Document Study: Moments of Personal Resistance - Actions
- Introduce your students to Grace Paley (1922-2007). Explain that she was a Jewish author who wrote short stories and poetry about everyday life, especially women's lives. She grew up in the early-mid 20th century in New York City surrounded by her family and a large Jewish community. She was also an activist throughout her life, involved especially in anti-war and anti-nuclear activism as well as many local issues in her community.
- Distribute the document study "Traveling" by Grace Paley to your students. Have them read Part I of the text to themselves. Then discuss the study questions as a class. If your students have difficulty with any of the questions, you may want to direct them to the appropriate part of the text or reread a section together. Repeat this process with Part II and Part III.
- After discussing the Grace Paley essay, tell (or act out) the Eli Evans and Bernice Stern stories that can be found in "Vertical Seating at a Lunch Counter" and "I Have Taken Stands". (You can also invite a student to do so.) Briefly go over with your students when each of the two stories was written/told, who the author/speaker is, and in what context it was written/told. (Like the Paley essay, both stories are reflections back, rather than documents from the time. Eli Evans is an accomplished author who was asked by a publisher to write about his life experience in the South for a book that would be widely available to the public. Bernice Stern is a woman who was asked to tell her life story during a lengthy oral history interview, conducted by the Jewish Women's Archive as part of a project collecting life histories from women in Seattle.)
- Discuss as a class the following questions:
- What do these 3 stories have in common? How are they different?
- How is each situation an example of personal resistance?
- What motivated each person to resist?
- How did these moments of personal resistance change the situation or the people involved? Many people find personal resistance difficult. What do you think makes it difficult sometimes?
