“In times of political volatility, it’s more vital than ever that we tell women’s stories” | 3 historians on the state of women's history
What impact has recent instability around the world had on the study of women’s history? Does our desire for strong female role models risk erasing complexity? And whose lives are still overlooked? Ahead of Women’s History Month, Ellie Cawthorne spoke to three historians about the state of the discipline
Ellie Cawthorne: Before we get into some of the thornier elements of the study of women’s history, let’s talk about some of its achievements. What strides have been made over the past few years?
Sarah Richardson: The relationship between women’s history and other types of history has really come to the fore in recent years. There’s been fascinating work going on into the role of women as activists, for instance, and connecting the study of women and of disability in past centuries. So I think we’ve been moving away from the traditional approach of looking at individuals, to consider the intersections between different areas of history.
Hannah Cusworth: My area is mostly black British history, in which there has been a renewed focus on the individual – particularly on black women whose stories we have known about for a little while, but which are now in the spotlight thanks to novels, films and television series. Following the focus on Queen Charlotte in Bridgerton, for instance, there’s been an explosion of interest in women of colour in 18th-century Britain.
I recently asked a group of fellow historians about the trends they had spotted, and someone mentioned that there had been two novels about [Queen Victoria’s ward] Aina Forbes Bonetta published in the past year or so alone! So it would be nice to move away from the individual stories of great women – but I think that, sometimes, telling those kinds of stories has to happen first in order to lay the groundwork for other types of history.
Hannah Skoda: I’m a medievalist, and women’s history is really thriving in medieval studies at the moment – as evidenced by the massive Medieval Women exhibition at the British Library [which ran until 2 March].
There has been a tendency in the past to focus on aristocratic individuals: figures such as Eleanor of Aquitaine are very cool, but their stories have sometimes obscured the wealth of material on other women in the Middle Ages.
There are now more attempts to look carefully through the archives for evidence of women’s experiences right across the social spectrum. There has been fascinating research into unpaid domestic work and acts of care that often go unrecognised – but without which society may have collapsed, for instance.
Conversely, are there any aspects of women’s lives in the past that continue to be overlooked?
HS: One specific area of the Middle Ages that I think needs a lot more work is late medieval slavery, which is very unstudied. People think of the Renaissance as being a glorious period, but it was underpinned by slavery – and most of the enslaved were women. So there is a whole cohort of generally young women whose histories have not been uncovered and that really deserve to be written.
SR: I think the voices of marginalised women are neglected, mainly because of the difficulties in finding sources that detail their lives. And it’s certainly the case that elite and literate women tend to grab the lion’s share of the research – perhaps understandably, because they were the women who left a record.
But people have also got a lot more creative in finding those stories. There’s a great project going on at the moment called Voices of Women in Early Modern Ireland, for instance, which is using AI to recover the lives of women from a whole host of digitised records. That kind of technology offers huge potential to explore archives that might not on the face of it look that promising.
HC: There has been so much great work in my field around the experiences of black and enslaved women, but one area that I think is due more attention is the white women – and particularly the women in Britain – who were involved in building the British empire in a variety of ways. It’s always been assumed that it was men who benefited from trading the goods of empire, but you can find numerous examples of women who used those goods to enhance their status.I don’t think there’s been enough attention paid to how the British empire helped some women forward their careers, furnish their homes, and so on.
One idea that’s become popular in the past few years is ‘reclaiming’ women’s stories – and, in some cases, explicitly presenting them as inspirational and motivational. It’s sometimes referred to as the ‘girlbossification’ of history, and is something that I know you’re particularly interested in, Hannah Cusworth. What’s your take on the phenomenon?
HC: I first posted about this on X a while ago, asking if anyone had written about the trend for presenting female figures from history as what we could term ‘girl bosses’. By that, I mean strong women who are seen as aspirational in a very individual sense – and often in quite a capitalist sense of their ability to accumulate wealth and power.
I had a flood of responses. Many of them, interestingly, came from art historians, who pointed to the recovery of female artists who were being presented through this ‘girl boss’ lens. But I think there’s been a real tendency for it in public history more generally: in television shows, in galleries and museums, in heritage spaces and, particularly, in children’s books. I do understand it, because one of the things that people seek from history is to gain lessons for the future or their own lives.
My slight reservation, in some instances, is that we’re doing these women a disservice: taking their complex, nuanced lives and presenting them through a narrow lens for our personal taste in 21st-century society. In doing so, we can slough away aspects that we feel are a little more inconvenient – whether it’s their political views or, as is sometimes the case in my area of research, their links to transatlantic slavery – and presenting them as these consumable motivational figures.
HS: It’s a really interesting idea, particularly in the context of the Middle Ages. There are a range of women from the period who present amazing models of achievement, agency and ambition – and some of them were also extremely unpleasant, and did some pretty dreadful things.
We also need to be really careful that, when we think we’ve found a medieval woman’s amazing success story, we’re not underplaying the sheer degree of oppression women faced in the period. There’s a really interesting 2024 article in the journal Past and Present by Judith Bennett, who’s an American historian of women in the Middle Ages. She addresses this question head on, writing about late medieval Coventry – which is an extraordinary setting in that, for every seven men, there were 10 women. The city was dominated by women, who had mostly immigrated there from the countryside as spinners because it was a big centre of cloth production.
In her article, Bennett considers the ways in which these female spinners were a very powerful presence – and, in some senses, this does feel like a ‘girl power’ kind of story. But she goes on to look at the ways in which the masters and merchants of Coventry, who felt completely outnumbered, got freaked out and tried to really tighten the constraints on these women. The women, as a result, found themselves being supervised in every aspect and detail of their lives. It’s a reminder of the sheer levels of constraint and oppression that women often faced, and a really important corrective to the kind of inspirational models which we might sometimes want to look for in history.
SR: An obvious example to cite here is the women’s suffrage movement in Britain. The Pankhursts, for instance, have been eulogised – and understandably so, because without the activism of such individuals, it’s unlikely that women would have got the vote.
It’s true that, in the end, it was introduced by men and by parliament. But it’s also true that it was the pressure that the more militant suffragettes put on the public that got their message across, in a way that hadn’t been possible across the previous 40 years of activism.
Yet the links some of the women had with the eugenics movement, and the attitudes some had towards the working class, are pretty horrific. So on the one hand these are women who have long been seen as inspirational, and who have had statues erected to them. But, on the other, there’s a dark underside that has been neglected until quite recently. Feminist historians sometimes haven’t really wanted to expose the nastier side of the suffrage movement.
In my own work on gender and political culture, a lot of the really interesting and successful women in politics have been pretty unpleasant people. That might be because of the nature of the political arena. History shows us that, in order to make an impact and get their message across, people have often trodden on lots of marginalised groups. So the women we think are successful are often the ones who, when you scratch the surface, may perhaps not be as motivational or as heroic as we would like.
You’ve identified one of the areas in which this ‘girlbossification’ happens as being the public sphere – and that it can sometimes be difficult to communicate nuanced discussions about history in that arena. Do you have any tips for how we might improve the way we do that?
HS: One of the most moving historical public events I’ve ever taken part in was at the Feminist Library in London. It was about 15th-century French writer Christine de Pizan, who is in many ways an incredible example of a ‘girl boss’ kind of figure. She was a widowed single mother with several children, who turned to writing in order to support herself and her family. She was an Italian living in France, too, so an outsider in lots of ways. She’s an amazing individual.
But what was great about this particular event was that it wasn’t about putting Christine forward as some kind of role model, because her situation and her circumstances were completely different from those we experience today. Instead, it used Christine’s writing as a way to think about responses to domestic abuse in the 21st century, and featured one talk on Christine and another from a social worker who works with present-day survivors of domestic abuse.
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I found it moving and inspiring because it used a consideration of this historical figure to throw critical doubt on the kind of self-congratulatory narratives of progress that we have, and many of the assumptions that we make, today. It was resonant and textured without the need to flatten things and say, simplistically, here’s a role model for us in the 21st century.
SR: What’s important with these individual women from the past is to not think of them in two dimensions. There’s often a very simple narrative when we look at the histories of some of these very inspirational women – but everyone has some sort of backstory, and has had to draw on a variety of experiences, people and resources in order to achieve what they did. So it’s about trying to reclaim the hidden histories of these individuals in order to paint a more nuanced picture of their lives.
Moving on to the challenges facing the study of women’s history in 2025, has the political volatility of recent years had any impact?
HS: In many ways, it just makes it all the more pressing: it seems very obvious, right in this moment, why this matters quite so much. We’re really lucky here at the University of Oxford, because in 2020, the institution was able to found a new chair in women’s history – the Hilary Rodham Clinton Chair in Women’s History.
HC: I agree: it feels really important, at this moment, to mark the political volatility you mentioned, and the really difficult circumstances that a lot of scholars are living through. I was talking recently to a professor in the United States, who says that thought is already going into how they might need to rename course titles in light of the purge of DEI [diversity, equity and inclusion] initiatives being undertaken by President Trump’s new administration.
Of course, history will always go on: it’s continually being made, and definitely exists outside of the academy. But it does feel like there are certain parts of the world – the US, but also Gaza – in which it’s really challenging to be a scholar of women’s history, or indeed of anything in this moment in time.
SR: From my perspective, the ‘culture war’ narrative of the past five to ten years in Britain has been difficult for academic historians, and particularly women’s historians, because it has felt almost as if the work we’re doing has been seen as a challenge to some sort of established view of history. But that’s what makes it all the more important.
What it also communicates is the achievements that can be made in a hostile environment – which is fitting, because many of the women we’ve studied had to navigate similar environments. So it almost makes it more important that we advertise and promote the tools and resources we’ve drawn on to work in the face of such hostility.
Something else worth considering is the term ‘feminist’. Not all women’s history is necessarily feminist history, and it doesn’t have to be. Yet it sometimes seems to be the case that feminism is presented as a dirty word, or that all women’s historians have got a feminist agenda to rip up the comfortable histories people are used to. When I’ve been interviewed on some radio shows, for example, it has felt as if the suspicion is that you’re trying to impose some sort of feminist agenda on to the past.
But we just need to keep drawing on the history and the authenticity of the sources to stress that, while feminism might be a 19th and early 20th-century phenomenon, that struggle for identity and power was shared by women earlier in history. So there’s a current of ideology and politics that women’s historians are continually navigating.
Finally, how can we – as people charged with communicating history to the public – improve the way in which we talk about women’s experiences in the past?
HS: I’d like to see medievalists being even more attentive to thinking about women’s subjectivities. We try to consider all the various ways in which women were con- strained and oppressed in the period, but I think we need to continue striving to find ways to write about those women as individuals with profoundly textured experiences – and diverse ways of responding to those patterns of oppression. We don’t just want endless histories of the ways in which women were oppressed; we also want histories of the ways in which those women as individuals responded to that oppression. And we need to find ways to write about women’s agency without underestimating the challenges and difficulties they faced.
HC: I’d stress the need, for people who maybe don’t see themselves as women’s historians, or who are perhaps not telling a story that’s particularly focused on women, to integrate women into those stories. And I hope that, over time, we can push people outside of the discipline to read the work that its incredible scholars are doing, and
in turn to integrate that work into the public or academic histories they’re making.
SR: One of the strengths of the Women’s History Network, of which I’m the chair, is that its membership isn’t just made up of academics – it also includes members of the public who are interested in all kinds of histories: family historians, members of community groups, people who work in museums, and so on. That wider community involvement is one of the key things that will help integrate the idea that women’s presence is just a normal part of any history.
After all, women were half of the population, and they contributed economically, politically, socially and culturally. We just need to recognise that – and my hope is that women’s history becomes a really communal activity in which everyone can participate, and in which everyone has a voice.
Sarah Richardson is professor of modern British history at the University of Glasgow and chair of the Women’s History Network.
Hannah Cusworth is a curatorial fellow at Queen’s House as part of Royal Museums Greenwich, and is a doctoral student with English Heritage.
Hannah Skoda is a fellow and tutor in medieval history at St John’s College, University of Oxford.
This article was first published in the March 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
Authors
Ellie Cawthorne is HistoryExtra’s podcast editor. She also contributes to BBC History Magazine, runs the podcast newsletter and hosts several live and virtual BBC History Magazine events.