Every year on International Women’s Day, we celebrate the achievements of women across the world. Yet so many of the women who shaped our past are still missing from history. Their lives were not recorded, their work was overlooked, and their contributions were often credited to men. Telling women’s stories is not simply about looking backwards; it’s about understanding how far women have come in challenging discrimination, creating systemic change and pushing for progress in society.

The impact of forgetting women in history

Despite the impact and influence of women throughout history, women’s history is under-documented and often forgotten. I remember craving female role models when I was at school. (See my blog where the women like me?) I wanted to know what women’s lives were like in the past, what challenges they had overcome and what they had achieved. But those stories were largely absent from textbooks then. Sadly, little has changed today.

Research by End Sexism in Schools revealed that in Key Stage 3, only 12% of history lessons focused on women, and only 7% of people mentioned in the history syllabi across Key Stage 4 and 5 were female. This means that millions of pupils aged 11 to 16 grow up without seeing women represented in the history curriculum.

When stories from women’s history are not shared, women and girls' experiences today are not understood in context as part of a continuum of women’s rights and lives. So, each new generation of young girls is unaware that they are facing the same old prejudices and narratives of patriarchal systems.

Myra Pollack Sadker said: “Every time a girl opens a book and reads a womanless history, she learns she is worth less.” Without women’s history, each generation of girls thinks it is the first to struggle, and each generation of boys grows up blind to the bias working in their favour. Women’s history is a vital education to address inequality and rising levels of misogyny and sexual abuse in schools today. That is why telling these stories matters so deeply.

Giving women a voice

Giving women a voice when they have been silenced in the past allows us to see the world through women’s eyes and experiences, not filtered through patriarchal systems. Millicent Fawcett said: “However benevolent men may be in their intentions, they cannot know what women want and what suits the necessities of women's lives as well as women know these things themselves.”

And for us, we begin to recognise familiar emotions, the determination to prove oneself, the courage to step into unfamiliar spaces, and the quiet resilience required to carry on when others doubt you. And we realise that these women were not extraordinary because they were different from us. They were just like us and faced similar challenges. The progress many of us rely on today exists because women were prepared to challenge the system and push institutions to change. That is why telling these stories matters so deeply today.

The inspiring Lumberjills: ordinary women who lived extraordinary lives

The Lumberjills were ordinary young women: shop assistants, secretaries and domestic servants, among others. When the Second World War came, they swapped their skirts for dungarees and went to work in Britain’s forests, armed with seven-pound axes and six-foot crosscut saws. They felled trees, hauled heavy logs, drove tractors, worked in sawmills and calculated the homegrown timber supplies we needed during wartime.

And yet in the 1940s, many believed women were not strong, skilled or intelligent enough to do such work. The Lumberjills had courage, resilience and the determination to prove themselves. In doing so, they pioneered new careers and paved the way for future generations of women who work in forestry today. Their story reminds us that progress happens when women step forward and refuse to accept the limits placed upon them.

Inspiring the future with the power of possibility

When we rediscover these stories, something powerful happens. You encounter women who changed the world in science, politics, art, sport, conservation and community life. Women who fought for the vote. Women who organised communities. Women who refused to accept that their future should be limited by someone else’s expectations.

You begin to feel a sense of solidarity stretching across generations. As Lady Gertrude Denman, the first chairman of the National Federation of Women’s Institutes, said, women did not get a fair deal in society, and her greatest happiness was in helping women do something about it. That spirit still matters today.

Because when we acknowledge and celebrate the women who came before us, we do not simply honour the past. We create role models for the present and possibilities for the future. And when a woman reads about another woman who faced impossible odds and still succeeded, a quiet thought often follows, ‘If she could do that, then perhaps I can too.’ That is the power of women’s history. And that is why sharing these stories still matters today.