Girls just wanna be in history textbooks

Kate Mosse

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It's 1972 and I have just started at secondary school, a 2,000-strong girls' comprehensive in Sussex: the smell of scuffed polished floorboards, the suspended silence in the corridors just before the bell rings for the end of lessons, battered textbooks with the names of girls who had studied before me.

This is the memory of small-town life. Though school was often overwhelming, and it was hard to find one's place in the hierarchy, I fell in love with English and history, music and religious studies. Yet, at the same time, I started to notice that the reality of the world about me - in shops, in church halls and leisure centres, the youth wing - was not reflected in the classroom. Put simply, where were the women?

It's hard to notice absence but, once you do, you cannot unsee it. We studied a procession of male writers, kings and generals, with only an occasional female to give any sign that women had been there too.

During a career that has centred on putting the voices of women and girls centre-stage, I've learned that it's not that women were absent from the living of history, but rather that we have been erased from the writing of that history. Thanks to neglect, lack of interest, the fact that history was usually written in religious and scholarly institutions where women were barred, deliberate erasure, failure to honour women's achievements - there are many explanations. But for the study of history to mean anything, and we are living through the disastrous consequences of history being misrepresented and distorted, it surely has to be the story of us all: men, women, everyone.