Beyond the Textbook: Women Have ALWAYS Led the Way

Those are the questions we carried with us all year as we brainstormed our subjects and created video after video for Share My Lesson. 

There’s an old saying: If you can’t see it, you can’t dream it. And it’s true. It is why I continue to fight to teach the full history of America, not just the whitewashed one. And it is why these History Chat videos are so crucial. I have noticed this in my own teaching experience. When we give students the real stories of women who led, built, created, strategized, resisted and reinvented the world, something shifts. They sit up straighter. They start connecting dots. Their definition of “leader” expands. It moves beyond the wall of 47 male presidents staring down at them in my classroom.

And that’s why this project became so much more than fast-paced videos. It became a way of putting back the missing pieces. 

Activism Across Eras: The Women Who Organized, Challenged and Mobilized

If you pull back the curtain on any major movement in this country, you’ll find women doing the work: the planning, the pushing, the insisting, the holding-it-all-together. This year, I highlighted some of the women whose leadership shaped entire eras, even if the men and the history books didn’t bother to give them the mic.

• Dorothy Height and Anna Arnold Hedgeman, who essentially engineered the March on Washington while receiving zero speaking time and barely any credit to this day. Their fingerprints are all over that moment, even if the spotlight wasn’t.
• Mahalia Jackson, who shifted Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech with just six words: “Tell them about the dream, Martin.” One sentence. A whole new direction. History is full of these women whose voices changed everything.

• Lucy Parsons, organizing workers long before labor protections existed. As we watch Starbucks workers striking across the country, you can draw a straight line from her to today’s labor movements.
• Angela Davis, who refused to accept the world as it was and demanded something better. Her courage, her moral clarity, feels especially urgent right now as we see attacks on civil rights ramping back up.
• Emma Lazarus, whose poem didn’t just welcome immigrants, it redefined the nation’s conscience. And somehow, in 2025, her words feel even more relevant, more necessary, than ever.
• Harriet Tubman, who escaped nearly 90 miles to freedom and then returned 19 times to lead hundreds to safety. A Civil War nurse, spy and military leader, she never stopped fighting for justice—including women’s rights and care for the elderly.  

Science and Redefining Knowledge: Women Who Rewrote the Rules

Even though I’m a social studies teacher, I love teaching STEM trailblazers because they blow up all the old narratives: the lone “genius” male scientist in a lab coat, the parade of awards handed to men, the discoveries and diseases literally named after them, and the endless montage of men being credited as the only ones who made a difference in science.

But here’s the truth: Women were always there. They were always leading, questioning, crunching numbers, out in the field, innovating. The problem wasn’t their brilliance; it was the erasure. Century after century, they were written out of the story.

This year, I featured:

• Temple Grandin, showing how neurodivergence fuels innovation.
• Eugenie Clark, clearing the shark’s name one experiment at a time.
• Katherine Johnson, quietly calculating the math that carried humans into outer space.
• Mae Jemison, proving that a Black woman belongs on a rocket and at the center of the story.

Carrying the Future: Quiet Leadership with Tremendous Impact

Some leadership is right out there for all the world to see. However, some leadership is quiet yet powerful nonetheless. It looks like: 

• Sacagawea, navigating new terrain for white colonizers while holding her baby in her arms, still a child herself.
• Coretta Scott King, carrying a movement through grief and refusing to let it die.
• Jane Goodall, rewriting what we believed about animal culture and reminding us and our students that the future depends on whether we care enough to save it.

Why This Work Matters in 2026

Every time I wrote one of these scripts and filmed the corresponding video, I kept thinking about my students today: the ones trying to understand their country in real time while states ban books and “divisive concepts,” and decide whose stories get to count. As they replace PBS with PragerU. 

But recently, I also haven’t been able to help myself from getting a little excited in spite of this bleak backdrop. Since Election Day over a month ago, we have entered a promising moment with more women governors sworn in than ever before. This shift didn’t happen in isolation. It happened because of women like the ones we profiled this year. One by one they have laid the groundwork of showing everyone from their local communities to the world that women can shape and make history just like men. 

Students deserve that context as they study history today. Teachers deserve those resources. Our country deserves an honest account of who built it, the full complex story. So, if students in some states can’t access this history in school, I hope they find it online in places like our Share My Lesson History Chat Series Hub and YouTube channel. 

None of this would exist without the team at Share My Lesson who believes deeply in this work:
Kelly Booz, our fearless leader who helped shape this idea in the first place.
Susan Youssofi, whose creative vision keeps pushing the series forward.
Andy Kratochvil and Megan Ortmeyer, who take my videos and turn them into magical resources.

This is a collaborative effort, and I’m so grateful to be part of it. I just got blown away going through all the videos and resources we produced this year alone.

As 2026 begins, I can’t wait to keep expanding this series! 

There are countless stories still waiting for you. You should see our spreadsheets and email chains on the backend.

But, I want to hear from y’all: Which woman should I feature next?