The U.S. Department of Education posted a historic photo to Facebook on Wednesday proclaiming, “American history is worth learning.” The image shows women in clothes from the early 20th century demanding the right to vote. It’s an inspiring thing to behold. But it’s not American history. The photo is from the United Kingdom.
The Facebook post’s glaring error was first spotted by Wendy Rouse, historian and author of several books, including Public Faces, Secret Lives: A Queer History of the Women’s Suffrage Movement and Her Own Hero: Origins of the Women’s Self-Defense Movement.
Rouse poked fun at the mistake on Bluesky, noting that it doesn’t show Americans, but rather British suffragettes.
In reality, the photo dates to around 1912, according to Encyclopedia Britannica, and was taken in London. The caption “Suffragettes holding signs in London, c. 1912,” really says it all.
Women over 30 gained the vote in the UK in 1918, and British women over 21 gained the vote in 1928. In the U.S., it was a slightly different story, with white women 21 or older getting the vote in 1920 with the ratification of the 19th Amendment. Women of color wouldn’t get full voting rights across the U.S. until the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965.
The gaffe by the Department of Education is rather humorous, but far from the first by this agency in the Trump era. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon regularly demonstrates the administration’s contempt for serious educational pursuits and has made verbal slips of her own since Trump took power again in Jan. 2025. One of the best examples is when McMahon referred to AI as “A1” in a speech on education in San Diego, California, last year.
McMahon was appointed to her role with the explicit instructions to dismantle the Department of Education under the theory that control of education should be “returned to the states.” Trump signed an executive order in March 2025 to accomplish that goal and they’re doing it piece by piece.
They’re not technically able to completely abolish the Department of Education without Congress (though that didn’t stop them from destroying USAID), and they’re just hacking it into pieces to send various functions to other federal agencies. They’ve transferred at least 118 departments elsewhere, according to NEA Today, including the student loan debt portfolio which is now at the Department of Treasury.
In some ways, Trump is just doing what so many conservative leaders who came before him have been trying to do, whether it was President Ronald Reagan or President George H.W. Bush. The Department of Education’s social media accounts even posted a video last year showing Republicans over the decades insisting the department needed to be dismantled.
But it’s hard to imagine Presidents Bush or Reagan taking a look at a British photo like this and not clocking it as being off. At the very least, they’d be embarrassed by the mistake and demand better of their underlings. But Trump doesn’t give a shit. McMahon and the folks working under her to destroy the Department of Education have just one task: take a chainsaw to the federal agency no matter the cost to American school kids.
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