The Herstory Project has been developed by the STUC Women's Committee to build upon capturing and highlighting the stories of Scottish trade union women. Herstory aims to engage, encourage, and empower trade union women with the confidence, courage, and skills to share a story of their own, and to equip them with the tools to support other trade union women to do the same. Every day women are contributing to and making herstory - the Herstory Project also aims to ensure that the herstory women make every day in our unions, workplaces, communities, and society has a place to be captured and valued for our present, and our future.  

So far, the Herstory Project has been funded by the STUCs Scottish Union Learning Funding and supported by the EIS Union. Through this funding, the Project worked to co-design two workshops with the Scottish Book Trust, and delivered with published author Alison Irvine. The Herstory workshops provided excellent tuition in writing, editing, and facilitation skills to a cohort of around 20 trade union women.  The workshops also empowered this small cohort to write a story of their own and have laid the foundations for growing and expanding the Herstory Project. A number of stories from the Herstory Project’s first participating cohort of women have now been captured - these can be viewed on this site. 

Importance of capturing & sharing women's stories

Stories are powerful and sharing stories is powerful. Everyone has a story. Yet women's stories, particularly working-class women’s stories, are less often told and many remain untold forever - the narratives around the struggles and the wins of many women often never having the chance to be shared or told.  Working-class women make significant contributions to our workplaces, trade unions, communities, and society, yet are less encouraged to tell their stories; and their experiences have not always been recognised or valued. Women are so busy ‘doing’ across the many roles that they juggle that they have little time to stop and think about what they are doing and the value that it holds for them, their families, communities, colleagues, never mind to tell stories about it. Women’s stories are less heard, shared, and celebrated across our society, is unsurprising when we consider how women have historically been underrepresented in the spaces where stories are most commonly told- in the world of literature, in the media, on TV, in the music industry, in politics, and elsewhere in civic life, including the trade union movement itself… though change has been coming, if slowly and patchily, over more recent years.  If we don't capture our herstory, who will?

Please take time to read the herstories collected so far on this site.