Here is the problem... South Canterbury has no shortage of remarkable women. Their names appear in archives, family albums, school magazines, newspaper reports, honour boards and old committee minutes... and yet, try to find their stories online, and many seem to disappear.
The problem is not that nobody cared. It is that the evidence is scattered, difficult to search and often hidden inside records created for entirely different purposes.
This WuHoo project aims to join those fragments together: to find the names behind “the ladies’ committee”, connect stories to their original sources and make the contributions of South Canterbury women easier to discover.
But this is not a hunt for flawless heroines or famous firsts. The more interesting question is simpler: what changed because this woman was there? Perhaps she challenged a barrier. Perhaps she created something new. Perhaps she taught, organised, protected, cared, raised funds or quietly kept an essential service running for decades.
History is often presented as a collection of extraordinary individuals. In reality, change usually happens through networks of people taking practical steps, one after another. By tracing those steps, we can understand not only what these women achieved, but how they began, who helped them and what became possible because of their work.
And perhaps, somewhere in their stories, we might recognise a pathway that is possible for us too.
Read on to learn how the women will be chosen, what we mean by impact, how their stories will be researched and how you can help bring more women from the margins onto the page...