Audacious Women Festival – Edinburgh, 21-25 February 2019

The Audacious Women Festival is back for 2019 with a diverse programme of events in Edinburgh from this Thursday.

Run by the independent Audacious Women Collective, the festival ‘aims to empower and encourage women to overcome personal, political and institutional barriers, and to celebrate the achievements of inspirational Scottish women’. Objectives that we at Women’s History Scotland certainly approve of!

For the Audacious Women Collective this is ‘more than a women’s festival’, but a celebration of Audacious Women who are ‘bold, courageous, who have flaunted convention, taken risks and done audacious acts’. They want to encourage women to move outside their comfort zone, face their inner demons and ‘do what they always wish they dared’.

If you fancy breaking convention and being adventurous then there is something for everyone. Importantly, in our view, you can also celebrate the achievements of the audacious women ‘who have gone before’.

You can find out more and book tickets via the Festival’s website – https://audaciouswomen.scot/2019-programme

https://twitter.com/AWfest/status/1070404093900939269

There is certainly plenty of women’s history and in particular an exhibition telling the story of Dorothée Pullinger and the other ‘girl engineers’ who sought professional engineering training in Galloway during the First World War. They went on to produce the Galloway car, described as ‘a car made by ladies for others of their sex’.The growing interest of women in becoming engineers led to the foundation of the Women’s Engineering Society in 1919.

The exhibition is part of a wider project “A Car for Women and Other Stories” which explores the life of Dorothée Pullinger who started as apprentice engineer at the Arrol Johnson Motor Company in Paisley in 1910. At the start of the First World War Dorothée was head-hunted to Vickers’ Engineering to manage 7,000 female munition workers, including the ladies’ football team. .

Find out about The Dorothée Pullinger Project at the University of West of Scotland here – http://dorotheepullinger.co.uk/

https://twitter.com/DorothePulling1/status/1095360191686721536

For those interested in women’s history also see: Firebrand Women: Generating ChangeWitches & B**@ Walking Tour of Edinburgh and Write to Remember

Valerie Wright (University of Glasgow)

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