MRS. PROCELL TEACHER FEATURE

WHAT DO YOU HOPE WILL CHANGE IN WOMEN'S RIGHTS IN THE FUTIRE?

I want women to get wages that are equivalent to their male counterparts We need paid maternity leave. We need paid paternity leave too. There are still societal norms and expectations in terms of traditional family dynamics that still make things really hard for everyone. We have a lot of work to do to normalize these shifting dynamics and to make it easier for people to not feel like they have to be one way or the other because every family is different and every person is different

You can’t tell me that there’s not a difference in the number of women CEOs and male CEOs, and you can’t tell me that it’s not a whole lot of women driving business models and being innovative out there for these companies, so why is it that we don’t see as many of them at the top?

HOW DO YOU INCLUDE POWERFUL, YET FORGOTTEN, WOMEN IN YOUR HISTORY CLASSES?

I never get to talk about women in history as much as I want to. Most of the important people to know for the AP class are men, but a dog makes the cut, Sergeant Stubby from World War I. One of my favorite websites is “Rejected Princesses,” and I’ve tried to work in a reference to it. Students are often shocked and interested, sometimes angry, when they hear about these amazing stories of these figures in history, and they’ve never heard of them before I remember feeling the same way It's really important to learn about these voices that have been silenced for millenia

WHAT LED YOU TO BECOME SUCH A STRONG PROPONENT OF FEMINISM?

One of my grandmothers had nine living children and went to college in the sixties or seventies and got her nursing degree when she still had littles at home, and my other grandmother was just this amazing person. She was an Annie Oakley kind of character, and she carried a machete, a beretta, and a slingshot with rocks in her Ford Torino station wagon. She had to work super hard to support her four kids Both of my grandmas were just these amazing role models of ladies who worked really hard, and they may have started out their married lives with their husbands being the bread-winners, but they ended up being economically sufficient on their own ground My parents got divorced when I was a kid, so my mom had to work two to three jobs to support us, and she sort of instilled in me this stubbornness If something needs to be done, you do it If you overstep, maybe you apologize later To take a line from Dirty Dancing, “nobody puts Baby in the corner,” and I feel like my grandmas and my mom and my three older sisters have shown me that you work hard for what you want and go after it