The Women’s Kit is a hands-on, free-form, multi-media educational resource that promotes discussion on women’s history and the experiences associated with being a woman. Created at the Ontario Institute of Studies in Education (OISE), The Women’s Kit contains over 150 resources (pamphlets, images, articles, records and more) about women.
Feminist photographer Pamela Harris started working on the kit in 1972 with the purpose of raising the consciousness of young people. Her goal was to get high school and college aged students to be aware of their positions and experiences as men and women, as well as to educate these students about women’s history. Books and records about women were few and far between; the team of women that created the kit included works from outside sources as well as material they created. This content included analyses of current advertisements, postcards of artwork by women artists, and recorded interviews with women such as Nell Hall-Humpherson, an active participant in the women’s suffrage movement in the U.K.
What began as an academic multi-media box filled with resources on women grew into the Women’s Educational Resource Center at OISE, which then became the Center for Women’s Studies in Education. The theme of The Women’s Kit, however, has remained the same.
“It’s about us [women]. It’s our movement, our history.”
-Pamela Harris
Feminist photographer Pamela Harris started working on the kit in 1972 with the purpose of raising the consciousness of young people. Her goal was to get high school and college aged students to be aware of their positions and experiences as men and women, as well as to educate these students about women’s history. Books and records about women were few and far between; the team of women that created the kit included works from outside sources as well as material they created. This content included analyses of current advertisements, postcards of artwork by women artists, and recorded interviews with women such as Nell Hall-Humpherson, an active participant in the women’s suffrage movement in the U.K.
What began as an academic multi-media box filled with resources on women grew into the Women’s Educational Resource Center at OISE, which then became the Center for Women’s Studies in Education. The theme of The Women’s Kit, however, has remained the same.
“It’s about us [women]. It’s our movement, our history.”
-Pamela Harris