00:00 "So it's 39 million fewer women than men in family trees. And that's just, I mean,
00:09 I couldn't believe it actually when I was given the figures, it just seemed extraordinary."
00:14 Perhaps history can be considered by erasing the majority of herstory, with many women
00:19 being outright missing from records. The stark divide is driven by 71% of those labelled
00:24 as unknown in family trees being women. Historic records spanning centuries skew male documentation
00:31 from education to military records, making it harder to track female relatives and meaning
00:35 details are often lost.
00:37 "But you can work out why it is, it's for a range of reasons. The one at the top of
00:42 course is that a lot of women change their names when they get married. And of course
00:47 it's because often the people that are compiling the records, the people writing history were
00:51 men and they quite often didn't value or even see the women's contributions and what women
00:57 were doing. A good example of this is the 1871 census, where it looks like so many women
01:04 have disappeared from the workforce since the previous census 10 years before. But all
01:08 it meant actually was that the definition of work had been changed so that women's work,
01:13 either in the home or working in a family business or working like a sole trader, like
01:18 I am actually, was suddenly not counted as work anymore. So all the women vanished."
01:23 Best known for her novels Labyrinth and Warrior Queen and Quiet Revolutionaries, I spoke to
01:28 British novelist Kate Moss about how important it is to showcase the role of women in history,
01:34 even despite the apparent lack in historical records.
01:37 "So I discovered that my great-grandmother was a woman called Lily Watson and she was
01:42 a really famous novelist in her day. So I was walking in my great-grandmother's footsteps
01:47 but the thing is I didn't know it because all of her books have vanished, they're all
01:52 out of print, her name doesn't appear in any biographies of Victorian writers and in her
01:57 day she was famous, she was the favourite novelist, the British Prime Minister Gladstone,
02:02 but yet she's vanished. It was just that when history was written we were left out and you're
02:07 exactly right, you and me, we could vanish too. So what we've got to do is raise our
02:11 voices and actually just start to do the detective story, you know, we've got to turn detective
02:17 and so we've got to start to follow the clues for women in our own family histories. So
02:22 you can go to your local newspaper archive or the archive that all of the digitised paper
02:27 that Find My Past have and you might find a story about a woman who didn't appear in
02:31 the official record but there she is. It's about saying these are incredible stories
02:35 for everyone and if we only tell one type of story then what about all the boys and
02:40 men and everybody who don't fit in with that? It works both ways and so for me it's about
02:47 telling all of human history, getting all the stories truly and accurately and with
02:53 integrity and authenticity so that everybody, whoever they are, sees themselves represented
02:59 in the story of us all.
03:01 [BLANK_AUDIO]
Comments