Lesson one - do it with someone you enjoy working with
We met while we were working as Museum Development Officers in the East of England. We helped museums to ‘museum better’, giving advice on collections care and audience engagement. We were responsible for different counties but worked well together so we did some collaborative projects and kept in touch as friends and when I came up with the idea for the podcast I asked Emma and she said yes.
Lesson two - plan, plan, plan!
Plan! Listen to other podcasts to get a feel for how they work, how many hosts they have, think about whether you’re going to have guests. Think about the time commitment, how regularly you can put up podcasts. Most fail because producers struggle to post regularly and on a frequent schedule. Plan a couple of months ahead for your initial promotion - we did press releases and a trailer and that really helped.
We started planning for the podcast in early autumn and started recording in November 2024. We launched our first episode in January 2025 and we’re airing one episode a week.
Lesson three - think about the stories you want to tell and find a repeatable format that complements them, but don’t be afraid to play with it!
You need to be really clear on what your niche is, what makes it different from other podcasts and what you specifically want to talk about and how you want to format it.
I was the Museum Development Officer for the county of Essex, which is butt of a national joke around ‘Essex girls’, who are stereotyped as being vacuous and promiscuous. It’s a negative and unjust stereotype. I ran a county-wide project with museums to explore local collections to highlight positive examples of Essex women and to show how women’s lives have changed (or not) in the century since getting the vote. We found there hadn’t been a lot of contemporary collecting, and it tended to be from the aristocracy or was anonymised - stories from the land army, factory women, not specific tales of particular women. I secured funding to support museums to actively collect to fill those gaps, to find out about women who were working class, LGBTQ, disabled, or women of colour.
That project happened just as I became a mum to a daughter and I did a full pivot into feminism and really wanting to share women’s stories and get better representation for women. The podcast has grown out of that passion and also because in the UK, we don’t talk about international history very much. In schools, when we talk about the history of other cultures, it’s from cultures that Britain would like to associate itself with - the Romans, Greeks, the classical world. That was something Emma and I had a similar vision for - we want to learn stories we don’t know. We’ve done an episode for Sámi National Day with the Women’s History Museum in Sweden, and one on photographer Julie Laurberg with the Royal Danish Library. We’re looking forward to continuing these international partnerships.
For us, it’s a lot of fun. We’re getting to talk to people around the world and hear interesting stories we wouldn't hear otherwise. We want to tell stories of women from anywhere in the world, any time period.
In our second episode, we talked about Chris Bearchall, an LGBTQ+ activist in Canada. Chris was a major part of the campaign for gay rights but doesn't seem to be known outside of Canada. We wouldn’t have heard of her if we hadn’t linked up with the ArQuives in Toronto. Episode 8 is April Ashley who was a vogue underwear model - one of first British women to undertake gender-affirming surgery. The last episode we released was about 19th Century Russian author, Avodot'ia Panaeva. This week, we’re looking at “warrior princesses” from Vietnam and Italy.
Every time Emma and I get off a recording we say that’s our new favourite. They’re always so interesting and different. We established a formula based on telling the story of a single individual from history, but for the right story, we throw the formula out and that’s fun!
Lesson four - connect with relevant initiatives or activities out in the world
For Women’s History Month, we’re partnering with Women in Red at Wikipedia, a project co-founded by Dame Rosie Stephenson Goodknight in response to the gender bias within Wikipedia. As of ten years ago, only 16% of biographical articles on the English language Wikipedia were about women, which is a tiny amount. Their project aims to redress that balance.
On Wikipedia, you click blue link after blue link to follow what you’re interested in. When there is something that should have an article of its own but doesn’t yet, it’s in red, so Women in Red are the women who are awaiting articles. The reason for that is partly because it’s harder to evidence the noteworthiness of women, which is one of the criteria for Wikipedia, because they’ve been less written about or reported on outside of a society context.
What Women in Red have achieved in the last decade is phenomenal. As of December 2024, they passed the 20% mark, which may not sound a lot but if you think about the thousands of articles included to swing that, it’s a huge number.
From 23-29 March, we will be encouraging listeners to log on and write articles about women. We have tools on our website to talk through how you become a Wikipedia contributor, the style guide, how you source information and how you can provide the evidence needed to get a woman on there. That’s where online databases like Europeana.eu and other articles and books come in. You can choose a woman you know needs an article or there is a list within Wikipedia of women that need articles. Participants can share their progress on social media using the hashtag #kickasswiki.
Lesson five - be open to the unexpected and to learning new skills
I did some podcast training years ago and had a little bit of technical knowledge but was stretching it to its limit with recording and editing - I’m improving! We’re recording over the internet because we’re talking to people all over the world, and that brings limitations to the sound quality. We’re playing around with the editing and marketing side - it’s a learning curve. One of the things we didn’t think about was how much time we would spend working out time differences and coordinating diaries across the globe!
We’ve learned that audiences are a slow build. If you are running a podcast independently - which we are - you’ve got to think about that and about budget, equipment costs, hosting costs. This is a hobby for us, we’re doing it for the love of it!
In future, we’d love to record live episodes with a live audience in a theatre or museum venue and have fun with live interaction and audiences asking experts questions.
Follow Kickass Women of History
New episodes are available every Tuesday. Find us on Facebook, Instagram, Bluesky, Threads, Tiktok and YouTube under @kickasswomenof. You can also explore our website or email us at [email protected]. More information about the #kickasswiki event and how to get involved can be found here.