A storytelling session for International Women’s Day
This International Women’s Day, audiences were invited into a powerful and deeply personal storytelling experience: “She Who Holds the Crown.”
The session explored the strength, humour, resilience and quiet authority of Romany Gypsy women — the women who have carried culture, memory and survival through centuries of change, discrimination and resilience.
The storytelling began with a simple question:
When history writes about a people… who kept them alive long enough for that history to exist?
After a pause, the answer came.
The women.
Challenging the stereotypes
Romany Gypsy women have long been surrounded by stereotypes.
Too often they are imagined as fortune tellers, mysterious figures in bright skirts, or women somehow oppressed by tradition. But the storytelling session gently dismantled those assumptions with humour and honesty.
Because anyone who has grown up in a Traveller family knows the truth is something quite different.
Romany women organise entire extended families. They keep track of kinship ties, family histories, disputes, celebrations and traditions. They are negotiators, protectors, historians and often the emotional backbone of their communities.
As the storyteller joked to the audience:
People say Romany women are controlled by their men.
That’s adorable.
In Romany culture there is a much more accurate saying:
The man may be the head of the home…
but the woman holds the crown.
A history carried through women
The session moved through history and memory.
Audiences heard about Romany ancestors who travelled from Rajasthan more than a thousand years ago, bringing with them skills as metalworkers, musicians, traders and healers. They heard about the laws that followed when Romany people arrived in Britain in the 1500s — laws that attempted to criminalise Gypsy identity and control where families could live and travel.
Yet despite centuries of exclusion and persecution, Romany culture survived.
And much of that survival came through the women who remembered.
Women who passed knowledge from grandmother to granddaughter.
Women who shared warnings across camps.
Women who carried family stories long before they were ever written down.
The women behind the stories
At the heart of the session were the women who shaped the storyteller’s own life.
There was Granny Suzanna, a tall, raven-haired woman remembered for her fierce courage and loyalty to family.
There was Granny Winnie, small but formidable — the kind of Romany granny who could command an entire family with nothing more than a glance.
But one of the most important women in the story was the storyteller’s own mother.
Her mam grew up travelling in wagons, her childhood spent on the road. The first night she ever slept in a trailer was on the night of her wedding. Everything before that had wooden wheels, canvas roofs and the open sky.
Later in life she stepped into a new role, becoming one of the first Home School Liaison Workers for the Bradford Travellers Education Service, helping Gypsy and Traveller families navigate education systems that were rarely built with them in mind.
For her children, that was an extraordinary moment. It showed that a Traveller woman could walk in two worlds — keeping her culture, raising her family and still carving out space in wider society.
Years later, after decades of working to support Gypsy and Traveller families, she said something that stayed forever:
“I’m done now, my big girl.
I’ve been doing this work a long time.
It’s been hard.
You go change the world.”
And with those words, the storyteller realised something important.
The crown doesn’t belong to one woman.
It is passed down.
Passing the crown
Throughout the storytelling session, audiences were reminded that strong women often shape families quietly. They are rarely written into official histories, yet their influence can stretch across generations.
The crown, as the story explains, moves from grandmother to daughter to granddaughter.
With it comes the responsibility to carry culture, resilience and pride forward.
Why these stories matter
International Women’s Day is often about celebrating well-known women who have changed the world.
But “She Who Holds the Crown” reminded audiences that there are countless women — grandmothers, mothers, aunties and sisters — whose strength quietly sustains entire communities.
Romany Gypsy women have done exactly that for centuries.
Holding families together.
Holding traditions together.
Holding communities together.
As the storytelling concluded:
“The man may be the head of the home…
but the woman holds the crown.”
And if Romany communities are still here after hundreds of years, it is because Romany women never let that crown fall.
