Girls' Study of Women's History Goes National

As students usher in the summer months and say goodbye to a year of accomplishments and memories, two sophomores are rubbing elbows with some of the most prominent historians in the country.

Courtney Cross and Louisa Oualim, both 16, spent much of this week at the University of Maryland taking part in the . The girls won the New Jersey competition in May with a documentary about the Women Air Force Service Pilots (WASPs) under the direction of history teacher Roseann Lichatin in U.S. History I Honors.

“Courtney really wanted to do the women’s suffrage movement, while I wanted to research revolutions in aviation,” Oualim said. “We decided Women Air Force Service Pilots was a good compromise.”

The skeleton of the project was outlined in November, when the students went to work researching the group once they decided the topic. After months of hard work, process papers, bibliography pages and video creation, the girls began their way through the judging process.

“Originally we just made the documentary to get a good grade in history class,” Oualim said. “When we were selected at regionals we weren’t really that surprised since most of the other documentaries from our school passed, too.”

But the next step, succeeding at the level of the state competition, was far from a consideration for the girls.

“They called our entry number (at the state competition) and then started to say Louisa’s name and the rest was drowned out in cheering,” Cross said. “Louisa started getting up and I tugged on her arm saying ‘That’s not us, why are you standing up?’ She had to pull me out of the seat and shove me down the aisle. I was in such shock, the entire time I was thinking, ‘Wait, there was a mistake, this kind of stuff doesn’t happen to me. This only happens in movies.’”

The history students’ win would take them to the National History Day finals competition this week at the University of Maryland. Unfortunately, the documentary did not make it into the top-14 projects, but was one of the final 86 from around the nation.

The process of creating the project and working toward a goal, however, may have been reward enough.

“Courtney and I are both ‘leaders’; we both wanted to take control of the whole project thinking that our own way was better,” Oualim said. “I had to learn to trust Courtney’s judgment and let her make decisions without always asking. I had to learn to just work on my part even though I didn’t know exactly what the final outcome would be, which I know will happen more later in my life.”

“(Making the documentary) I learned to never ever give up,” Cross said. “The WASPs were turned away, abused, and ridiculed for trying to be a part of the Air Force, but they refused to let it get to them. It was almost like seeing Martin Luther King Jr. there.

“I also learned to like history. I hated history in the beginning of this year.  There were too many dates and names and faces and we had seen and heard about Washington crossing the Delaware way too many times. But here was a little alcove, with a topic that we had never heard about. Here was a story full of rejection and hate that would inspire people. It had emotion and plot and characters that got mad and won victories and were sometimes killed while fighting for what they believed in. If there’s anything that this project has taught me it is that history is not a jumble of names and faces and dates to be memorized. It is a story about the push and pull, with characters, emotion, reaction, reform, and revolution.”

While the Long Valley teens may not have taken home national accolades, they’ve certainly left their own mark on West Morris Central’s history.  

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