About the Project
This National Heritage Lottery Funded project engages Plymothians with the city’s unique heritage of powerful women, by celebrating the significant contribution made by women to Plymouth’s identity as the new city of Plymouth emerged 1919-2019. It is an ongoing project, which will conclude formally in September 2021, but includes a legacy building period until 2022. We use the project to highlight these women by providing, through the website, brief biographical profiles. A selection of these has also been used to create a model heritage trail app. The list of Plymouth Powerful Women is still being added to.
The Hoe Neighbourhood Forum has, with its main partner, the University of Plymouth, developed an initiative to highlight women’s input, as MPs, local Councillors and Lord Mayors, professionals and above all, as everyday activists, all working to improve the physical, emotional and spiritual environment of the city, by focusing on initiatives to enhance the lives of Plymothians. The objective for this project has been to ensure their recognition, utilising narratives which can engage both citizens and visitors, to make them a permanent part of Plymouth’s heritage. To recognise this, we came up with the concept of Plymouth Powerful Women – powerful not because of social or economic position, but because of the positive impact they have, and continue to have, on Plymouth. Looking beyond social or class status, possessions or age and ethnicity, Plymouth Powerful Women have in common a practical – even down-to-earth – approach in their contributions, consistently understanding the importance of apparently mundane objects and objectives to community welfare and happiness.
The project’s objective is not to revisit the Plymouth Powerful Women whose names were already familiar, from Agnes Weston to Selina Latimer, unless – like Rosa Bale or Mabel Ramsay – their activism in various causes in Plymouth continued post 1919. Instead, we wanted to highlight names less familiar but whose contribution to Plymouth in the last 100 years has been significant in a range of fields. Such women include councillors like Clara Daymond, Lord Mayors like Jacquetta Marshall, and magistrates like Agnes Buller-Kitson. Successive generations of Powerful Women subsequently made their mark on Plymouth, and continue to do so today.
Why a start date of 1919? In that year, Plymouth was no longer the Three Towns, having been forced to become ‘Plymouth’ in 1914, because a looming prospect of conflict (in Ireland, not the World War, ironically) convinced the government to overcome local objections and push the legislation through. As well as the war, 1919 was the start of a new era in other ways. The Representation of the People Act 1918 had enfranchised at least a substantial number of women, and in Plymouth, the year had closed with women forming the majority of those voting in the December General Election. That election in many ways marked the end of one era where Plymouth Powerful Women had played a major role in lobbying for women’s suffrage.
So, in 1919, Plymouth was rethinking itself and its identity in peacetime, and wondering how to go forward. In that year, women would be eligible for election to the Town Council (it was not yet a city), and Plymouth was also looking forward to being a centre in the Mayflower 300 celebrations. There had never before been a celebration of the sailing of the Mayflower, but in the closing stages of the war, Plymouth-born scholar Dr James Rendel Harris suggested celebrating Mayflower 300 to mark the new closeness of the UK and the USA, focusing on Plymouth as a symbol for both. Nancy Astor loved the idea, and, with local friends, spent 1919 lobbying for Plymouth to be the key focal location. So that year ended with plans in place for a huge international week of celebrations in September 2020, in Plymouth – an enterprise where much of the practical delivery would depend on Plymouth Powerful Women. It seemed appropriate to end the project at the 2019 date, with the launch of plans to celebrate Mayflower 400 on the same day as celebrating Nancy Astor’s election. Looking forward, the focus on environmental issues including plastic waste, preservation of green spaces and a fairer society are clearly echoed in the concerns of the last 100 years, but today’s Powerful Women are choosing to challenge in new and innovative ways and not just replicating the past.
The project used the opportunity of the centennial celebration of Nancy Astor’s election to the House of Commons, as MP for Plymouth Sutton – the first woman elected to take her seat in Parliament. On 28 November 2019, the project put itself before the city via a free public exhibition in Plymouth Guildhall, which showcased a sample selection of Plymouth Powerful Women as part of making Plymothians better acquainted with their first (but not last) woman MP, including her key contribution to making Mayflower 300 happen. The event also saw the premiere of a play by local author Hugh Janes, and the showing of a University Time-Lock produced documentary on Nancy Astor. Visitors were invited to submit names of other women they felt deserved to be included, to promote the level of public engagement with this project and to make it a shared community enterprise. The twin outcomes were to be an app supported Heritage Trail of Plymouth Powerful Women, and the creation of a permanent resource of biographical summaries, outlining the headlines of their contributions, of as many Plymouth Powerful Women as could be managed and researched in the timeframe of the project. We hoped for at least 100 – and we have nearly achieved that goal.
The 100 names, if we achieve that by Plymouth History Month in May 2021, can only represent a selection that is, at best, representative of the types of contributions that Plymouth Powerful Women have made, and continue to make. Our objective is that the resource of biographical summaries we provide via the website will encourage others to take the research further, adding to the resources on the one hand, and using the existing resource and any new additions to create additional trails. These could be geographical – around Devonport or Stonehouse – or thematic, focusing on education, or environmental issues, or politics, for example – or chronological, focusing on a particular decade and developments in Plymouth, including new communities and housing.
To take the project further after 28 November 2019, we had planned a series of community engagement events in the first months of 2020. But those plans were largely overtaken by the Covid-19 pandemic, which shifted focus away from community engagement thanks to lockdown, and also meant that, understandably, engagement with the details of the project were not, for most Plymothians, a priority. Kindly given an extension by the National Heritage Lottery body to September 2021 we carried on working behind the scenes. We researched and began the process of drawing up a model trail which could be supported by an app. We are very grateful to Visit Plymouth and Plymouth City Council for their support in developing this and adding it to their online Plymouth Trails. We also launched on 8 March the supporting website hosting the resources. This website, hosted on the University of Plymouth website, will be regularly updated until September 2022. From 8 March 2021 on, and including those 12 months of our active legacy, Professor Rowbotham will take a lead in interacting with suggestions for amendments or additions. We will also be offering advice, via Rob Giles, in that period on the software dimension of how to create your own trail.
The launch on 8 March 2021 of the initial Plymouth Powerful Women trail app, and the associated website, coincides with International Women’s Day. The IWD theme for 2021 is Choosing to Challenge – and what better motto could the project have? Choosing to Challenge in a variety of fields and in many different ways has characterized the Powerful Women we highlight in this project.