A statue of the Victorian palaeontologist Mary Anning in Lyme Regis, Dorset, prompted by a campaign by schoolgirl Evie Squire.
Women are still largely missing from the history we teach in classrooms. If we want a fairer future, we must stop erasing half the past
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, the motes of dust in a chalky classroom floating beneath high Victorian windows, 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 and preserve 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.
More than 50 years have passed since I first put on my Chi High uniform yet, in terms of the representation of women and girls in the classroom, I was shocked – dispirited – by how little has changed. There’s an idea that things are more equal, but behind all the Taylor Swifts and Billie Eilishs, the same old problems remain. It’s as if none of the social equality movements of the 70s, the 80s, the 90s and the noughties ever happened. On 24 September, the organisation End Sexism in Schools – a charity striving for a UK education system that is free of sexism and allows all children to fulfil their potential – will publish a report showing that although the History KS3 national curriculum states how history: “helps pupils to understand the complexity of people’s lives, the process of change, the diversity of societies and the relationships between different groups”, women are still largely absent from KS3 history lessons.
In 2025, women are still only the focus of 12% of history lessons, while 59% feature no women at all. None. The named women who are taught are dominated by four exceptional figures – Elizabeth I, Mary I (both early 16th century) and Emmeline Pankhurst and Emily Davison, (both early 20th century) – which gives the impression that, for most of recorded history, no other women contributed much at all. And of those schools teaching women’s suffrage, only 65% taught about women’s political campaigns before the 19th century: the work of Caroline Norton, Eglantyne Jebb, Mary Wollstonecraft, Harriet Martineau, Edith Morley, and others goes unmentioned, stripping the fight for the vote of any context or understanding that women battled over centuries for a fairer society.
The UK government is currently undertaking a curriculum and assessment review, which is great news. Less good is that when an interim report was released in March, which included plans to improve representation in the curriculum, there was no mention of gender balance.
It’s not just a question of fairness and balance, of telling a complete story, it’s also a matter of common and social sense
Parents and young people want things to change. When I toured the UK in 2023 with my one-woman show Warrior Queens, bringing the lives of 20 extraordinary women to the stage, every night teachers, parents, grandparents and carers would ask if I might write a history book for young people. Time and again they cited the lack of women in the curriculum. Feminist History for Every Day of the Year is the response to that, a celebratory YA/crossover book to be dipped into, putting incredible women and girls, past and present, back into history. From Elizabeth Blackwell, who transformed the opportunities for women to train as doctors and founded the first hospital for women, to Junko Tabei, the first woman to climb Everest after surviving an avalanche days earlier, there is no shortage of incredible women waiting to be discovered.
Why does it matter? It’s not just a question of fairness and balance, of telling a complete story, it’s also a matter of common and social sense. If women are largely missing from the textbooks, then how are girls supposed to feel that their endeavours are valued and that they can achieve what men can achieve? The media is rightly full of the pressures on young boys, the toxicity of online conversations, the rampant misogyny and the pernicious influence of fake porn that dehumanises girls. If schools only teach boys to see the world from a male perspective, then how are they supposed to feel empathy towards women and girls, or to respect their achievements? A counter-narrative is essential.
This absence of women in the curriculum is part of a broader picture. In the UK, only 17% of statues are of real – not mythical – women, and when you take Queen Victoria out of things, the figure plummets! In Edinburgh, there are more statues of animals than of women …. Again, if we see only men honoured in our public spaces, the impression given is that women’s achievements are simply not worth mentioning.
In Edinburgh, there are more statues of animals, such as Greyfriars Bobby, than of women.
We can make a difference. Parents, students, carers can write to their child’s school and raise the issue of fairer representation of women in the classroom. We can write to our MPs and to Prof Becky Francis, who is leading the curriculum review, and ask for gender to be a consideration. We can celebrate schools that are working hard to include women, alongside great men, in their teaching of history. And in our streets and parks, campaigns are already transforming the landscape: Dorset schoolgirl Evie Squire started a campaign to raise a statue to the Victorian palaeontologist Mary Anning, which was unveiled in Lyme Regis in 2022. The statue of nursing pioneer Mary Seacole outside St Thomas’ Hospital in London is the result of years of work by the Mary Seacole Trust. And in 2018, the statue of Millicent Fawcett was the first of a woman unveiled in Parliament Square and the first statue by a woman. Fawcett is holding a banner with her famous rallying cry “Courage Calls to Courage Everywhere”, but just as important is the names of the 96 women and four men on the plinth who also played a key part in the suffrage movement.
This isn’t about taking wonderful men out of history, but about putting the women back where they belong. Let’s find a way to reflect that in our schools and public spaces. After all, women and men built the world together
Feminist History for Every Day of the Year by Kate Mosse is published by Macmillan Children’s Books
Photograph by Darren Galpin/Alamy, Jen Grantham
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