Launch speech by Margaret Drabble

We are here to celebrate a unique combination of new technology, new scholarship, new thinking and old material. The launch of this website is an important moment for the history of Yorkshire, the history of women in Yorkshire and it has a relevance that goes beyond the local. It is a blueprint for a new way of reclaiming the past- and we all now know that by reclaiming the past we can strengthen and alter the future.

The stories we have heard are part of a continuing story and we who listen to them here and at home are part of that story too. Soon it may become easy to forget the extraordinary changes in emphasis that we have seen in the past two or three decades. We already take many of them for granted.

When I look back I recognize that during my working life I have been lucky to live through a period of great and I believe irreversible progress. We still – and rightly- hear complaints about the way in which women are under-represented in many careers and professions and the way in which their contributions to society have been ignored, neglected, or under-recorded.

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