Speaking up for rights of women

Published on Friday 31 July 2009 10:02

IF she was daunted by the grand surroundings of the House of Lords, or by the bewigged judges peering down at her, or even by the fact that she was one of the first women permitted to open her mouth and actually speak in that rarified atmosphere, it didn't show.

Edinburgh suffragette Chrystal Macmillan's speech was clear and to the point, argued in technical legal language rather than the kind of emotional outpouring more commonly attributed to women back in 1908.

Dressed in brown, with a hat "the colour of crushed strawberries" the 36-year-old certainly impressed the Lord Chancellor and the three law lords sitting with him with her bid for the vote for female university graduates. Impressed too were the gentlemen of the Press who promptly dubbed her the "Scottish Portia".

It was not, however, enough for the law lords to actually agree with her – even though her argument was merely that the word "person" covered both males and females. The law lords ruled, "persons" referred to men. And just men.

If Chrystal, the only sister in a family of eight brothers who grew up in Corstorphine Hill House, now part of the zoo, and the first female science graduate from Edinburgh University was crushed by this, it didn't show.

But then her life was one long series of extraordinary achievements, from travelling across war-torn Europe to deliver aid to refugees and pleading for peace at the Hague to using her ready wit to counter abuse thrown at her at public meetings and becoming one of the UK's first female barristers at the age of 54.

"She was a pretty intrepid woman," agrees her great-nephew, Iain Macmillan, 69, a retired fundraiser from Lasswade, who was born three years after she died in 1937. "She was from a well-to-do family, she didn't need to do anything, but she was obviously very driven."

Yet Chrystal, the daughter of Melrose Tea tycoon John, was just one of a group of Edinburgh-based woman who fought – by means both legal and illegal – for the vote for women, as a new exhibition which opens in the Capital today shows.

The city's prominent part in the fight by both suffragettes – a term coined by the Daily Mail for the more militant – and suffragists is often overshadowed by the more famous Pankhursts and their London activities.

"But there was a massive amount happening in Edinburgh and hopefully this exhibition will throw some light on this hidden history," explains the curator, Helen Clark.

The fight began in 1867 when the first Societies for Women's Suffrage were formed in London, Manchester and Edinburgh.

"Women couldn't own property, they couldn't hold public positions and they couldn't get the vote. It was thought that they didn't have the brains for it, that they weren't suited to it, " explains Helen.

Some of their methods were legal – such as the 1909 march down Princes Street, where hundreds of men, women and children, swept down the thoroughfare to a rally at Waverley Market addressed by Emmeline Pankhurst.

One of those talking part was nine-year-old Bessie Watson, right, who played the pipes – then seen as male-only activity. Edinburgh born and bred, she died in 1992, but Helen remembers meeting her: "She was very feisty. She talked about the excitement as a child of being involved and playing at Waverley."

Frustrated by a lack of progress, many took the law into their own hands. One was Grace Cadell, a member of the Women's Freedom League, who refused to pay taxes on a house she owned – in return, her furniture was sold off in public at the Mercat Cross in 1912.

During a Scottish campaign of attacks on buildings by suffragettes, a portrait of King George V was slashed in the Royal Scottish Academy, an electric cable was cut in the National Museum, Whitecross Kirk in East Lothian was burned down, Fettes attacked and acid poured into mailboxes.

So afraid did the authorities become of such violence that many public buildings – including Holyrood Palace – were closed.

Several women were imprisoned in the city's Calton Jail and force fed when they went on hunger strike. A victory came in 1918 when women over 30 were granted the vote.

Deidre Brock, the city council's culture leader, says women today owe a huge debt to the pioneers.

"At that time they were regarded as freakish and unnatural, and they withstood huge pressures from their family, from politics and from society in general."

As for Chrystal, the fight never ended. One of her many causes was trying to change the law that meant women who married foreigners lost their British nationality and she stood as a candidate for the Edinburgh South seat in 1935. She wasn't successful in either bid and she never married – as Helen Kay, co-ordinator of the Gude Cause, explains: "I don't think she had time for romance. She was too busy and committed."

But she was at Parliament in 1928 to see women given voting rights, a moment, Helen Kay says she surely relished. "Having been put down and taken so much, she must have been very satisfied."

Votes for Women is on at the Museum of Edinburgh, Canongate, from today to 9 January, 2010. The museum is open 10am to 5pm, Monday to Friday and Sundays during August from noon to 5pm. Admission is free.

'THE TUBE WAS SHOVED DOWN MY THROAT'

ONE of the most notorious suffragettes to be imprisoned in Calton Jail was Ethel Moorhead, who was the first in Scotland to be force fed.

Ethel, who had moved to Edinburgh from Dundee after her father's death in 1911, used a string of aliases and carried out various acts of violence. These included smashing windows in London, attacking a showcase at the Wallace Monument, throwing an egg at Winston Churchill and carrying out several arson attacks.

Sentenced to eight months in jail for house-breaking and fire-raising, she began a hunger strike in Calton Jail on 21 February, 1914.

Later in an interview with a newspaper, she described the horrific process which followed. "I was held down on the operating table, my head held as if in a vice and, without any examination of heart or pulse, a tube was forced down my nose, coughed it up into my mouth, as I opened my mouth to spit out the tube a steel gag was forced into my mouth and the tube was then shoved down my throat."

Within a week, Moorhead was so ill a priest was summoned to give her the last rites. She was released until well, but went on the run and ended up in Paris, where she fell in love with a poet half her age and launched a literary magazine.