What's the state of women's history in 2025?

Summary

History Extra Podcast: What's the State of Women's History in 2025?

Release Date: March 7, 2025

In the March 7, 2025 episode of the History Extra Podcast, hosted by Immediate Media, the focus centers on the evolving landscape of women's history. Titled "What's the State of Women's History in 2025?", the episode convenes a panel of three distinguished historians—Sarah Richardson, Hannah Skoda, and Hannah Cusworth—to explore contemporary trends, emerging challenges, and future directions in the field of women's history. The discussion is timely, marking International Women's Day, and delves into how historical narratives are reshaped to include diverse female experiences.

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Introduction to the Panelists

The episode begins with introductions:

• Hannah Cusworth (02:27): A curatorial fellow at Queen's House, Royal Museums Greenwich, and a doctoral student with English Heritage.

• Sarah Richardson (02:42): Professor of Modern British History at the University of Glasgow and convener of the Women's History Network.

• Hannah Skoda (02:55): Fellow and tutor in medieval history at St. John's College, Oxford.

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Emerging Trends in Women's History

Intersectionality Takes Center Stage

• Sarah Richardson (03:28) emphasizes the growing emphasis on intersectionality, highlighting the convergence of women's history with other historical approaches such as disability history. She cites the example of deaf women activists in the Soviet Union, illustrating how researchers are moving beyond individual narratives to explore the intricate intersections between various social categories.

Focus on Individual and Collective Experiences

• Hannah Cusworth (04:05) discusses a resurgence in spotlighting individual black women from the past, propelled by their representation in popular media like the television series Bridgerton. She mentions recent novels about figures like Ina Forbes Burnetta and highlights scholarly work that examines the collective experiences of black women in the 20th century, such as Jade Bentle's upcoming book.

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Advances in Medieval Women's History

Expanding the Scope Beyond Aristocracy

• Hannah Skoda (05:37) reflects on the success of the British Library's "Medieval Women" exhibition, noting a thriving interest in women's roles across the social spectrum during the Middle Ages. She points out a shift from solely focusing on high-profile figures like Eleanor of Aquitaine to uncovering the lives of women from varied backgrounds. Current research explores themes such as family structures, domestic work, and women's participation in traditionally male-dominated institutions like medieval universities and the Charterhouse in London.

Understudied Areas: Enslaved Women

• Hannah Skoda (07:55) identifies the study of enslaved women in the late medieval period as a critical yet neglected area. She underscores the significance of uncovering the histories of young enslaved women who played pivotal roles in underpinning the Renaissance period, advocating for more scholarly attention in this domain.

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The "Girlbossification" of History

Balancing Inspiration with Complexity

• Hannah Cusworth (11:53) critiques the trend of presenting historical female figures as "girl bosses", where complex lives are simplified into inspirational narratives. She warns that this approach can obscure the nuanced and sometimes unsavory aspects of these women's lives, such as political affiliations or connections to transatlantic slavery.

• Sarah Richardson (16:57) echoes this sentiment by highlighting historical figures like the Pankhursts, whose contributions to suffrage are often celebrated without acknowledging their involvement in movements like eugenics. This dichotomy challenges the notion of presenting women solely as heroic figures, urging a more balanced portrayal that includes their multifaceted identities.

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Challenges Facing Women's History

Political Volatility and Cultural Resistance

• Hannah Skoda (22:02) discusses the impact of recent political instability and cultural backlash on the study of women's history. The establishment of positions like the Hillary Rodham Clinton Chair in Women's History at Oxford signifies institutional recognition, yet scholars face challenges such as course renaming and ideological purges in certain regions, particularly in the United States.

• Sarah Richardson (25:27) addresses the stigmatization of the term "feminist" within historical discourse. She contends that women's history is often misconstrued as a feminist agenda aimed at disrupting established narratives, which complicates the acceptance and integration of women's historical studies within broader academic and public spheres.

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The Relevance of the Women's History Label

Advocating for Continued Segregation in Historical Scholarship

• Hannah Cusworth (27:19) affirms the necessity of the women's history label, arguing that until women's contributions are universally acknowledged across all historical fields, a dedicated focus remains essential. She hopes for a future where women's presence is seamlessly integrated into all historical narratives, but recognizes that current public perceptions still often overlook women's roles.

• Sarah Richardson (27:24) concurs, noting that the existence of organizations like the Women's History Network underscores the ongoing need for specialized platforms to promote and consolidate research on women's histories. She emphasizes that women's historical studies often illuminate broader social dynamics, including intersections with race, sexuality, and class.

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Recommendations for Historians and Public Communicators

Integrating Complexity and Encouraging Community Engagement

• Hannah Skoda (30:11) advocates for historians to delve deeper into women's subjectivities, portraying their agency without minimizing the oppression they faced. She illustrates this with the case of three women from late medieval Coventry, whose legal records reveal intricate social networks and personal resilience amidst societal constraints.

• Hannah Cusworth (32:52) calls upon those outside the academic realm—such as television producers and authors—to incorporate women's histories into their narratives. By doing so, the public can develop a more nuanced understanding of women's roles throughout history, moving beyond tokenistic inclusion.

• Sarah Richardson (33:56) highlights the role of the Women's History Network in fostering a collaborative environment that includes not just academics but also community groups and professionals in archives and museums. She advocates for communal efforts to normalize the presence of women in all historical contexts, thereby enriching the collective historical consciousness.

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Concluding Thoughts

The episode concludes with the host acknowledging the contributors and providing information about related content and future episodes. Key takeaways emphasize the importance of intersectionality, the need for nuanced portrayals of historical women, and the ongoing challenges posed by political and cultural forces.

Notable Quotes:

• Sarah Richardson (03:28): "The intersectionality between women's history and other different approaches to history is really coming to the fore recently."

• Hannah Cusworth (11:53): "There's a real tendency to do it in public history... presenting these women as kind of consumable motivational figures."

• Hannah Skoda (16:55): "We need to be really careful that when we think we found some amazing kind of success story, that we're not underplaying the sheer degree of oppression which women were facing."

• Sarah Richardson (25:27): "The work that women's historians are doing is being seen to challenge some sort of established view of history."

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This comprehensive discussion underscores that while the field of women's history has made significant strides in recent years, particularly through embracing intersectionality and uncovering diverse female narratives, it continues to grapple with the challenges of political resistance and the oversimplification of women's complex histories. The panelists advocate for sustained efforts to integrate women's experiences into the broader historical narrative, ensuring that history recognizes and respects the multifaceted roles women have played across all eras.

Transcript

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[Podcast Host]

Welcome to the History Extra Podcast. Fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History magazine. What is new research revealing about women's lives in the past? Does all women's history have to be feminist? And why do we need to be cautious about the so called girl bossification of historical figures? To mark International Women's Day, I brought together a panel of three expert historians, Sarah Richardson, Hannah Skoda and Hannah Cusworth, to get their thoughts on the biggest trends and challenges in the field of women's history at the moment.

[Podcast Moderator]

What would be great is if you could all introduce yourself. First of all, I wonder if we could start with Hannah.

[Hannah Cusworth]

Cindy hi, I'm Hannah Cusworth, or Hannah C. For the purposes of this discussion. I am a curatorial fellow at Queen's House as part of Royal Museum's Greenwich, and also a doctoral student with English Heritage.

[Podcast Moderator]

Thank you very much, Sarah.

[Sarah Richardson]

Hi everyone. I'm Sarah Richardson. I'm a professor of Modern British history at the University of Glasgow, but I'm also convener of the Women's History Network.

[Podcast Moderator]

Fantastic. And finally, Hannah Skoda.

[Hannah Skoda]

Hi Everyone, I'm Hannah Skoda. I'm a fellow and tutor in medieval history at St. John's College in Oxford.

[Podcast Moderator]

Thank you so much. It's great to have you all with me to talk about some of the central themes in women's history today. So we're speaking now in 2025, and I'm wondering whether there are some aspects of women's history that you think are getting particular attention now that maybe haven't been focused on so much in the past. Sarah, I wonder, as convener of the Women's History Network, if you might be a good person to kick us off on this one.

[Sarah Richardson]

Yes, certainly. I think that the intersectionality between women's history and other different approaches to history is really coming to the fore recently. So one particular area is disability history and the connections between women and disability and their role as carers, their role of enablers, their role as activists. So there's been some really interesting work, for example, in the Soviet Union on deaf women activists. So I think it's moving away from the traditional, which is to look at individuals, to look more at intersections between different areas.

[Hannah Cusworth]

I think in my area, which is mostly black British history, there almost has been a renewed focus on the individual, particularly black women from the past who we have kind of known about for a little while, but I think maybe are being brought to the fore in maybe film or TV or in novels. So thinking about, obviously it was a couple of years ago now, but Bridgerton, and particularly the focus on Queen Charlotte, I feel like there's been a bit of an explosion in interest in Women in 18th century Britain, particularly women of colour or maybe slightly later period. So I asked this on the group chat of my fellow historians and asked them about what they were kind of what they were noticing. And someone mentioned that there'd been two novels of a woman called Ina Forbes Burnetta, who I think spoken about before, published in the last kind of year or so alone. And so I think that in that sense it is a focus more on the individual, although there are some historians who are doing really fascinating work about more kind of black women's collective experiences in the 20th century. For example, Jade Bentle and her book that's coming out soon. So, yeah, I think it would be nice if we could kind of move away, I think, sometimes from that individual kind of great woman story. But I think sometimes in some areas of history that kind of comes first and then you can kind of move on from there.

[Podcast Moderator]

Well, that idea of the great woman story is definitely something that I Want to dig into in a bit more detail later, but. Hannah S. What about amongst medievalists? We've had a massive new exhibition this year in Britain, Medieval Women, but what else has been going on?

[Hannah Skoda]

Yes. So the exhibition at the British Library on medieval women is absolutely amazing. And for those who still have a chance to get to see it before it closes soon, I would recommend do that. But I think it's indicative of the fact that women's history is a really, really thriving area in medieval studies at the. It's so exciting. I think there has been a tendency in the past really, to focus on particular aristocratic individuals, so figures like Eleanor of Aquitaine who are really extremely cool, but I think sometimes that's obscured the wealth of material that there is on other women in the Middle Ages. And there are more and more attempts now to think about women right across the social spectrum and to look really, really carefully through the archives for evidence of women's experiences right across the spectrum. I think there's a really interesting and exciting emphasis on thinking about the family at the moment. There's some really fascinating work about the role of women in the family and about family structures and subjective experiences of being part of a family more generally. There's a really fascinating trend to look at care, particularly so to think about acts of care and nurture, domestic work, the kinds of things that are unpaid and often unrecognised, but without which society would pretty much collapse. And I think it's wonderful to see historians turning to explore these kinds of things. And then I've noticed, particularly amongst medievalists as well, a real tendency to try and think about the role of women in what have been assumed to be all male spaces. So I have a doctoral student at the moment, Elena Rossi, working on women in medieval universities, a space which people thought of as completely male. Another doctoral student, Vicki Sands, is working on women at the Charterhouse in London, again an institution people thought of as completely male. It's a brilliant article came out recently by Alice Rohr about the role of women in political revolts in the Middle Ages. So this tendency to challenge the idea that women were just excluded and didn't have anything to do with certain spaces is. Is really exciting.

[Podcast Moderator]

Something you've all alluded to is that there are areas, of course, that still need more attention. So what are some of those areas that you think continue to be overlooked?

[Hannah Skoda]

All the above areas, I think, really just need more work. There is so much still to discover, and one particular area where I think we need a lot more work in the Middle Ages is thinking about enslaved women. So late medieval slavery is an area which is very, very understudied, not very much known about. In general, people think of the Renaissance, glorious period, but it's underpinned by slavery. And most of the slavery in this period is of women. So there is a whole cohort of generally young women whose histories have not been uncovered and which really deserve to be written.

[Sarah Richardson]

I think that certainly marginalized women are neglected mainly because of difficulties with sources, but people have got a lot more creative in finding those voices. So there's a great project in Ireland at the moment, it's just called Voices, which is using AI to recover the lives of women from a whole host of digitized records. So that offers a huge potential to sort of scrape archives which might, on the face of it, not look that promising to find the sorts of things that Hannah Skoda's been talking about, which is sort of the everyday life of women in the past. But the other Hannah, Hannah Cussworth, will know a lot more about marginalized communities of women of color. And it's certainly the case that it's elite women, literate women, who tend to grab the lion's share of the research, understandably, because they leave a record totally.

[Hannah Cusworth]

I think we have had so much work done by historians or by scholars such as Saadia Hartman, thinking about those creative ways to look at archives where you don't immediately see very much about women. And a lot of the archives that I work in are kind of termed the slavery archive. And actually something that someone said to me is, when I started my PhD really stuck with me, which is that you will have so much source material, but none of it will be about what you really want to tell stories about, or none. And that is exactly as Sarah was saying about those. Those kind of marginalized people about those women, those everyday experiences, those can be really hard to get at, although the levels of source material that we have is huge. And I guess that's kind of getting at that point about using other ways to go through all of that source material to find those tiny traces of women's voices and lives in the archive. I think one thing that has come up for me that could do with a bit more attention is there's been so much great work in my field around black women's experiences and enslaved women's experiences. And now I'm starting to think about the white women, and particularly women in Britain, and how they were involved in building the British Empire in a variety of ways. And just as we've been Talking about that, actually, it's kind of always assumed that it's men who are doing all of these things. But actually, you do see numerous examples of women being involved in these kind of trades of goods from empire and in using these goods to kind of enhance their status. But I don't think that that has been talked about with specific reference to the empire and how empire kind of helped these women kind of forward their careers and furnish their homes. So I think that's one thing that I've been really keen to see a bit more scholarship on.

[Podcast Moderator]

I did a similar conversation to this probably five or six years ago with a panel of people about the main themes in women's history. And something that didn't come up then, but I think has really exploded in the time since, is this idea of women's stories being reclaimed. Not only reclaimed, but also presented as motivational and inspirational. This idea of the girlbossification of history, if we can call it that. Hannah C. I know that this is something that you're particularly interested in, and you have some thoughts on what's your take on all of this?

[Hannah Cusworth]

Yeah, I think I tweeted about this ages ago, before I went on maternity leave and asking that question, like, had someone written about this, this kind of trend towards presenting female figures from history as kind of girl bosses? And I guess what I mean by that is these kind of strong motivational women who are kind of taken from history and are kind of seen as aspirational, but very much in an individual sense, and often in this sense of kind of accumulating wealth and power in quite like a kind of quite capitalist society. And I had a flood of responses, particularly from people, actually art historians, which I found really interesting, about the kind of recovery, if you want to call it that, of female artists, painters, etc. And that they'd been kind of presented through this girlboss lens. I think there's a real tendency to do it in public history. So if we're thinking maybe about, like, television or galleries or museums or heritage spaces or actually in, like, children's books, I also see it quite a lot in. And I think all of that really makes sense, right? Because I think something that people kind of seek from history is about almost like lessons for the future or to be inspired. And so I totally understand understand it. I think my slight reservation is, is it, in some cases, doing these women a disservice? It's kind of taking their really complex, complicated lives and presenting them through this one kind of narrow for our personal taste in today's society. And so sloughing away some of the things which feel a little bit more inconvenient, whether that's some of their political views, whether that's their links in, in my case, in my kind of research, their links to transatlantic slavery and presenting them as this kind of really consumable motivational figure. So I think it's something that is continuing, but I'd be really interested to hear other people's opinions on it.

[Podcast Moderator]

Yeah, absolutely.

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[Podcast Moderator]

An example that I saw recently is that there's a children's book, a kind of aspirational children's book about Coco Chanel, who obviously, you know, achieved great things, but also is a very complex character with some connections that might not be so admirable. So I thought that that was an interesting case. Sarah and Hannah, I don't know whether you have any thoughts on this.

[Hannah Skoda]

I think in the context of the Middle Ages, it's really interesting. There are range of women who present kind of amazing models of achievement and agency and ambition, some of whom were also extremely unpleasant and did some pretty dreadful things. So, you know, we need to kind of beware of the hypocrisy. But I think also thinking about this as a medievalist, we need to be really careful that when we think we found some amazing kind of success story, that we're not underplaying the sheer degree of oppression which women were facing. There's a really interesting 2024 article in the Journal called Past Present by Judith Bennett, who's an American historian of women in the Middle Ages, and she addresses this question head on. Actually, she's writing about late medieval Coventry, which is a completely extraordinary setting in that for every seven men in late medieval Coventry, there were 10 women. So it's a city really dominated by women in the later Middle Ages, and they're mostly women immigrating to the city from the countryside as spinners because it's a big centre of cloth production. And Judith Bennet, in this article, thinks about the ways in which these women represent a very powerful presence. And in many ways this does feel like a kind of girl power sort of story. But she then looks at the ways in which the merchants and masters in the city of Coventry, who feel themselves to be completely outnumbered, get extremely freaked out about it and really try to kind of harden up and tighten the constraints on these women so they find themselves supervised in kind of every minute detail of their lives. And it's a really important corrective, I think, to the kind of inspirational models which we might want to see, by just reminding us of the sheer levels of constraint and oppression.

[Podcast Moderator]

Sarah, can I bring you in on this?

[Sarah Richardson]

Yeah. I mean, I think the most obvious example is the women's suffrage movement in Britain. So they have been eulogized, people like the Pankhursts, understandably, because of, you know, without their activism, it's unlikely women would have got the vote. But the links they had with things like the eugenics movement, their attitude to the working class, are pretty horrific. So, on the one hand, you have these women who are inspirational and have been inspirational and have statues, et cetera, to them. And on the other hand, there's a sort of dark underside which had been neglected until quite recently, really, with feminist historians not really wanting to expose that sort of more nasty side of the suffrage movement. But my own work is on gender and political culture. And I totally agree with Hannah. I mean, a lot of the really interesting and successful women in politics are pretty nasty people. I don't know if that is because of the political arena, but in order to achieve and to make an impact, you're often treading on lots and lots of marginalized people in order to get your message across. So the women we think are successful are often the ones who, when you scratch the surface, maybe are perhaps not as motivational or as heroic as we would like.

[Hannah Cusworth]

I think that's a really interesting point, though, that you made, Sarah, about the research around their connections to, for example, the eugenics movement are coming in now. I feel like often Maybe in women's history you kind of have to do there's that work of recovery. And then once that's kind of been established and the field's kind of been established, or women's presence has kind of been established, then scholars are able to do the more kind of nuanced or the research which, yeah, uncovers some things which maybe aren't so palatable to kind of modern audiences. And I wonder if maybe that cycle will start to happen with some of these other women as the kind of public become more aware and people become more comfortable being like, yeah, women were there, now we can start talking about them in their real complexity.

[Podcast Moderator]

That's interesting, Hannah, because I was just thinking about this, how you mentioned, Hannah, that a lot of this girl bossification, shall we call it, that is happening in the public sphere. And of course, quite often in public discussions around history, nuance can be hard to communicate. I wonder if any of you had any tips on how we, people like me, who are bringing history to the public, can begin to do that.

[Hannah Skoda]

Yes. One of the most moving historical public events that I've ever taken part in was at the Feminist Library in London. And it was about Christine de Pizan, who is a 15th century French writer and in many ways an incredible example of a kind of girl boss sort of figure. So she was a widowed single mother with several children who turned to writing in order to support herself and her children. She was Italian, living in France. So she's an outsider in lots of ways, and she is amazing. But what was so great about this event was that it wasn't about putting Christine forward as some kind of role model for us because her situation was completely different from that that we're all experiencing and the circumstances were different. But it was using Christine's writing and reflecting about Christine's writing to think about responses to domestic abuse in the 21st century. And so we had a talk about Christine and what she says, and then we had a talk from a social worker who works with victim survivors of domestic abuse. And then there were kind of breakout sessions where people discussed it. And I found it particularly moving and inspiring because it was using thinking about this historical figure to throw critical doubt on many of the assumptions that we make now. It threw doubt on the kind of self congratulatory narratives of progress that we have. It drew on some of the wisdom of Christine, but it also picked up on resonances across the centuries. It gave a kind of added texture to the experiences that people were going through. And it was really quite extraordinary without Any need to sort of flatten things out and say, here's an inspirational role model for us all.

[Sarah Richardson]

Yes, I think one tip to think about some of these individual women is to not think of them in sort of two dimensions and to start elaborating their sort of background and the tactics that they used. So often there's a very simple narrative when we look at the histories of some of these very inspirational women, but everyone has a sort of backstory, has had to draw on a variety of different people and resources in order to get where they were. And it's trying to reclaim those more hidden stories, hidden histories of these individuals, which I think makes them more nuanced.

[Podcast Moderator]

So I wonder if we could move on now to some of the challenges facing Women's History in 2025. There's been a lot of political volatility in recent years across the globe. Has that impacted the study of women's histories in any ways?

[Hannah Skoda]

I think in many ways it just makes it all the more pressing. It seems very obvious right at the moment why this matters quite so much. We're really lucky at Oxford. It's a really exciting moment for women's history, partly because in 2020, the university was able to found a new chair in women's history. It's called the Hillary Rodham Clinton Chair in Women's History. And that seems, I think, indicative of the ways in which institutions actually are at the moment, aware of the importance of this and the importance of putting resources into it.

[Hannah Cusworth]

Yeah, I think it does feel really important at this moment to mark that kind of political volatility and the really hard circumstances that a lot of scholars are living through at the moment. And even then, thinking in America about the challenges of speaking to a professor over there who is thinking about how they might need to rename course titles, how they might need to think about the work that they're doing with their students and the teaching in light of this kind of focus on a purge of. Of edi. And there are certain things that kind of the government will be looking at. So, of course, history will always go on. And history is continually kind of made and definitely exists outside of the academy, but it does feel like there are certain parts of the world where it's really, really challenging to be a scholar of women's history, or indeed of anything at this moment.

[Sarah Richardson]

I think from my perspective, just thinking about this sort of the last five or ten years in Britain, the culture wars element has been something that has been challenging for historian or academic historians, and particularly women's historians, because it's almost as if the work that we're all doing is being seen to challenge some sort of established view of history. But that's what makes it all the more important. What I do think that women's history and women's historians contribute, though, is this idea of what can be done in a hostile environment, because all the women that we've worked on, I would think, have had to navigate that. And it's something that is ongoing, as both the Hannahs have pointed out. I think the other thing is the term feminist. So, you know, not all women's history is necessarily feminist history, and it doesn't have to be, but it has been presented as if feminism is a dirty word. And all women's historians have got some sort of feminist agenda to rip up the sort of comfortable histories that people are used to. And certainly I've had that from when I've been interviewed on radio shows and things like that. As if you're coming on to pedal some sort of feminist agenda and imposing that agenda on the past. And again, I think that that's something that we have to keep drawing on the history and the authenticity of the sources to say, although feminism is a late 19th, early 20th century phenomenon, it is something that resonates with some of the women in the further past. That sort of struggle for identity, that struggle for power. There's a whole sort of current of ideology and politics that women's historians are continually navigating.

[Podcast Moderator]

Your point there about people assuming that women's history is all just about feminism is really interesting, Sarah, because something that comes up again and again is this idea of whether the label of women's history is useful or not. I mean, is this something, of course, that's debated as well with black history? Because you were all talking earlier about how we're looking evermore at how women are integrated into male spaces in more ways than we might think. Is it still useful for us in 2025 to have the label women's history, or does it pigeonhole women into little areas more than we want it to?

[Hannah Cusworth]

It's a really valuable question. I think there is still a space for it where you're still trying to make the argument that women were there. But I think maybe I would like to hope that potentially in the future those arguments that work doesn't kind of need to be done because it has been done, and scholars can then focus on potentially other things. Or there's more of this feeling of, like, integration between men and women. But I think when you're brought up. And I think the kind of general perception, certainly before I started my doctoral study, I still had that complete assumption that, like, oh, women wouldn't have been involved in this and women in the 18th century wouldn't have been kind of patrons for building their own, you know, building their own houses. So I think there is actually still really a way to go, and I think that therefore, women's history is still really valuable. I think it helps people like scholars connect with each other to understand that there are other people in similar disciplines who are researching in the same way that you are, or looking at historical sources for the same kind of purposes. So I do really feel as though, at the moment, thinking on my feet, I do think it is still a really valuable, really valuable label.

[Podcast Moderator]

Sarah, I'm guessing as the convener of the Women's History Network, you would agree.

[Sarah Richardson]

I certainly would. And I think that, like Hannah said, if it was the case that the work that women's historians were doing was seen as mainstream, then we wouldn't need a women's history network, we wouldn't need sort of women's history journals, we wouldn't need outlets. But it's still the case that there are just assumptions that women don't exist in many areas of the sort of public sphere and that Hannah Skoda talked about spaces. A lot of work recently has been done on Parliament and there is just this notion that, you know, before There were women MPs, before women could vote, Parliament was an entirely male space, which is totally wrong. But it's surprising to people. I did a big exhibition or helped to put on an exhibition in Westminster hall in 2018, looking at the role of women in Parliament. And what was really interesting was the number of visitors who just said, we've never been taught this at school. Why do we not know this? So they were really angry that women had been written out of history. So it keeps on demonstrating that we do need to keep asserting that women are there. You know, women are there in the records, they've just been overlooked. And history has mostly been written from the perspective of men and elite men. So there is a real need. I think the other thing that we've all touched on is that the study of women often throws light on other marginalised groups. So we've talked about carers, talked about people with disabilities, communities of color, and I think that there is an important connection with the research that is done on women that then throws light on broader groups of both men and women. An area we haven't touched on is Sexuality. And it's often women's historians that led the way in looking at same sex relationships and things like incest and domestic violence and all those sorts of areas which have just not featured in sort of standard histories.

[Hannah Cusworth]

I think it will also be the case that no matter where we go as a Society in the 21st century, women's experience in the past, there'll be unique elements to it, which means it's still really valid to look at it through the category of kind of men and women. And I don't think necessarily that that will change, even if hopefully the kind of present moment will change and gender equality and people's perception of what women did in the past will change.

[Podcast Moderator]

So finally, how can we, as academic historians and people who are communicating history to the public, improve the way that we talk about women's experiences in the past? What would you like to see happen.

[Hannah Skoda]

As a medieval historian? I would like to see medievalists being even more attentive to thinking about women's subjectivities. So I think whilst we try to think about the patterns of oppression and all the various ways in which women were constrained and oppressed, oppressed in this period, I think we want to continue striving to find ways to write about those women as individuals with profoundly textured experiences and a range of ways of responding to those patterns of oppression. So we don't just want endless histories of the ways in which women were oppressed, but ways which think about how women themselves, as individuals, responded to that oppression. We want to find ways to write about women's agency without somehow kind of underestimating the challenges and the difficulties that they faced. And I think we need to continue to think really carefully about the kind of evidence that we can use. Medievalists obviously always have a huge challenge with evidence because there isn't so much of it and there's even less for women. Very often we're writing about women through the writings of men. And I think we need to make sure we never use that as an excuse and that we think really carefully about the kind of. The layers of voices. I was looking just recently a really interesting case of three women who are kind of immigrants from a local village to Halezowen near Birmingham in the 1280s. And we know about them because they're prosecuted for illegal trading. They're called Alice, Christina and Juliana. We know so little about them. We've just got this little case which says they're prosecuted for illegal trading. But actually once you start to interrogate that more closely, you can hear their voices and it's a question of really devoting the attention to the case that it deserves. We can start to think about the fact that they supported one another, that they traveled together, that they worked together, and that they stuck up for each other in this situation. And then if you trawl really carefully through these legal accounts, you find one of them in 1317 being prosecuted again. So Juliana crops up again in these legal records and she's prosecuted for sheltering a thief. And this thief was called Marjorie, turns out to be her daughter. So through these tiny, tiny references, we can start to uncover family networks, patterns of support, the ways in which these women in a very precarious social situation are responding to the kind of oppression and fragility that they faced in their day to day lives. And I think we just need to do more of this. We need to really give the kind of rigorous attention to the details which enables us to recover these women's experiences.

[Hannah Cusworth]

I suppose that this is more a call not for, again, not for us, because I suppose this is kind of what we've dedicated a lot of our professional lives to doing. But I suppose it's to people who maybe don't see themselves as women's historians, or they're not telling a story that's particularly focused on women to integrate women into those stories. So if you have people who are making a television program about Parliament, for example, before women were MPs, showing women in that space, and I think those kind of things really, really help to kind of stop this view that, like, women weren't there. Because I think actually maybe we would like to be able to move on from that being the argument that we're, that we're making. But that can't happen if that's still the overwhelming public perception. So I hope that over time we can kind of push people maybe outside of our discipline to read the work that incredible scholars are doing and then to integrate that work into, whether it's in kind of public history or in their own academic histories.

[Sarah Richardson]

One of the strengths of the Women's History Network is that it's not just academics, that it includes the sort of general public who are interested in all sorts of histories. It involves community groups, family historians, it includes professionals in archives and heritage and museums and so on. And one of the things that I think will help get this idea more integrated so that women's presence is just seen as a sort of normal part of any history, is the work that that wider community do. We started off by talking about the exhibition in the British Library all of those events really help to spread the word that this is a sort of normal feature of the past. You know, women were half the population and actually they did contribute economically, politically, socially, culturally, and we just need to recognize that. So I've been really heartened in my role as convener of the Women's History Network to see how much work is going on in local communities to sort of reclaim local and particularly in Hannah Cusworth's area, you know, the sort of communities that came over with Windrush, for example, have done an extraordinary job of not only sort of retelling their stories and their histories, but showing their contribution to Britain in a really positive way, which totally pushes against many narratives. So what I hope is that women's history becomes that really communal activity that everyone can participate in and everyone has.

[Podcast Host]

The Foley that was Sarah Richardson, Hannah Skoda and Hannah Cusworth speaking to me. Ellie Cawthorn Hannah Cuzworth referred in the podcast to Ina Forbes Benetta, who she nominated as a historical figure of Note in our 15 minutes of fame podcast, which you can find on your podcast feeds or via our website historyextra.com and Hannah Skoda is the co host with Rana Mitter of our regular series History behind the Headlines, where they discuss the history that informs current affairs. Just search for history behind the headlines in your podcast feeds to bring that up. Thanks for listening. This podcast was produced by Jack Bateman.

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