International Women’s Day at Teddies
St Edward’s is marking Women’s History Month and International Women’s Day in a variety of ways this year – from a visiting creative workshop in School, to exploring untold stories of forgotten women at a performance in The North Wall – pupils from our Feminist Society and the wider community are coming together to celebrate women’s achievements and progress the drive for greater equality.
Under this year’s worldwide #BreakTheBias campaign for gender equality for a sustainable tomorrow, our first School assembly of the month looked both to the past and to the future. It was as an opportunity for the Warden to invite FemSoc representatives and School prefects to the stage to talk to pupils about plans to mark the month, and to highlight their own personal experiences and understanding of what it means for the School and more widely. Pupils spoke candidly about the individual paths their mothers and grandmothers had taken to enable them to have, not only the opportunities, but also the inner confidence to achieve their aims and celebrated their courage and tenacity.
This month, we are also encouraging pupils to reflect on the wider context of women in Oxford and at the university – the fact that a degree was awarded to the first woman at Oxford only in 1920, that the university’s quota for women was only removed in 1957 and that the first men’s colleges to admit women did so only in 1974. St Edward’s, like the Oxford University of today, celebrates an enlightened and forward-thinking ethos. However, the early history of Teddies associates the founding of the School in 1863 with Thomas Chamberlain and the first Warden, Algernon Simeon (who was involved with moving Teddies to its current site in Summertown) but very few would be aware of the significant role of Felicia Skene, who first turned the soil for the building of the School on this site. Her relative absence from the history books is just one example of male bias in history and something which we as a School are working to change. An account of her life will appear in the next edition of the Chronicle.
Looking at the present-day situation and reshaping the current and future narratives, pupils have this week already taken part in a workshop in the School led by EmpowerHer*Voice – a platform bringing together artists, activists, and academics to highlight the vision and experiences of people of marginalised genders worldwide. Today, pupils have the opportunity to attend a performance in The North Wall, by Zing Tsjeng, journalist, podcaster and founder of the UK edition of award-winning millennial women’s website Broadly. In her show Forgotten Women, she explores the untold stories of inspiring women who have been marginalised from history.
As St Edward’s celebrates International Women’s Day today, and Women’s History Month throughout March, we hope to encourage all pupils to think about equality, seeing and treating everyone in the same way – and the integral part it plays in our School values of integrity, kindness and courage.
