Scanning through all the placements available to me, the opportunity to work with this organisation stood out. As is evident by my degree choice, learning about history is a huge interest of mine. It’s what led us to the present day, it’s what has influenced society around us, and even on a personal level has influenced our families generation by generation. Social history is where the largest part of my interest lies, so learning of birthing stories from the women of Worcester seemed fascinating to me. To learn of the bigger picture, we must look at the individual stories, each as important as one another. Moreover, female history often seems to be sidestepped in favour of male history, when in reality women have shown as much courage and strength as men throughout history.
Sales, marketing, and the like isn’t something I could necessarily see myself in. Though circumstances have changed due to covid-19, sitting behind a desk with no human interaction didn’t really seem greatly appealing to me. I’d much rather reach out to others, be social, make connections with other groups and see how we can all work collaboratively to reach common goals. Additionally, I feel it’s important to make efforts to improve communities, and I’m hoping to contribute towards this if funding for this project goes ahead.
Through this project, I hope to help connect the museum to groups from in and around Worcester. This includes from medical fields, pregnancy groups, mum and baby groups, religious groups and diverse ethnic communities. Not only do I want to share their stories to connect women to one another and highlight their solidarity, but also celebrate their differences and what makes each person and their own child birth story unique. I hope that hearing of other mothers difficulties but most importantly joys will empower women to feel in control of their own birth. Hearing of others could be reassuring, help women make their own choices instead of just listening to medical advice and hopefully inspire social charge. This is why I am working on trying to drum up interest for the project. Having created a list of organisations I could contact, I will soon be working on getting in touch with them to ask if they feel this project could benefit the women in their communities. From this, we will be able to see if the project can go ahead.
Hope to keep you all updated on what happens next!