Kate Mosse: Shifting the narrative

Bestselling author and feminist champion Kate Mosse was in Bath earlier this month to highlight her new book, Feminist History for Every Day of the Year, as part of the Bath Children’s Literature Festival. Melissa Blease spoke to Kate to learn how she’s shining a light on female unsung heroes, from the past and present… Photography by Ruth Crafer

We all know that history isn’t neutral – it’s shaped by who tells it. But did you know…?
• Women only occupy around 0.5% of recorded history
• Only 15% of blue plaques in the UK celebrate female figures
• Only 1 in 5 statues across the UK are of women (in Edinburgh there are more statues of dogs than women)
• 68 million women go unrecognised in census records
• In the KS3 curriculum, 82% of novels taught feature a male protagonist; 77% of schools teach one or no whole texts by female authors across the three years of KS3, with 44% teaching none at all
• In the 2023 History GCSE exams, only 6% of questions were focused on women in history, compared to 37% of questions about men

The statistics highlighted above are a grim read indeed. But do they make you angry – or sad?

Bestselling writer, feminist activist, journalist, broadcaster and founder-director of the prestigious Women’s Prizes for Fiction and Non-Fiction Kate Mosse OBE/CBE’s initial response to that question bewildered me for a moment.

“Neither, really,” she says. What? I was expecting a barrage of outrage fuelled by raging exasperation and deep melancholia! Ah, but…

“Anger may, for some people, be a really healthy emotion that inspires action – but not necessarily positive action,” she continues. “And being sad is no use because when people despair or feel demoralised, that tends to make them inactive.

“Personally, those statistics make me want to act, to do something to change things by shining a light on the serious big issues around the representation of women and girls; that’s much more powerful than either being angry or being sad.”

And Kate’s new book is nothing if not powerful. Feminist History for Every Day of the Year (published by Pan Macmillan last month) tells the real story of women’s and girls’ history through the ages and across the world, celebrating 366 diverse movers and shakers in their own, distinct fields including Sophia Jex-Blake, Taylor Swift, Simone Biles, Mary Wollstonecraft, Anne Bonny, Billie Eilish and 359 others, including women that you’ve probably never heard of but who we all should have done, supplemented by essays, quotes, and beautiful imagery.

It’s a treatise that acts as a rebuttal to both those statistics and our current socio-political climate: a gorgeous, uplifting festival of light for all ages to dip in and out of.

Crikey, Kate: it must have been difficult to choose which women to put in the spotlight in the book?

“Oh, so difficult!” she says. “At first, it felt like I was doing one of those circular jigsaw puzzles without corners; you’d be astonished at how many incredible women die or were born on the same day.

“But then, on other days it was like, where is everybody? And I wanted it to be a mixture of different types of women from different backgrounds, ethnicities, parts of the world and different parts of history – and different professions or social activism too: a snapshot of all the amazing things that incredible women throughout history have done.

“But I also really wanted it to be fun, not only focusing on women who have changed the world through their incredible brain, or incredible courage, or incredible fight to be acknowledged. I’ve included women who just make the world better for us all through their music, say, or their acting. I’ve aimed for a mixture of women and girls from the past, but also from the present, to speak to younger readers today.”

Fairness for all

But will the book resonate with boys, too – indeed, are they likely to add it to their reading pile?

“It’s crucial that boys and men are involved in this dialogue and the book is very much for boys too,” Kate says.

“Throughout everything I do – for example, when I toured my one-woman Warrior Queens and Quiet Revolutionaries show in 2023, or my Labyrinth Live! show earlier this year – I say out loud, in every single performance or speech, that this is not about girls v boys or men v women; it’s about fairness, it’s about getting a bigger table and more chairs. And it’s not about taking wonderful, beautiful men and boys out of history – it’s about adding the women and girls back in there, where they always were.

“One of the essays in the book is about how boys can be feminists too, because the world is a better place if all those who believe in fairness of opportunity stand together and find a common language – and that means supporting boys to do that too.

“At the moment, our world seems to be intent on setting people against one another, and we have to find a way of showing that we don’t believe in that vision of the world that’s being offered to us.”

…this is not about girls v boys or men
v women; it’s about fairness, it’s about getting a bigger table and more chairs.”

Changing the status quo

Kate and I are talking about the impact that she’s made on the world in the year that celebrates both the 30th anniversary of the Women’s Prize for Fiction (co-founded by Kate in partnership with fellow literary-world luminaries Clare Alexander, Jane Gregory, Susan Sandon and Carole Welch.) and the 20th birthday of her epochal historical novel Labyrinth, a global best-seller centring around strong female characters.

Was Kate aware, when she first started writing, that she would become as known for her activism and campaigning as she is for her perfect prose?

“No, not at all,” she says. “I describe myself as a storyteller. When people ask me why I write about women, I say, well I’m a woman – why wouldn’t I write about women? People don’t ask men why they write about men – they just assume it’s the logical thing to do.

“I know I’ve been very lucky; I follow my interests and my enthusiasms, and I’ve found myself in a position where I can make a career out of doing that. But having spent all my writing life looking at history and seeing all the women who were a massive part of it all written out, I’ve become more interested in telling the 360-degree story of history rather than the very narrow band we’re taught about.”

But how does a writer even attempt to change such an established status quo when the current political climate seems to be intent, in many ways, of sending women back to the dark ages?

“What we’re dealing with right now, more than ever before, is an active and deliberate campaign of misinformation and disinformation,” says Kate. “In an unparalleled moment of history, it’s now possible to use propaganda to affect and influence every single person who has a mobile phone.

“In the past, that influence couldn’t be disseminated quite so widely, and I genuinely believe that spreading despair is part of a deliberate process to divide and rule. This is one of the many reasons why we have to be more careful about, say, our social media use, because we’re living in a time of techno feudalism, and the control of the narrative is held by a miniscule number of men.

“But real life is nuanced and complicated, and you can admire and respect people even when they have views that you don’t agree with at all. We need to get back to a listening time, and we are in a shouting time.”

Feminist connections in Bath

If you crave a moment of quiet time in which to reflect on Kate’s manifesto, she’s keen to share the importance of a little part of big history right on our Bath doorsteps that could well be your ideal oasis.

“Emmaline Pankhurst – who is of course in the book – has very strong connections to the city,” she tells me.

“Eagle House in Batheaston was a sanctuary for suffragettes who would go there to recuperate after the brutality of being force-fed while on hunger strike in prison.” And if the prospect of a visit to Eagle House might make you sad or angry, take Kate’s closing statements with you:

“We have to remember that history is a pendulum reliant on change,” she says. “If we can find it in ourselves to galvanise action, then we can make those changes. Small steps make a difference just as much as big ones do; before you know it, you’ve got a movement. Think of the incredible women in Feminist History for Every Day of the Year and the barriers they faced – but they made change anyway. That’s the biggest message in the book, for everybody.”