WOMEN’S role in the making of Scotland’s past has been a recognizable feature of our historiography and public history for many generations although, waxing and waning with the priorities of each age, it has admittedly neither been a constant nor dominating presence. Nevertheless—while they may not have used the word itself—‘gender’ has played a role in the stories told by historians for at least one hundred years. That its role may not match the intellectual and methodological sophistication of our postmodern times, or be quite how some historians may have wished it to be, is only part of the story, and perhaps a rather distracting part.1 To accept our historiography on anything but its own terms is risky. Such an approach threatens to impose anachronistic value judgements that may serve the interests of a particular historical genre or cause (women’s history and feminism are the most obvious examples here), but it will tend to undervalue or at least misrepresent the achievements of previous generations about which we still remain somewhat ignorant.
Women’s history, as conceived since the 1970s, was not the first and has not been the sole avenue through which gender concerns have intruded upon comfortable historical conventions, nor has it always offered the most successful or most obvious approach to gendering the Scottish past. The second half of the twentieth century certainly witnessed a reawakening of interest in women’s history, but this period does not mark its beginning, nor—alternatively—its coming of age.2 Spatial and temporal dynamics are important here. Unlike other historical disciplines, women’s history has been too apt to sketch its lineage across national boundaries, as if the universality of sexual differences inevitably yields a shared historiography, and has generally styled the lineage in a surprisingly Whiggish manner, presuming unrelenting progress and improvement in each generation. From the biographies of ‘women worthies’ in the late nineteenth century, through the ‘her story’ approaches of the 1960s to the challenges of postmodernism since the 1980s, such rites of passage in women’s historiography are widely acknowledged to hold good across many national traditions, although their precise timing might vary a little.3 In part as a consequence of this state of affairs, to date the development of gendered approaches to history in Scotland has been too readily considered within a British context in which any awareness of the development of Scottish historiography generally has been absent, or at least lacking nuance.4 As a corollary to this, it will also perhaps not come as a surprise that, when measured against the English model, the historiography of women’s history in Scotland has typically been considered backward or immature.5 Writing in 1999, Terry Brotherstone is typical in this regard when he notes: ‘English historiography in the late 1960s was at a different stage of development from that of Scotland.’6 Three years later, the editors of Twisted Sisters were bold enough to suggest that the ‘first two significant works on Scottish women’s history’ appeared just twenty years before.7
Current historiographical accounts of women’s history in Scotland have tended to undervalue the contribution of other historical genres and of mainstream historical works to the study of women in the past, thus establishing for women’s history an alternative historiography at one remove from standard accounts of Scottish history.8 This needs to be readdressed. It is the aim of this chapter to consider the ways in which women’s histories (as opposed to women’s history) have informed Scottish historiography in the last hundred years, and to identify the extent to which gender perspectives (no matter how crude, no matter how old-fashioned) infused writings on Scotland’s past in this period. Typically, women’s history and gender history have been formally distinguished in historiographical critiques. Women’s history—an attempt to uncover previously neglected narratives of female achievement and oppression—is typically seen as the precursor to a more sophisticated gender history in which female and male ideals, roles, and experiences are identified as socially constructed and resting on particular epistemologies. While this is appropriate for contemporary circumstances, the use of such prescriptive categories is less appropriate when considering the limited scholarship in Scotland before the 1980s. For this earlier period, it would be anachronistic to distinguish schools of women’s and gender history, and so more fluid terms are used here which—though they might frustrate a neat periodization and exacting terminology—reflect more accurately the level of maturity in approaches to gender in these years and the absence of a critical mass of material from which to draw definitive conclusions. In the process it will become apparent that the shifting socio-economic and political contexts of the times proved influential in the writing of Scotland’s history (in this is included the history of Scottish women), and that the dynamic accommodation of Scotland within the UK state has had implications for how Scottish historians have written that history and what aspects of the past they have chosen to write about.
The memoirs of writers such as Henry Cockburn and Hugh Miller are well known, and yet in the hinterland of Scottish letters stand a multitude of authors whose recollections of lives lived and changes wrought might be identified as some of our earliest social histories. Elizabeth Grant’s Memoirs of a Highland Lady (1897), alongside the autobiography of the Victorian novelist Margaret Oliphant, are notable exemplars of this form from the pen of female authors, but there were many more besides for whom women’s contribution to the history of the nation, or at least a particular locality, was of interest.
Indeed, in keeping with the antiquarian interests of the times, many authors went beyond simple reflections and into serious historical research in order to ground their claims to voice the past with authenticity and legitimacy. In doing so, they gathered and recorded valuable insights into erstwhile neglected worlds. Worthy of comment in this regard are the works of Scotland’s most prolific travel writer (and historian) of these years, George Eyre Todd, who, in books such as Scotland: Picturesque and Traditional (1895), did much to establish a historic sense of the Scottish landscape and environment.9 Samuel Carment’s Glimpses of the Olden Time (1897), however, is more typical of this school. He wrote:
In the preparation of this work the compiler had for his aim, the desire to see the people of a former time not so much engaged in the great affairs of their nation’s history … but rather to see them in the more retired and humble walks of life.10
In exploring the ‘customs and manners of the past’ such authors sought to preserve the knowledge of lifestyles that had already been eroded by industrialization, urbanization, and the very print medium that, paradoxically, was their conduit to memorialization.11 Given their focus on domestic life they might have proved a valuable route for the more thoroughgoing investigation of the pasts of Scotland’s women. However, making little contribution (beyond adding a bit of local colour) to the history of the nation itself and laying no claims for accommodation in popular narratives of the past, they hardly impacted upon the formal historiography of the nation itself. If the first few editions of the Scottish Historical Review (SHR, established 1903) are to be our guide, women continued to enter the historiography in predictable ways. The editors appeared content to perpetuate the popular allure of Mary, Queen of Scots—no fewer than three articles about this most unfortunate monarch appeared in Volume Two alone—and the courage and self-sacrifice of Jacobite women were acknowledged in a piece in 1907 on Margaret Nairne.12
A book first published in 1899 would eventually point the way forward, although from first appraisal it appeared to reinforce rather than challenge many historiographical orthodoxies. In the preface to the first edition of The Social Life of Scotland in the Eighteenth Century, Henry Grey Graham noted:
In Scotland during the eighteenth century there were only two outstanding events which, after the Union, specially belong to its history—the Rebellion of ’15 and the Rebellion of ’45.13
Scotland’s history after 1707, therefore, needed a new approach. In this book, Graham would address:
The social condition of the country—chiefly in the Lowlands—and the internal changes through which it passed during a hundred years, with details which the historian dismisses with impatience as unconsidered trifles marring the dignity of his theme and disturbing the flow of his narrative.14
In defensive mode, he asserted that it was, after all, ‘in the inner life of a community that its real history is to be found’.15 It seemed that only a new perspective on Scotland’s past would allow it to live in history as it had not lived in politics after 1707. If any doubts remained, the agenda was reinforced in the first paragraphs of the first chapter:
Feelings and usages had become part of life and character which were peculiarly Scottish, forming the undefinable quality of nationality. … This contrast and this separation continued very long after the Union of 1707, which united the governments, but could not unite the two peoples.16
As Scotland shared a state apparatus with a more powerful neighbour, Graham eschewed the constitutional obsessions of the Whig historiographical tradition and went one step further when he concluded his study by reinforcing the false promise of Anglo-Britishness evident in the ‘political and civic thraldom’ under which the people of Scotland ‘abided’ until the Reform Acts of the nineteenth century.17 Instead, he identified a national history for Scotland inherent in the very fabric of life, thus evidencing a historical confidence in these years somewhat underestimated by Colin Kidd in his groundbreaking study, Subverting Scotland’s Past (1993).18 Furthermore, this was not a crude racial determinism: Graham deliberately avoided the familiar and easier route of restyling North Britain as a Celtic periphery.19 This undoubtedly made his approach all the more potent for those who would come after him, although few historians in the short term at least chose to follow in the wake of Scotland’s first social historian, and his next work, Scottish Men of Letters in the Eighteenth Century (1908) did not appear to bode well for any reassessment of women’s role in the national history of Scotland.
Graham’s account of female lyricists, corralled in an awkward chapter entitled ‘Women of Letters’, bears the hallmarks of the times in which it was written:
In the eighteenth century Scotswomen did not indeed take that position in literature which … members of their sex assumed in England. … But if they wrote little … [i]t lived on the lips and lingered in the ears of the people, when the works of more formidable and learned women stood forgotten on the shelves.
Graham must be excused for lacking the insights into the female intellectual culture of the Scottish elite researched by contemporary scholars such as Jane Rendall: it is only in recent years that women’s role in the Scottish Enlightenment has been sensitively addressed, and attempts made to incorporate the works of female writers into the Enlightenment canon as well as draw attention to the gendered nature of aspects of Enlightenment scholarship and philosophy.20 But Graham must be given credit for shifting attention from the ‘high born dames’ of Edinburgh to women such as Jean Adams, Jean Glover, and Isabel Pagan, and their contribution to the popular ballad tradition, and for imaginatively placing in their social context the writers of the Scottish Enlightenment. What is important in Graham’s text is not that women are integrated into his narrative in a manner distinct from men—that is obvious—but the ways in which they do appear and the extent to which Scottish society as a whole looms large in his understanding of the literature of the times.
Scottish history was only just emerging as a distinct academic discipline as Graham’s works appeared. In 1901 Peter Hume Brown was appointed the first Sir William Fraser Chair of Scottish History and Palaeography at the University of Edinburgh. Two years later the SHR was founded, and in 1913 the Chair of Scottish History and Literature at the University of Glasgow was established with the proceeds of the Scottish Exhibition, held at Kelvingrove in 1911. Outside the universities, though intimately associated with the nation’s leading historical scholars, the Scottish History Society had been established in 1886 following a letter to The Scotsman that February from Lord Rosebery, then Foreign Secretary (he would become the Society’s first president), in which he recorded his support for ‘a Society in Scotland for printing the manuscript materials for Scottish history, especially social history’.21
Rosebery, British Prime Minister between 1894 and 1895, had been Under Secretary at the Home Office with special responsibility for Scotland between 1881 and 1883, and was to the fore in the years preceding the foundation of the Secretaryship for Scotland in 1885 in highlighting the restricted time available in the House of Commons and in government for the consideration of Scottish matters. His enthusiasm for Scotland’s history, in similar terms, expressed a desire to correct an imbalance in the historiographical state of the nation.
There is a reforming zeal evident in fin-de-siècle scholarship and cultural activism in Scotland that was in keeping with a renewed interest from government in the particular political challenges facing the component nations of the Union state. Establishing the case for Scottish history, however, involved not just challenging the overlordship of English historiographical practices (many of them owing their potency to Scottish scholars),22 but simultaneously changing the rules of engagement altogether. What constituted history had to be reconsidered. For historians of the late-modern period in particular, social history appeared to offer the way forward. But this was social history in the service of a higher ideal—a new national historiography—and sacrifices were inevitably made. Among these, one might argue, was a more thoroughgoing appreciation of women’s role in the life of the nation. But one wonders whether there really was a choice. Some battles simply have to wait, and in any case, there is scant evidence that many voices were raised in protest.
When women did contribute to ongoing debates in the discipline, they tended to follow the imperatives of the time in ways that did not suggest that the feminization of Scottish historiography was a priority to them at least, or indeed to journal editors. This is most evident in the works of female contributors to the SHR. Between 1918 and 1928 female scholars such as Margaret Adam and Marguerite Wood respectively contributed articles on highland poverty and emigration, and the latter stages of the reign of Mary, Queen of Scots. Thereafter, while women were to the fore in contributing to the relaunched SHR from 1948 to 1950, their contributions in the 1950s and 1960s were few and far between and were largely made up of reviews. Again, there is little evidence of any urgent gender agenda. The radicalizing potential of Graham’s social-history insights appeared to have been lost.
Evidence from monographs in these years, whilst somewhat more encouraging, is still ambiguous. Harry Graham’s 1908 work, A Group of Scottish Women, foregrounded seventeen Scottish women notable for their ‘heroism, courage, piety or wit’.23 Yet he stopped short of challenging gender conventions:
… whatever views one may hold on the subject of woman’s capacity to govern or achieve, it cannot be denied that she has always been the most fruitful source of inspiration for genius or eminence of any kind; that the noblest actions (and the greatest crimes) have been inspired by women.24
This image of woman as catalyst rather than creator was selective and in part disempowering. And yet, what there was of an alternative feminized narrative hardly recast woman’s role more sympathetically. Some twenty-two years later, Eunice Murray’s Scottish Women of Bygone Days (1930) offered a more strident appreciation of women’s role in the past, but even then women were identified as much by what they could not do as by what they actually achieved. Reflecting on the women of the eighteenth century, Murray—a lifelong suffrage campaigner—noted:
No wonder they were, in the main, anaemic women, who left little mark upon the history of their time; the wonder is they survived at all, and that any were fit to lead or take a place in the world of art and letters.25
While Murray’s campaigning perspective was novel in the historiography of the nation, her methodology and focus followed convention: Mary, Queen of Scots, witchcraft, rites of passage, education, dress, and social life occupied her attention in this rather unsystematic volume. Little had changed, it appeared, since the days of H. H. Graham. Indeed, in Marion Lochhead’s 1948 volume, The Scots Household in the Eighteenth Century, the author goes over much ground already covered by Graham some fifty years before. Change and progress, she asserts, ‘are as apparent in domestic chronicles as in narratives of war or statesmanship’.26 The case had been made already.
Indeed, many of the works that followed Lochhead, including Marjory Plant’s The Domestic Life of Scotland in the Eighteenth Century (1952), refute any notion that there was incremental progress in the development of women’s history, and social history for that matter, in Scotland. Whilst notably an early publication of the Edinburgh University Press, Plant’s work added little to established historiographical conventions and might for that reason even be considered a step backwards.
With few openings in Scotland’s universities for Scottish historians, one ought not to be surprised to find that the most significant contribution made by a female scholar to Scotland’s history in these years came from a woman outside the Scottish ‘academy’, such as it was. The early career of Agnes Mure Mackenzie boded well for women’s history in Scotland. Mackenzie’s first work of non-fiction examined The Women in Shakespeare’s Plays (1924), in which she reflected on previous female scholars’ treatment of the same theme:
in the nineteenth century as in the eighteenth, the opinions of women upon themselves were derived in the main not from their own direct observation of the subject, but from the attitude towards it of the opposite and more articulate sex, which whether colouring their minds by the insidious influence of suggestion or the more overt but more turbid one of contra-suggestion, was not altogether adapted to produce the dry light, nor always the sweet reasonableness, that best informs the truly discriminating critique.27
Even the Aberdeen Press and Journal felt compelled to acknowledge that Mackenzie ‘emphasise[d] the modernness of Shakespeare’s women’: ‘They are not heroines of plays written about 1600, but living women with the sort of feeling and impulses of women of to-day.’28
Turning to history, after a period of novel writing in the 1920s and early 1930s, it might have been hoped that Mackenzie, whose style was described by The Scotsman as ‘frank and independent’, would infuse Scottish historiography with the insights of such feminized literary criticism.29 Indeed, aspects of her first novel, Without Conditions (1923), suggested Mackenzie’s literary approach was one in which gender would be to the fore. The female protagonist, Miss Broadie, is not one for complying with convention: ‘Miss Broadie of Balcairn had more than once challenged the Daurside gossips by her impetuous lack of heed for the restrictions it should have set about a well-brought-up young gentlewoman.’30 Again, in The Quiet Lady (1926) reflections on gender are close to the surface. And in similar fashion we have (tongue in cheek) the following observation from Mackenzie’s novel of the following year, Lost Kinellan: ‘there was no New Woman about Bertha. She was good and gentle and domesticated—no Women’s Rights nonsense about her.’31
Mackenzie’s histories, however, show very little of the gendered insights evident in her fiction. In Scotland in Modern Times (1941) we are invited to consider the author’s own position as a woman when she writes as follows:
The present writer, as a young girl, attended a Cabinet Minister’s meeting in Glasgow in 1914, and it gave her nightmares for many months thereafter. As was the usual tactic at that time, a number of women rose and cried their slogan. She recalls one delicate-looking old lady with white hair, whose wrists had been grasped by a couple of powerful stewards, who were pulling hard in opposite directions; and a girl being carried feet first up a flight of stairs, while a respectable elderly gentleman marched alongside flogging her with a gold-topped umbrella. And though she was too young then to read their meaning, the faces of some of the men have stayed in her mind, and returned again vividly to her memory when she came to deal with the witchcraft prosecutions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.32
Yet extracts like this one are the exception rather than the rule in Mackenzie’s histories, and it is worth noting that this reflection is presented as a footnote, detached from the main narrative and in the third person—at one remove from the author herself. As a literary critic in her own right and a writer sensitive to the processes of both writing and reading, it is also of importance that Mackenzie consistently used the male pronoun without qualification in her writings, although she was only too apt to use the female pronoun with reference to the nation.33
Nationhood rather than gender offered the dominant perspective in Mackenzie’s histories. It was history with a purpose. As a nationalist, she sought to ground claims for Scottish home rule in historic precedent, and to establish history as the means by which nationalism would be graced with antiquity. In the wartime pamphlet Scottish Principles of Statecraft and Government, Mackenzie noted: ‘A nation is an idea, a pattern of living, a community that has a common tradition. It is a group of people shaped by a thought. That thought of Scotland has very ancient roots.’34 Her emphasis on community echoes Graham’s social focus fifty years before, as does her insistence on meaningful nationhood extending beyond 1707. Yet the presentism in her work is far more explicit. In contrast to the footnote on female suffrage, Mackenzie repeatedly foregrounds her politics in prefaces and conclusions. Consider this, the last lines of her wartime publication, The Kingdom of Scotland: A Short History (1940):
As soon as peace has been secured in Europe, we must begin again, those who are left. For Scotland is not dead yet, nor will she die, ‘so long as only a hundred of us stand’.35
One might conjecture that Mackenzie made a conscious choice between her feminism and her nationalism: there is scant evidence on which to ground such a conclusion, however.36 Nevertheless, the explicit political intent of her writings is undeniable, and the historiographic consequences of that are clear. For Mackenzie—Honorary President of the Saltire Society in 1942—Scotland’s history in the mid-twentieth century was fundamental to grounding claims for home rule, and—vice versa—history suggested that only home rule would be the natural outcome of historical processes which established Scotland’s ‘organic’ nation status. Making these connections visible and raising them above the abstract was central to Mackenzie’s work, making other concerns subordinate.
Between 1899 and 1969, establishing Scottish history’s place within a resistant academic environment, challenging Whig perspectives on Scotland’s past, and achieving both within a political context in which Scottish nationalism was regularly treated as an incidental and faintly comic distraction, proved to be the principal and most distinctive motivating factors in Scottish historical scholarship. Certainly, many other influences informed and infused the approaches of practitioners—here, one thinks of the influence of ethnography, cultural studies, and anthropology, for example, on the work carried out by Isabel Grant on the Scottish Highlands.37 Nevertheless, one gets a sense of a discipline still struggling to establish its identity, still endeavouring to identify both its antecedents and its future, still unsettled about its purpose in a nation that did not boast a state. Gender perspectives in Scotland’s historiography were certainly not absent, yet were subordinate to what were probably seen as more urgent imperatives, and were placed firmly within the context of social history and shorn for the most part of their radicalizing potential.
Agnes Mure Mackenzie died five years before a young academic, T. C. Smout, took up a post as assistant lecturer in the Department of Economic History at the University of Edinburgh. Reflecting on his early introduction to Scottish history in the north, Smout has recalled:
Perhaps the whole corpus of professional Scottish research historians amounted to fewer than twenty individuals, of whom possibly fifteen worked in the universities. Their main concerns were political narrative, though the outlines of a national economic history were being sketched as well.38
The 1960s and 1970s, however, would see the transformation of Scottish historical studies, with Smout to the fore in establishing social history’s contribution to this revival. His publication of 1969, A History of the Scottish People, 1560–1830, is one of the few texts in Scottish historiography that can clearly be identified as a turning point in the fortunes and direction of the discipline, and its contribution to the gendering of Scottish history was fundamental if not immediately obvious.
In this particular regard, Smout’s volume is as important for what it did not do as for what it did achieve. He does not offer a call to arms, and does not make the case for Scottish history. One might suggest that this silence, indeed, creates the impression that, by the late 1960s, there was no case to answer. (Smout’s preface refers to ‘the growing army of Scottish historical scholars’ at the time of writing.) Instead, it is ‘the ill-defined character of social history’, rather than Scottish history, that appears to tax him. He writes:
As to the problem of what social history is, I have resolved this in a way unlikely to satisfy the purists. Several chapters of the book are basically about politics. … Other chapters of the book are about cultural history. … The remainder of the book is mainly about the social organisation and material conditions of life for the Scottish people between the Reformation and the eve of the Great Reform Bill.39
Smout appeared to feel no compunction to justify a focus on Scotland that reached beyond 1707, and qualified the influence of the Union of the Parliaments. What seemed to matter to Smout was the dearth of scholarship on the history of Scottish society, not the arguments that could be used to justify addressing this.
For these reasons Smout’s scholarship was liberated from an enforced engagement with the Whiggish tendencies of established English historiographical practice, which had in any case come under attack following E. P. Thompson’s seminal study, The Making of the English Working Class (1963). This was a moment in time when Scottish history had an opportunity to free itself, like Thompson’s artisans and hand-loom weavers, from the ‘enormous condescension of posterity’, and in the process Scottish voices (some of them female) heretofore unheard would be listened to more keenly. In A History of the Scottish People the role of women per se is somewhat masked by Smout’s more explicit and deliberate focus on family and community. And yet, even here he draws attention to, for example, the influence of property-owning women in seventeenth-century Edinburgh, the living conditions of eighteenth-century craftswomen in the capital’s Old Town, and the interface between fashion and class in the etiquette of the nineteenth century. In Smout’s A Century of the Scottish People 1830–1950, published seventeen years later, the gendered nature of Scottish society is more to the fore with, for example, an entire chapter of this volume devoted to ‘Sex, Love and Getting Married’.40
Scottish history, it appears, had to be peopled before it was gendered, and the times facilitated this. By 1969 the Union state as originally conceived no longer appeared the only legitimate constitutional arrangement for the UK: the Whig story had lost its happy ending, indeed, any ending seemed up for grabs. In 1967 Winnie Ewing won the Hamilton by-election for the Scottish National Party and a year later her party secured around 40 per cent of the vote in the local-council elections. The Scottish Unionists were even moving with the times: at the party conference in Perth in 1968, Ted Heath announced that, if elected prime minister, he would deliver a Scottish Assembly. Labour in power, meanwhile, established the Kilbrandon Commission (1969–73) to investigate the governance of the constituent nations of the UK. There was less need than ever before for Scottish historians to justify their existence, and every reason for them to inform public debate.
Rosalind Mitchison’s A History of Scotland was published a year after Smout’s History. Her ‘Author’s Note’ is revealing:
This book … has been finished at a time of considerable debate on the future government of the country. Within a few years the epilogue may be in need of revision. I ask the reader to bear in mind that in its own way this is a historical document, to be viewed in the light of changing events.41
The confluence of fresh academic interest in ‘history from below’ and the constitutional debates of these years revealed the latent potential in Scottish social history to recast and reinvigorate Scottish historiography by opening it up to new influences, new possibilities, and new priorities. The further concurrence with the second wave of feminism also meant that the history of women in Scotland would seek to assert itself. This grafting of feminism onto another compatible tradition reveals nothing new. Joan Wallach Scott has explored how in the USA social history ‘offered important support for women’s history’ in these years, and later England’s History Workshop Journal (established 1976) became ‘a journal of socialist and feminist historians’ from 1982.42 How such processes have been made manifest in a Scottish context in the last forty years is instructive, if hardly distinctive.
The potential of women’s history, whether feminist or otherwise, to consider lives below the level of the collectivities of class and/or nation meant that traditional interests in biography persisted beyond the 1960s, and continue even now to act as a lingering point of contact with past historiographical traditions. Of particular note in this regard has been the work of Rosalind Marshall. In works such as The Days of Duchess Anne (1973), Virgins and Viragos (1983), Scottish Queens, 1034–1714 (2003), and Queen Mary’s Women (2006), biography has been at the core of what she has offered Scottish historiography. Yet established methodologies could challenge commonly held notions of where power rested in Scottish society. Marshall concluded in 1983, for example, that ‘throughout Scottish history women have enjoyed an unusual degree of influence despite the constraints of law and convention’.43 Her focus on the world of the Scottish elite makes this assessment more convincing and less surprising than it may at first appear. Indeed, even in recent years, biographical studies have tended to focus on women whose status, class, or celebrity make it easier to identify relevant sources and convince reluctant publishers.44 All in all it has been an approach which—despite innovative treatments and extravagant claims to the contrary—remains limiting, being as it is constrained by just how far one can prove the representative or exceptional quality of individual lives.45
Despite the impetus of the late 1960s and 1970s, it took time for a recognizable ‘women’s history’ in Scotland to assert its influence within the new social history. Still, of the writers of the time, two stand out. Leah Leneman and Rosalind Mitchison were instrumental in releasing social history’s potential to tell women’s stories in Scotland. This does not mean that they can be easily pigeon-holed as women’s or feminist historians. Towards the end of her life in 1999, Leneman noted:
What I have said all along, and would still say now, is that I am a feminist and a historian, but I am not a feminist historian. It is true that I am not interested in what might be termed masculine history, i.e. power and politics; I am interested in the lives of people in the past—of the interplay between the experiences and emotions that are common throughout the centuries with the particular state of knowledge and attitudes of the period I am studying—and since women make up half or more of the population, I am interested in them.46
In their single- and joint-authored publications, Leneman and Mitchison were instrumental in identifying the gendered voices of authority in Scotland, the potential for women to alter their spectrum of expectations and desires, and the insights that gender might afford Scottish history more broadly. So, for example, in A Guid Cause (1991) Leneman addressed the struggle for women’s suffrage in Scotland as, in part, an expression of a far older and largely neglected women’s movement in the late Victorian period, coinciding with whilst distinct from the ‘struggle for democracy’—a theme that had by then been well covered in Scottish historiography, although its treatment had for the most part been gender blind. Together with Mitchison, in Sexuality and Social Control (1989), and the associated volumes, Girls in Trouble (1998) and Sin in the City (1998), the role of the Kirk and the legal establishment in shaping and, in turn, being shaped by sexual and gender conventions was brought to the fore. It is telling that it was Mitchison, along with Tom Devine in 1988, who edited the first volume of the significant People and Society in Scotland series, supported by the Economic and Social History Society of Scotland, which did so much to affirm the arrival of a new and more confident Scottish history, and prepare the foundations for further undergraduate and postgraduate study in the discipline in the last decade of the century. For our purposes here, however, what is of particular interest is that both Mitchison and Leneman came to women’s history through their commitment to Scottish history.47 Mitchison’s first monograph in 1962 addressed the ‘improving’ exploits of Sir John Sinclair of Ulbster, and in the decades thereafter, preceding her death in 2002, her reputation was established as an economic, political, and social historian of Scotland with works such as Life in Scotland (1978), Lordship to Patronage (1983), and The Old Poor Law in Scotland (2000). Leneman, meanwhile, first earned academic acclaim for her 1986 study of the social history of the Atholl estates.48
It would be misleading, therefore, to style Leneman and Mitchison as the pioneers of women’s history in late twentieth-century Scotland. Yet their seniority and established interests in more ‘mainstream’ Scottish history distinguish them as important transitional figures, perhaps alongside Olive Checkland, in the historiography of that genre in these years.49 It would also be too neat to ignore the fact that a more explicitly feminist history was being written at much the same time as (and long before) they collaborated. Their lives overlapped with the next generation: the periodization is not straightforward.
While few might have appreciated it at the time, the birth of a new generation of women’s historians in Scotland was anticipated by the publication of two starkly different texts—Elspeth King’s History of the Scottish Women’s Suffrage Movement in 1978, and Christine Larner’s study of witch-hunting, Enemies of God (1981)—and ultimately heralded by the publication in 1983 of Unchartered Lives: Extracts from Scottish Women’s Experience, 1850–1982 by the Glasgow Women’s Studies Group. Among the first publications clearly informed by a feminist perspective, this collection of essays presaged the left-leaning reforming impulse that would provide the momentum in the short term at least for the next stage in women’s scholarship. In the foreword to this volume, Barbara Littlewood noted that ‘debates between and among Marxists, socialist feminists, and radical feminists’ were an important influence on the contributors.50 Resting heavily on established interests in labour history in Scotland in a period when many of the established icons of Scottish industrialization were under threat, it is not surprising that among the first themes to benefit from such radicalizing tendencies was the world of work. In 1990 Eleanor Gordon and Esther Breitenbach co-edited The World is Ill Divided: Women’s Work in Scotland in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries, and a year later Gordon published Women and the Labour Movement in Scotland, 1850–1914. Both publications were from university presses and drew attention to the limitations of established traditions and conventional sources in addressing the history of Scottish women. It appeared that Scottish women’s history had ‘arrived’, and had acquired the establishment status it had long laboured without.
There followed further edited collections, the most important being Gordon and Breitenbach’s Out of Bounds (1992). Hindsight lends an air of prophecy to the themes explored by contributors to this volume: these were to influence the trajectory of women’s history in the next ten years. Education, sexuality, political and workplace activism, criminality, religion: all these proved to be themes that would drive forward the gender agenda in Scottish historiography in those fin-de-siècle years when women’s historians themselves consolidated their collective achievements in the Scottish Women’s History Network (established 1995, renamed Women’s History Scotland from 2004) and interests became increasingly international in scope. Working together, members of Women’s History Scotland thereafter did much to galvanize interest in the genre in the north, particularly with their landmark publications, The Biographical Dictionary of Scottish Women (2006) and the edited volume, Gender in Scottish History Since 1700 (2006). In this latter volume, in part eschewing women’s history in favour of more explicit gender approaches, new concerns with identity, medicine, and the body, arts and culture, and the family highlighted that women’s history in Scotland was no longer ‘snug in the asylum of taciturnity’.51
Developing interests in masculinity and innovative approaches to local history, particularly in the work of Lynn Abrams, confirm that the gendering of Scottish history is now a fully formed and conscious project for a discrete discipline.52 This discipline—having broken through Whiggish constraints in the company of a new social history—is not just sufficiently confident to ‘go it alone’, but ambitious enough to eschew the national frame as the most appropriate context within which to address gender in Scotland and to do so through multi-disciplinary initiatives, as proved by the foundation of the International Centre for Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Glasgow.
Since 1969 a greater focus on the history of Scottish women, and emergent interests in gendered social and cultural conventions, have made a valuable contribution to the historiography of this northern nation. The association of women’s history with Marxist history and the close relationship between gender and postmodern histories have also encouraged an engagement with historical theory at best muted in much conventional research in the north. This has facilitated robust critiques of the much-vaunted and somewhat unapologetic empiricism at the core of earlier historical scholarship, more sophisticated and searching readings of primary sources, and a broader definition of ‘evidence’ to include material objects and fictional narratives.
But what is the way forward? Three immediate areas of development suggest themselves to this Scottish historian at least. While the first two address how gender history might further inform Scottish history, the third suggests how gender history might more fully realize its potential in the current academic environment in Scotland.
Paradoxically, one might suggest that women’s history has had its greatest impact on the history of the Scottish nation when it has problematized the notion of nationhood itself, largely—though by no means exclusively—by asserting the primacy of a collective identity below and within and overwhelming national identity itself. In this manner, women’s history has reaffirmed the complex nature of Scottish nationhood and notions of belonging in ways that have questioned essentializing tendencies in popular history and asserted the importance of change over time. This can and ought to be taken further. The interface between national and gender identities and their expression in mutually sustaining and contradictory tropes offers the researcher access to the very essence of what it is to be Scottish. To date too great an emphasis has been placed on Scottish identity in relation to English and/or British identity, with scant regard for how these are actually constituted in the lived experience of citizens. Gender certainly offers one way of exploring how national identity must find its way in bodies, beliefs, customs, laws, and economies inherently shaped by sexual norms and practices. And, of course, the opposite is true: gendered practices have no meaning beyond the societies that are infused with and subject to their influence, and—in the modern period at least—such societies have typically (though not exclusively) expressed themselves within national and/or ethnic parameters.
The narrativization of the pasts of nations and the communication of such histories through time and space—heritage—is the second area in which gender might inform future Scottish historiography. How gender has shaped the historical sense and sensitivities of each age ought to be central to historiographical studies in Scotland. If the foregoing discussion is anything to go by, much is to be learned in identifying how gender has shaped historiographical legacies. The ballad tradition, music, oral history, poetry, and art more generally—as much as history—all have something to contribute in this regard.
Only through more interdisciplinary, culturally aware, and theory-rich study will such potential be realized, however. And many scholars are already pursuing such agendas. By embracing insights from other disciplines; moving beyond social history into new avenues of cultural history; consciously critiquing established political histories (rather than lamenting their gender-blindness) via complex appreciations of nationhood, constitutionalism, and politics, and embracing the liberating tendencies of post-structural methods, gender history in Scotland will certainly continue to enliven and enrich our historiography and move beyond the dichotomies (e.g. public/private, feminist/Marxist, patriarchy/capitalism, social reform/social control) and stereotypes (e.g. ‘The Angel of the House’, ‘blue stockings’) that have tended to limit and, in turn, caricature its contribution to history so far.
The coincidence of new constitutional and gender interests, and the flowering of a new social history in the late 1960s, brought together in a singular historical moment influences which—while extant—had previously had neither the power, the longevity, nor the correct environment to necessitate a fundamental change in Scottish historiography. That having been said, one would rest too much on serendipity to suggest that mere coincidence or chance dictated the timing or indeed the trajectory of the historiographical changes that were consolidated in the last three decades of the twentieth century. There were important economic, academic, political, and constitutional reasons why Scotland needed its history in these years, and why that need could only be met by asking different questions of the past. A nation whose industrial identity was destroyed in these years was investing more than ever before in the education of its young adults. Shifting political fortunes, as after 1979 the Conservatives consolidated their hold on the sentiments of middle England while simultaneously destroying any vestige of sympathy they had enjoyed north of Carter Bar, also dictated that history would loom large in popular appreciations of the state. The Border—as Graham had styled it in 1899, ‘an invisible march here and a narrow river there’—began to reassert itself in constitutional discussions now emotively charged with the pain of long-term unemployment and a feeling that somewhere along the line something important had been lost. Women’s history chimed with the passions and pains of the moment: history showed that women did not need lessons in disempowerment, or disenfranchisement, and had always understood that in marriages of apparent equals power was never equitably shared. Such national preoccupations set within a global context of a communications revolution relatively unhampered by state control, and the evolution of trans-national politics relating to gender, race, and environmentalism dictated that in contrast to the academic environment of one hundred years before, conditions supportive of new scholarship were in place to an extent never before realized.
Yet women’s history did not commence in Scotland with the second wave of feminism, nor does it owe more to that ideology (or to the sentiments galvanized at the millennium’s end by devolution) than it does to a century of empirical research. Suggestions that sub-state status or a stunted intellectual environment held back the genre in Scotland must be questioned when it is realized that the momentum challenging Whiggish conventions was also the motor of a new Scottish history in which the female voice eventually would be heard. We might wish it was otherwise; we might envisage an alternative lineage, or a shorter gestation. But it is a story worth telling in its own voice and on its own terms, and it is the story past and present historians have gifted to us now.
Abrams, L., Gordon, E., Simonton, D., and Yeo, E. J., eds., Gender in Scottish History from 1700 (Edinburgh, 2006).
Breitenbach, E., and Gordon, E., eds., Out of Bounds: Women in Scottish Society 1800–1945 (Edinburgh, 1992).
Breitenbach, E., Brown, A., and Myers, F., ‘Understanding Women in Scotland’, Feminist Review, 58 (1998).
Brotherstone, T., Simonton, D., and Walsh, O., eds., Gendering Scottish History: An International Approach (Glasgow, 1999).
Ewan, E. and Meikle, M. M., eds., Women in Scotland c.1100–c.1750 (East Linton, 1999).
Ewan, E., Innes, S., Pipes, R., and Reynolds, S., eds., The Biographical Dictionary of Scottish Women: From Earliest Times to 2004 (Edinburgh, 2006).
Gordon, E., Women and the Labour Movement in Scotland, 1850–1914 (Oxford, 1991).
—— and Breitenbach, E., eds., The World is Ill-Divided: Women’s Work in Scotland in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Edinburgh, 1990).
Graham, H. G., The Social Life of Scotland in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1899).
Knott, S., and Taylor, B., eds., Women, Gender and Enlightenment (London, 2005).
Leneman, L., A Guid Cause: The Women’s Suffrage Movement in Scotland (Aberdeen, 1991).
——, and Mitchison, R., Girls in Trouble: Sexuality and Social Control in Rural Scotland 1660–1780 (Edinburgh, 1998).
—— —— Sex in the City: Sexuality and Social Control in Urban Scotland, 1660–1780 (Edinburgh, 1998).
Mackenzie, A. M., Scotland in Modern Times, 1720–1939 (London, 1941).
Marshall, R., Virgins and Viragoes: A History of Women in Scotland 1080–1980 (London, 1983).
Mitchison, R., A History of Scotland (London, 1970).
Smout, T. C., A History of the Scottish People, 1560–1830 (London, 1989).