This Women’s History Month we launched the Herstory campaign where we asked where are all the women within our curricula.

We believe that It’s impossible to fight for a society where women are seen as equals when our efforts are constantly marginalised or completely written out of history all together because of the systematic sexism in education.

That’s why NUS Women’ Campaign has teamed up with the HerStory project to kick off this initiative to help students to get more women in the curriculum. We've worked with students to create this online resource of women that we think should have a place in the curriculum. You can access the entire padlet here.

Quotes from the Her Story Survey
 

Constantly left out - of reading lists, seminars and citation. In crits, in response to my performance based practice the same men are offered to me, Vito Acconci is always offered up. This is a medium contributed to predominantly by women but my male tutors seem unable to cite them.

I'm a fine art student. When we have lectures on feminist theory we are shown only female artists but otherwise our curriculum focuses on male artists almost exclusively.

I think there is still a long way to go. As much as the Arts and Humanities love to talk about diversity, they rarely walk the walk. It seems that Humanities scholars think that they can get away with it, because they think they know so much about oppression, they're exempt from reproducing oppressive constructs. (to be honest, Cheryl Dunye WAS actually in my curriculum, but I want her to be in other people's curriculum as well)

The fact that you only learn about the work of women activists in history the context of gender history and it is never accepted as part of the mainstream narrative.

What representation? Women were barely mentioned in the curriculum, aside from the brief compulsory interlude into the suffragettes. I had no idea how many crucial scientific discoveries were made by women, or how much of our national landscape was carved by women, or just how badass feminists were until University - and even then, in my own research.