Volume 22:
Women’s History Month

Updated 1 April 2022

Editor’s note

Happy Women’s History Month!

Women’s History Month in the UK runs every March and is a time for us to bring women’s history back into the spotlight. Centuries of sexism have meant that many women’s voices have been erased from history, lost forever. But, historians can use their skills to recover some women’s stories – as long as we know where to look. That is our duty as historians, to recover stories from the past and preserve them for the future.

Maisy Morris has written an article on the remarkable Byzantine historian Anna Komnene, and her epic – near Homeric – work The Alexiad. Molly Churchill has examined historians’ sexist approach to history before the Second Wave Feminist Movement and Zac Fairbrother has drawn out Japanese women’s voices using Hello Kitty as a launchpad for historical discovery. Anya Goulthorpe has detailed how Madonna broke down the walls of the patriarchy and used the stage as her platform for activism.

I have written five short stories, re-imagining the lives of the women murdered by Jack the Ripper in 1888. Violence against women does play a central role in our history, yet historians can illuminate their lives – rather than their deaths. We have a choice in whose history, and what history, we tell.

This volume of New Histories is dedicated to Polly, Annie, Elizabeth, Kate, and Mary Jane. And every other woman harmed by male violence.

Hannah McCann

Editor-in-Chief