Lives of Scottish Women: Women and Scottish Society, 1800–1980 (review)

The history of women and gender in Scotland is currently in the ascendant and women’s biography is an engaging and accessible means of revealing the complexity of women’s lives while, at the same time, making a statement about the nature of Scottish society and its representation by historians. Knox’s selection of ten relatively well-known Scottish women is complemented by the simultaneous publication of The Biographical Dictionary of Scottish Women (Edinburgh University Press, 2006) which features more than eight hundred women of note, repute and influence. No longer are women consigned to the sidelines of the Scottish historical narrative, caricatured as witches or prostitutes or feisty rent strikers. Recent research in women’s and gender history now permits, nay demands, the incorporation of women’s narratives into political, national and cultural versions of the Scottish past and recent texts have begun to redress the balance.

Biography is a beguiling medium for the historian in its potential to gain access to or insight into the public via the prurient interest in the personal story. At its best biography can bring new perspectives to bear on old stories and in the case of biographies of women may open up entirely new ways of gender ideals in fashioning opportunities for men and women and for placing constraints on female ambition and participation reveals the false neutrality of many events in the Scottish historical narrative. Indeed, female biography is an ideal medium for revealing the unconscious frameworks used and re-used by historians which may do more to conceal female experience than to reveal it. For instance, the generalised description of Scotland as a patriarchal society may work well as a shorthand for the structures which denied women access to the same opportunities as men but as the biographies of many of the women featured here demonstrate, women with wealth, power, ability and sheer determination were able to negotiate that society and, in some cases, mediate its worst effects.

But female or feminist biography strives to do more than merely place a woman within the rushing river that is the existing historical narrative if only because women’s lives rarely fit the model of the normative biographical subject. The partial and ephemeral nature of the sources and the structural constraints on women’s participation in many spheres of public life makes their lives difficult to shoehorn into mainstream accounts. The dominant narrative framing this collection of biographies, that of struggle for women’s equality with men in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, allows for an easier fit between women’s lives and the social world, but it is clear that while historians might find it convenient to read women’s lives in this way, the women themselves rarely regarded themselves as part of an emancipatory trajectory. Here is a problem afflicting much biographical work: the attempt to use the personal or individual story to illuminate, in this case, the lives of women in general. Knox’s solution is to focus on what his subjects did as opposed to what they thought; their actions – as writers, missionaries, activists and reformers – are more accessible to interpretation for an historian keen to discern general trends, than internal thoughts and feelings.

The ten women featured in this book, from the writer Jane Welsh Carlyle to the political radical Mary Brooksbank, were chosen for their ability to cast a light on the wider issues concerning women in the modern era. Thus they were all public figures and in most cases are familiar to historians having already been subjected to detailed research which the author draws upon extensively. In one case, that of Sophia Jex-Blake, one wonders what new material might be added to a well-known story when Knox explains that all Jex-Blake’s papers were destroyed by her biographer. In several cases it appears that there has been no recourse by the author to the original...