#IWD2019 The women who went before us

There's a long history of enterprising and inspiring women whose stories we don't get to hear about, if ever. I'm sure every family can tell its own tale of one such woman and how she shaped their family; in my family it was my Nana.

My Dad's Mum grew up in Liverpool, born in 1917 into a large family, weren't they all, her Dad worked as a Dock labourer and her Mum was a Tailoress (that's how she's listed on the census). She was only 19 when her dad died and must have missed him terribly at her wedding a few years later in 1939.

What a year to be married, what a world to bring children in to and what a time to start out as an entrepreneur. As with lots of women during that time, her husband went to war and she stayed home, raising and supporting the family and supporting the local war effort. So far, not so different from thousands of other women in the UK at that time.

My Nana had an entrepreneurial and restless spirit, she was clever and commercially minded at a time when women weren't really encouraged to be so. Seeing an opportunity she set up a market stall selling haberdashery, this grew and grew till she took a shop. Then she opened another shop, and another and her empire grew some more. Now imagine doing all that during war time, raising your kids and hoping that the bombs that dropped missed you and your family; already there's enough inspiration there to motivate me.

When my Grandad came home and was out of work, as were lots of men, his wife was not quite the woman he had married in 1939 and left to her own devices. He had been fighting to save the world he knew and she had been busily creating a new one in his absence. Ruth Bader Ginsberg famously said that "it helps to be a little deaf in marriage", I would add that it helps to be a little humble too, sadly that's not a message that my Grandad ever got.

Rather than be delighted at his wife's success and the money that she had made for their family, my Grandad saw it as a threat. He got involved in the running of the business, it would have been unthinkable for him not to I suppose, he took over the running of one shop and it started to lose money, so did the next one he managed. My Grandad was not commercially minded. Thwarted by the marriage conventions of the time and maybe her own views, my Nana couldn't stop the decline and so, over a few years, the successful empire she had created was slowly suffocated and the shops all closed. My Grandad got a job in a factory and who knows what my Nana thought. She certainly didn't confide in her grandchildren years later.

I can only imagine how much fun she would have had being a woman in business today. She would have made many fortunes and still had time to do more. So it's to her that I bow my head on International Woman's Day, it's to her that I offer my thanks for being one in a long line of strong, enterprising women who contributed to society way before society appreciated their contribution and it's about her that I tell my daughter stories about how far women have come.