this year are physicist Chien-Shiung Wu, the first woman to teach at Princeton, in the 1930s, and Susan Butcher, who has won the Alaskan Iditarod dog sled race four times.