‘Accelerate Action’ is the theme for International Women’s Day 2025, with a strong call for Women’s Advancement towards full gender equality. Whilst by the nature of our work, the Collections Team generally looks to the past, we believe that our ongoing work to expand the historical emphasis away from ‘His Story’ to telling the wider Shakespeare story and its legacy resonates with ‘Accelerate Action’. ‘Engaging with Shakespeare’s Stratford’ is a Collections specific initiative, which complements the Trust’s multi-year project ‘The Women who Made Shakespeare’ (which our collections also support).
The Collections team is the custodian of the organisational memory of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, the Shakespeare family biography (and so much more that helps tell the story of Shakespeare and Stratford-upon-Avon). We have a key role in identifying, preserving and sharing records of women’s lived experience. ‘Engaging with Shakespeare’s Stratford’ highlights personal engagements, identified for cultural, educational, employment or entertainment purposes. Such engagements leave a mark in the historical record, whether by local people with a deep engagement across Stratford life, or people with a more fleeting involvement with Stratford. All have stories to share, and women’s stories provide both examples of past action and how their cumulative actions provide platforms and encouragement for future advancement.
Enid Usher was a qualified bookseller and longtime resident of Stratford-upon-Avon. She worked in the Trust’s bookshop, before opening the independent Stratford Bookshop with her brother Neville in 1982. Enid remained committed to celebrating Shakespeare in Stratford and donated items to the Trust museum.
She also immersed herself in the town’s wider cultural and civic life. Enid took a keen interest in events beyond Stratford and was an advocate for human rights causes across the world. Glimpses of her social conscience and practical action through fund raising and campaigning are revealed in ephemeral items, which so often are the starting points for tracing past action by women.
In contrast, Elizabeth Tatham, later Marshall, spent only a short period in and around Stratford, being evacuated with her private school (Runton Hill) from Norfolk to Ilmington, south Warwickshire. Regular trips to the Shakespeare family homes and the Memorial Theatre in Stratford sparked a lifelong passion for Shakespeare and his works in performance, such as Antony & Cleopatra.
Elizabeth’s horizons spread after leaving school, enlisting in the Women’s Royal Naval Service and working at Bletchley Park cryptanalysis centre. Aspects of this later life, as well as her time in Stratford are contained in her collection.
Michelle Avon is a current resident of Stratford-upon-Avon and an advocate for the LGBTQIA+ community, locally and across Warwickshire. Michelle is working with the Collections team to ensure that stories of trans people are recorded, celebrated and preserved as contributions to achieving gender equality – in keeping with the spirit and practice of ‘Immediate Action’.
Explore our world class, Designated collections for yourself.