Titanic Women’s Stories

‘I feel you have captured the essence of my Great Aunt Helen.’ – Howard Ostby, descendant of Titanic survivor Helen Ostby

The early 1900s were a man’s world, and the Titanic was no exception. Even today, the stories we know about that fateful night mostly revolve around men and their actions, despite there having been nearly 500 women and girls on board.

From the stewardess who survived three different maritime disasters to the mother whose young children were kidnapped and taken aboard the Titanic, and from the Carpathia passenger whose reports on the Titanic started a journalism career to the woman who went down with the ship but who no one remembered seeing, Melinda E. Ratchford tells the stories of women whose lives were inextricably linked to the sinking, revealing the world as it was for women in 1912.

Titanic Women’s Stories is an investigation into the lives of these women before, during and after the tragedy that irrevocably changed both their world and ours.