WKU faculty, staff and students gathered Friday afternoon to learn about women in ancient history.

The annual Genderations Luncheon series, sponsored by the Gail Martin Faculty Development and Lecture Fund, was held at the Mahurin Honors College and International Center. 

After lunch, Kathryn Reetzke, history instructor, gave a presentation titled “Teaching Women and Agency in Ancient World History.” Her discussion was on the primary sources she collected for teaching World History from the perspective of women, where restrictions, laws and cultural norms often attempted to negate women’s power.

Reetzke said if people only look at who the kings, lawmakers or religious leaders are in history, they will end up not learning about a huge percentage of the population.

Reetzke said everyone has been born of a mother, and everyone has female relatives somewhere in their family. She said these women should be seen in the present and the past.

“If we’re not also addressing kind of what’s happening in these rural spaces and what women are doing, then we’re missing out on a big chunk of what history should be,” Reetzke said.

Reetzke said if she is trying to truly connect with her students, she should be expanding the materials that they use to also show them they are represented in the past. Since she teaches a Colonnade course with students from a variety of majors, Reetzke said she pays attention to the majors of those who sign up for her classes because she wants to spark her students’ interests in the course.

One example, Reetzke said, is how she gives extra credit activities about Greek Olympians because she has a lot of exercise science students. She said those students might look at what Greek Olympians are eating before they run races and compare that to what they are learning in exercise science.

Attendees of the luncheon participated in a group activity that Reetzke does with her classes. She said she came up with the group activity over the summer in preparation for a course called World Civilizations (pre- and post-1500) that she is teaching. 

Attendees examined images in groups of different artifacts and paintings of women in ancient history. The images had short descriptions students could read, but they had to use their prior knowledge of women in history to guess what was happening in the images.

Groups were then instructed to look at the back of the images and some primary source materials written by women in history, which helped them find out what was actually going on in the images. Reetzke said this activity makes students think about what they have and have not been taught about women in the past.

Tanya Burgess, assistant pedagogical professor of social work, said she was interested in the luncheon because she got her undergraduate degree in anthropology, specifically looking at Greek life.

Burgess said she loves all things antiquity, and she feels it’s important for departments to show students how they are represented in different career fields throughout history.

In social work specifically, Burgess said women make a large percentage of that career field but aren’t talked about much, though. 

“This is really great because talking about women and what’s going on in the world kind of needs more context than just the last 50 years or the last 70 years,” Burgess said.

Burgess said professors need to review the textbooks and materials they teach like Reetzke. She said professors should make changes if the materials are outdated or don’t have different perspectives from varying groups in history.

“We need to be critical about the way that we utilize these textbooks and what we ask our students to read,” Burgess said.

Abigail Goehner, freshman English literature major, said she is in one of Reetzke’s classes. She said she has attended a few of these kinds of events hosted by the WKU Gender and Women Studies Program, like the Nikky Finney poetry reading.

Goehner said she enjoys going to any event to see what speakers have to say. 

“People say college is what you make of it,” Goehner said. “Aside from just classes, so much of the value is being around people who know so much more than you, and when they’re trying to share that with you, you should take the opportunity.”