Gill Heriz - A Woman’s Shed: She sheds for women to create, write, make, grow, think, and escape

What is it about sheds that is so appealing?

Do they remind us of the hiding places, of our childhood, when we made dens out of anything and everything, wherever we could, turning bunk beds, packing cases, ruined walls, and hedges into our own secret places, and lost ourselves in the world of our imagination?

As we sit in our centrally heated houses, amid the trappings of consumerism, do we, as adults, crave that simpler life? Is there a collective primal memory of a more elemental existence that gives us direct contact with the few things we need in order to live? When we enter our sheds, we see a table, a chair, a bench, boxes of tools, seeds, a simple stove, a tea kettle. We can pretend, play, create, be ourselves, and find freedom from the paraphernalia of everyday contemporary life.

When we were young we tried to understand the mystery of our fathers disappearing into their sheds, their own private realms, but as girls then, and as women now, we, too, have built, converted, and kitted out spaces for our own needs away from everyday life. Women, too, have sheds.

When the idea for this book arose, I keyed in the words "Womens Sheds" on the internet, which led to the digital universe scratching its patriarchal head. The initial response was that "shed" meant losing weight. A second attempt brought the reply, "Do you mean Mens Sheds?" No, I did not! I tried again. There was more scrunching of the massive labyrinthine lexicon wrapped around the whole of our e-planet and reaching into the stars. "Do you mean Womens Shoes?"

The invisibility of womens sheds began to raise a challenge. Are womens private and working spaces meant to be invisible? Are they so private that we succeed in hiding them from the rest of the world? Do we enjoy the assumption that sheds are for men, and thin women like shoes a lot?

In the West, for the last two hundred years or so, women have been primarily identified as "homemakers," even when they have also been engaged in paid work outside the home.