Forgotten Women

During lockdown, a group of a dozen women, who knew each other through family history events and courses, began to meet online for mutual encouragement with various research projects. We were aware that women's stories are often overlooked in the historical narrative, in particular, stories of those women who found themselves on society’s margins. We decided to create a website where we could showcase short biographies of some of these women and A Few Forgotten Women was born. The website went live in December 2022.

In Britain, it is usually men who perpetuate the family surname. Men are more likely to make wills, to appear in records of land ownership and land transfer, in polls books, electoral rolls and service records. Men also predominate in other occupational records, apprenticeship indentures and directories. Women comprise fifty percent of the population, so we sought to give them equal prominence with the men. In order to do so, we often needed to be more creative and to set them into the social historical context of their times.

Our focus is on women who may have been overlooked or stigmatised by society, those who might find themselves in prisons, workhouses or asylums, the disabled and those who have no descendants to honour their memory. We began to post stories of our own relatives and of those we encountered during local history research and other projects. Occasionally, when we met together on Zoom, we researched a woman collectively. We realised that, with only twelve of us, all of whom had other commitments and busy lives, the site would grow very slowly. We began to accept guest contributions, providing the woman was not already well researched and that she fitted one of the criteria listed on our website.

Our collective online research was great fun and we realised that we could share that experience and dramatically increase the number of stories on the website at the same time. The concept of Forgotten Women Fridays was born. Every few months we choose an institution and usually using a census return as a basis, invite volunteers to research one of the women or girls associated with that data set. There is an optional all day Zoom that volunteers can drop in and out of if they wish; some stay all day. We have ranged across England to investigate a school of housewifery, homes for inebriate women, an industrial school, a teacher training college and a children’s hospital. The latest project involves the girls who attended two schools for the deaf. In this way, we have, so far, been able to ensure that more than 350 women or girls are no longer forgotten.

The aim is that the site should be useful to those studying women’s lives, so we add background information about the institutions we research and the site contains a timeline of women’s history and an extensive and expanding  bibliography, as well as a few articles. It is very much a work in progress, one that is entirely unfunded and dependent on voluntary contributions but hugely rewarding.