HistoriA® was born to encourage the next generation of women by unearthing the history of female pioneers.
Historical records reveal story after story of male accomplishments. But those stories don’t provide a complete narrative. For centuries, women toiled in obscurity to produce work that would achieve immortality. The time has come to recover their names from dusty forgotten volumes and spread them far and wide.
On a necessary quest to keep the overlooked biographies of important historical women alive, IRIS sets out to give history’s forgotten women their rightful place in the spotlight by launching HistoriA®.
HistoriA® complements and corrects what the world takes to be foundational knowledge, with the aim of addressing ignorance of women’s contributions to human understanding through time and around the globe.
More important, this gives people the opportunity to examine and celebrate the women who helped shape our present—including Laura Bassi, an 18th-century Newtonian physicist, and Amelia Bassano Lanier, a 16th-century poet believed to have co-authored Shakespeare’s plays—and to recognize that history’s important lives aren’t only those of men.
IRIS is conducting workshops for middle and high school students to expand girls’ expectations and plant seeds of leadership and innovation through the rediscovered biographies.
The message that IRIS wants to convey with HistoriA is that being a young woman today is intimately connected to the experiences of women of the past.
With every new female biography escaping the shadows for the light, IRIS brings the world one step closer to seeing its true history and preparing for a better future.
IRIS is a force of gender equality in research, scholarship, preservation, documentation, and illumination.
Be a Light of New!