Inspiring Scottish Women
With International Women’s Day coming up, it’s the perfect time to look at some amazing Scottish women. I’ve already written about some of the contributions that women have made to Scotland, from pioneering doctors like Sophia Jex-Blake and Elsie Inglis to suffragette and bagpiper Bessie Watson, but you could fill a whole library with stories.
Because women throughout history have mostly been excluded from male-dominated spheres of power like politics and higher education, their more domestic revolutions were often overlooked. We tend to associate early women’s rights activism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries with suffrage campaigns, but women at all levels of society were also engaged with the project of improving daily life.
The Victorian age saw massive growth in Britain’s cities as the country industrialised and grew richer off the back of its expanding global empire. Growing populations and a lack of social safety net led to cramped housing and slum conditions in every major city, with whole families often crammed into single rooms with little or no access to sanitation. Like the men, women had no option but to work, whether in factories, in domestic service or by taking piecemeal sewing work into the home.
All of this made access to childcare a necessity, but it wasn’t provided by the state. However, Victorian society revered the innocence of children, and improving their lives was an acceptable form of activism for women at the time. Projects would often be funded by wealthy women, aided by middle-class professional women (such as teachers) on the ground, and fought for by the women in working-class communities, who knew better than anyone the positive effects on their own lives and their children’s education.
In early twentieth-century Edinburgh, a teacher and activist called Lileen Hardy worked with some of these mothers, whom she referred to as “the heroines of the Canongate”. The Canongate (the lower section of the Royal Mile in the heart of the Old Town) was largely an overcrowded slum, where working women had little or no access to formal childcare. Although older children were in schools by this stage, the youngest often had to fend for themselves while their parents worked.
Lileen Hardy was from the middle classes, so she had to work to support herself. She trained as a kindergarten teacher in London in 1899 before moving to Edinburgh as a governess for the Whyte family. The first free kindergarten in Britain opened in the Canongate in 1903, and as a trained teacher Lileen must have been interested. In 1906, she set up Edinburgh’s second free kindergarten, St Saviour’s, in the Mission Hall of Old St Paul’s Church. Her old boss, Jane Whyte, was one of the project’s major philanthropic backers.
Gardening at St Saviour’s in 1909. Image: Capital Collections
Lileen truly devoted her life to St Saviour’s, which she ran until her retirement in 1927. In the Mission Hall, they had to share the space with church activities. This meant setting up and dismantling the nursery classroom every week, putting away the little desks and the toys, removing the pet canaries and taking down the cheerful pictures from the walls. By 1908, the kindergarten moved to its own premises in Chessel’s Court. Lileen lived in, saying, “I want the house to be a home, theirs and mine, and it will be much more possible there than in the Mission Hall”. Furthermore, as a member of the same community where she worked, Lileen was able to gain the trust of working parents in the area and understand their needs.
A classroom at St Saviour’s in 1909. Image: Capital Collections
The kindergarten movement emerged at a time when urban reform was very much on the agenda in Edinburgh, aided by the work of pioneering town planner Patrick Geddes. There was a drive to improve housing, provide education, and foster community. Urban gardens popped up throughout the Old Town, some of which still exist today. St Saviour’s own little garden was created in collaboration with Nora Geddes, Patrick’s daughter. The Canongate was still a heavily industrial area, and access to green space was not only healthy but allowed the children to learn about gardening and nature.
There were countless women like Lileen working tirelessly in education and childcare (including the working-class mothers of areas like the Canongate) but history doesn’t record most of their names or contributions. The pioneering ideas that Lileen Hardy helped to advance – like learning through play and physically engaging with the natural world – are still cornerstones of early years education to this day. As the kindergarten movement flourished in the Old Town, the legacy of Lileen Hardy and the women she worked with helped to improve the lives of thousands of children over successive generations.
The work of community childcare and education activists was vital and often underappreciated, but it was also one of the few fields where women were already expected to have an influence. In most other professions, women had to fight simply to be included.
This included the arts. Although women have obviously been painting, drawing and otherwise producing art for millennia, they struggled to gain access to the institutions of the art world. Phoebe Anna Traquair was one of the first women to receive broad professional recognition as an artist in Scotland.
Phoebe Anna Traquair in a self-portrait from 1911. Image: public domain
She was born in Dublin in 1852, the daughter of a doctor, and studied art at the Royal Dublin Society. Through an assignment to create illustrations of fossil fish, she met Ramsay Traquair, a Scottish palaeontologist. The couple married in 1873 before moving to Edinburgh so Ramsay could take up a job at what is now the National Museum of Scotland.
Phoebe and Ramsay moved in intellectual circles in Edinburgh, counting important cultural figures like Patrick Geddes amongst their friends. It was Geddes who commissioned Phoebe for one of her first public artworks in 1885: the murals in the mortuary chapel at the Royal Hospital for Sick Children (affectionately known to locals as “the Sick Kids”). Her sumptuous arts and crafts style illuminated the walls of a very sad space with vivid beauty and Christian imagery, intended to bring comfort to parents in their darkest hour.
The interior of Mansfield Traquair. Image my own
The success of these murals led to other public art commissions for Traquair, including the Song School at St Mary’s Episcopal Cathedral and the interior of the Catholic Apostolic Church (now an events space called Mansfield Traquair). Both were widely praised at the time, and the spaces are still in use and sometimes open to the public, so you can still see some of her incredible work in situ today. You can also still see her enamel work in the Thistle Chapel within St Giles’ Cathedral, and the National Galleries of Scotland collections include some of her ornate embroidered panels and illuminated manuscripts – check out their website for a more detailed look at Phoebe’s life and art.
Phoebe and Ramsay Traquair’s gravestone (click to enlarge). Image: Stephencdickson, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Although her work is widely appreciated today, Phoebe Anna Traquair was also (unusually for a woman at the time) a popular and successful professional artist and designer in her own lifetime. In 1920, she became the first woman to become an honorary member of the Royal Scottish Academy – the national academy of art – twenty years after they had first turned her down. Phoebe continued producing art, including sketches from her global travels, until her eyesight failed in her later years. She died in 1936 and was buried with her husband in Colinton churchyard, where you can still visit her grave today.
Women like Lileen Hardy and Phoebe Anna Traquair grew up in an era when power and public success was largely reserved for men, but they both found ways to succeed in their fields. Throughout the twentieth century, women continued to fight for and win more access to the systems of power. We could become members of parliament from 1918, when some women over 30 first gained the right to vote, and women could vote on equal terms with men from 1928.
By the time the Scottish Parliament was re-established in 1999, women’s participation in political life was the norm. Although we remain under-represented in both the Westminster and Holyrood parliaments (representing about 35% of the members in both), women now have access to the corridors of power at the highest level.
The current First Minister of Scotland is Nicola Sturgeon, the first woman in the role. She grew up in a working-class area near Glasgow, where she later studied law and practised as a solicitor before being elected to the Scottish parliament in 1999.
Nicola Sturgeon at the Scottish National Party conference. Image: ScottishPolitico, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Nicola has been politically active throughout her life – she was just 16 when she first joined the Scottish National Party she now leads. She stood as an SNP candidate various times before her election as a member of the new Scottish Parliament, and her talent as a politician was clear early on. She became deputy leader of the SNP in 2004 and deputy first minister in 2007, when the SNP first formed a government at Holyrood after becoming the largest party in the chamber.
In 2014, following the loss of the Scottish independence referendum, Alec Salmond stepped down as first minister and leader of the SNP. Nicola Sturgeon was elected to both positions and has led an SNP government through subsequent administrations.
Obviously no politician is universally adored, but Nicola is more popular than most. After over six years in office she still enjoys the best approval ratings of any UK political leader, and her leadership qualities and ability to communicate with the population have gained international recognition. In a couple of months, she’ll lead the SNP into another Scottish parliamentary election, which they’re widely expected to win. And with support for independence currently showing a consistent majority in the polls, Nicola Sturgeon’s most significant contribution to history could be yet to come…
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