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History Of Women's Suffrage Highlighted In New Curriculum

Better Days 2020 is a Utah organization that created a curriculum about Utah women's path to suffrage.
Better Days 2020

Workshops this week are preparing 30 of Utah’s elementary and middle school teachers to teach their students a new curriculum about the history of women’s rights in the state. The curriculum focuses on women’s suffrage in Utah.

Better Days 2020 is a Utah organization that wants to make Utah a better place for women by exploring the history of women in the state. One way they are sharing that history is through a curriculum developed for fourth-and seventh-grade students.

“It’s a great curriculum,” said Pam Sua, a Jordan School District Administrator over social studies and foreign language. “It talks about how women in Utah worked to get the right to vote at the same time we were looking to get statehood and who the figures were that helped move this forward. And they weren’t all women. There were a lot of men who worked to make this happen.”

A seventh-grade history teacher in the Jordan School District, Krista Gibbons, piloted the curriculum last year. Next year the curriculum will be available to all fourth and seventh-grade teachers who want to use it Sua said.

Naomi Watkins is the Better Days 2020 director of education.

“The curriculum is more than just a curriculum too. Like, the website has resources for the general public. It’s not just teachers that can utilize this,” Watkins said.

Better Days is also working to ensure the curriculum covers other areas of women’s history.

“Our goal is to show that women’s history is not just limited to suffrage,” Watkins said. “While we’ve started with the suffrage movement, we’re hoping to build more lessons that look at the diversity  and the abundance of women’s advocacy work and women’s history-making that’s occurred in this territory and state.”