Voices from the Well

This is the story of my journey across the world collecting stories from women who love women. Being in fact a project manager and not a writer or collector of stories, I don’t have the remotest idea of exactly how I will go about doing this, and the thought alone is terrifying. But I didn’t think that was a good enough reason not to do it, so here goes…

On the first step of my journey across the world to collect stories of women who love women, my voice will be the first and, no doubt, the last. But I hope very much that in between I will uncover the stories of many women that might otherwise never be told – ordinary women, wealthy women, old women, powerful women, rural women, marginalised women, young women, famous women, poor women, urban women – all united by the their love of other women. We have been all but invisible throughout history – my mission is to change this.

Although I identify as a lesbian, here I will mostly refer to women who love women because I recognise that it is only very recently that this term has been embraced by women who love women, largely in the Western world. I am aware that to many older women, the term lesbian has negative connotations and I have yet to discover how, if at all, women who love women identify themselves outside my relatively small and insular Westernised gay world. I also want to include the stories of women who have loved women in the past but now love men (and vice-versa), and those who may never have acted on their love for another woman.

How we define ourselves is up to us – that we are women who love women is all that matters.

So here goes. An entirely unqualified British woman, living in Australia, embarking on an adventure with no idea where it will take her. Her only experience of writing has been for her university newspaper more than a decade ago. She has no funding and no real plan. But she will go to the ends of the earth to document the stories of women who love women, and she won’t stop until the whole world hears them.