The passionate HSIE teacher from Pittwater High School says the state’s history syllabus, as a whole, does a decidedly piecemeal job of recognising the significant role, plight, power and influence of women throughout the ages.  

“I think the modern history syllabus needs to step it up,” she tells EducationHQ. 

“I mean, they've changed the syllabus five years ago, and … now it's all just men and war and power – when there were women involved in those struggles, a lot.” 

Sonter warns that while more experienced history teachers will take it upon themselves to delve into the ‘Sappho’s of the world’ in the classroom, it takes a long time to get your practice to this stage. 

“I would like to see equal recognition in the syllabus, but I'd like to see a deeper dive [too], because new teachers that get the syllabus, they're just looking at what's there.

“I think the syllabus could be more intentional and specific with the amount of dot points they allocate to study women. 

“It really is a bit of a statistics and a numbers game initially,” she adds. 

Sonter recently scoured all history topics her school covers from Year 7 to 12 and found just 12 per cent of dot points specifically reference ‘women’, ‘woman’ or refer to a specific female figure. 

“The modern history syllabus for Year 11 and 12 only has 3 per cent, ancient history has more with 25 per cent. 

“So those are the statistics that we're dealing with,” the teacher flags. 

In her own ancient history lessons, Sonter makes a point of injecting female characters into studies spanning Ancient China, the Mediterranean, Medieval Europe, as well as Contact and Colonisation. 

“We look a lot at Agrippina The Younger from Imperial Rome, from the Julio-Claudian period in the topics that we do for the HSC. 

“And on top of that, we look at the women that came before her that made her role possible; her mother, Agrippina The Elder, and people like Livia Julia, who was the wife and daughter of the First Emperor Augustus.

“But then we also look at Greek women that didn't necessarily have as much power, so … Hypatia, who was an Egyptian philosopher and astronomer and mathematician in the 3rd century in Egypt."

Jen Sonter recently presented at the Centre for Professional Learning’s 'Women in History: Reclaiming (In)Visible women' course. 

In the junior school, students learn about the likes of Barangaroo from Australia (an influential Cammeraygal fisherwoman who defied British colonialists) and Joan of Arc. 

“I look at Cleopatra a lot, because she is very misunderstood,” Sonter adds. 

“Everyone's obsessed with her being ‘hot’, and not the fact that [she] was like a real person who spoke nine languages and, you know, ran a whole country.”

Sonter also sees a clear problem with how the syllabus references women in its coverage of the World Wars. 

“It seems very tick-boxy, ‘Oh, we have to look at women, so we'll look at nurses', [or] 'let's look at them on the home front’, when there's actually some really interesting stories about women in Europe, Jewish people parashooting into Nazi Germany and things like that,” she says. 

“But they are just harder to find and harder to source, which I guess the syllabus has to take into account in terms of resourcing for schools.”

When they do get a mention in the document, women are most often defined by their connection to powerful men, Sonter says. 

“They're the daughters, wives, sisters of the people in power. The exception would be Egypt, because they tend to have that Pharaonic role that they can take on. 

“But again, it's because they're connected to the men in their household – because all the men have died, they have power.” 

Rectifying the gender imbalance would go a long way toward combatting the tightening hold certain ‘manfluencers’ are wielding on boys’ attitudes and behaviour, Sonter says. 

“In light of boys gravitating towards people like Andrew Tate, and the levels of misogyny that female teachers face, I think students on the whole need to be exposed to the fact that women exist and they deserve to be respected – and well.

“Learning about how that hasn't happened in history and what women have had to do to get where they are, I think, is incredibly important to combat some of those things that we face in the classroom.” 

Last year, EducationHQ heard that history teachers across Victorian secondary schools were being forced to fight to save their subject at senior levels, with school leaders and career advisors reportedly making deliberate moves to sideline the discipline.

Sonter says her school leadership are supportive of the subject, but worries that we’re seeing a devaluing of history education across society in general. 

“I think that's really sad and difficult to work with, because it teaches so many interesting skills of critical thinking, of analysing the media, of making informed global citizens that can go out and make informed choices,” she says. 

The teacher is determined to champion the humanities amid a broader slide toward the STEM fields. 

“The world needs scientists and mathematicians, don't get me wrong, but the world needs philosophers and ethical thinkers as well to go hand in hand with that. 

“So that’s why I teach history, and I'm very passionate about it and the other humanity subjects that I teach, because I think it's starting to get a little bit eroded,” Sonter says. 

“And again, it comes from politics as well, because there's certain factors that don't value those skills, or don't want those skills.

“It can be a bit frustrating, but that's what I want to improve: the uptake of those subjects.”