HerStorically is a women’s history ‘hub’, offering up a variety of miscast, missing and misunderstood women, presenting and promoting women’s history in bite-sized pieces.

It champions those women forgotten from mainstream history, their lives missing from traditional history books, their legacies misunderstood, overlooked or defined purely by the men in their lives. It’s for those women who have taken a back-seat to their husbands, been unjustly maligned, attacked for their intelligence, intellect and wisdom, their lives unfairly edited by historians. It celebrates those punished as ‘witches’, for religious or spiritual dissidence – regarded as a danger to the safety of the status quo.

History books and traditional school lessons often focus on the same few women, held up as examples of female achievement. But times are changing. Women’s history has become more prevalent in our collective consciousness, whether in the news, in books, through commemorative events like International Women’s Day, the #MeToo movement, charities, education and writers and academics.

Those women we do know about are recorded because of their military skill, incredible courage and loyalty, scandal, poison plots and sexual debauchery. Often they have crossed over into the realm of legend and myth and become powerful symbols of feminist power.

We know of others, not specifically because of achievements in their own right, but because of their relation to a particular man in history. They were a wife, a mistress, a mother – as opposed to themselves.

For others, their stories have been overlooked or airbrushed from history. And for those whose names we will never know – their number is incalculable.