Placing Women in Scottish History

Placing Women in Scottish History Fiona M. S. Paterson and Judith Fewell, eds. Girls in Their Prime: Scottish Education Revisited. Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1990.160 pp. ISBN 0-7073-0578-0; $16.95. Sian Reynolds. Britannica's Typesetters: Women Compositors in Edwardian Edinburgh. Edinburgh Education and Society Series. Edinburgh : Edinburgh University Press, 1989. 160 pp.; ill. ISBN 0-85224-634-X (cl); 0-85224-652-8 (pb); $37.50 (cl); $15.00 (pb). Eleanor Gordon. Women and the Labour Movement in Scotland, 18501914 . Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991.320 pp. ISBN 0-19-8201435 ; (cl), $69.00. Eleanor Gordon and Esther Breitenbach, eds. The World is III Divided: Women's Work in Scotland in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1990.192 pp. ISBN 0-7486-0116-3 (cl); $37.50. Leah Leneman. A Guid Cause: The Women's Suffrage Movement in Scotland. Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1991. 192 pp.; ill. ISBN 0-08-041201-7 (pb); $17.91. Jane McDermid For generations Scottish history was largely neglected in schools whUe Scottish women's history was never even considered.1 Scottish history, particularly local studies, has revived since the 1960s, revising what had passed for Scottish history—the romance of the Highlands, of the Stewarts, of Walter Scott—and challenging comfortable assumptions about the distinctive features of Scottish sodety. Yet such myths have formed an important part of Scottish national identity so that trying to place, let alone find, women in this historiographical context is difficult. For Rosalind Mitchison the power of the myths linked Scottish national identity to a "pecuUarly chUdish and fictitious picture of the Scottish past."2 These myths—such as that of the democratic inteUect—are masculine. IronicaUy, it was the male inteUectual of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, exemplified in David Hume, who was seen to represent © 1992 Journal of Women's History, Vol. 4 No. 2 (Fall) 1992 Book Review: Jane McDermid 181 the incorporation of Scotland into the EngUsh state, thus putting Scottish national identity at risk. To counterad that threat, eighteenth-century Scottish moraUsts highUghted the role that the feminine charader could play in a moral community, perceiving a correlation between nationhood and motherhood.3 By the nineteenth century the Union with England was generaUy accepted; but whereas there were no caUs for a separate Scottish state, there was an interest among inteUectuals in preserving their integrity as Scots which meant resisting anglicization. Education was seen as a key agent in preserving Scottish identity, and women in the famüy were seen as the domestic keepers of national culture. Moreover, the late nineteenthcentury fear for the physical rather than the moral state of the nation led to a renewed emphasis on motherhood and female education. These fears were not pecuUar to Scotland, but in Scotland the stress on domestic education for girls was linked to the stress on national identity. The past two decades have seen a questioning of national identity in Scotland—reflected in research into Scottish culture—that evolved into the paradox of a beUef in a distind national identity together with a feeling of national inferiority.4 Since the late 1980s work published on Scottish women, including the books under review, has revealed that women have largely been excluded from history predsely by the nature of the debate on Scottish culture, which is above aU conceptualized as a masculine construct. Two major themes of Scottish revisionist history, education and labor—which may be seen to have stunted the development of Scottish women's history— are now themselves being revised. In the nineteenth century, education was seen as integral to Scottish distinctiveness, but it also had to be adapted to EngUsh education. There was a widely held belief in Scotland that poverty should be no barrier to the talented (the lad o' pairts) and that education was desirable for aU, regardless of class or sex. Whatever the reaUty, the parish school before 1872 was believed to develop a common culture for the whole population. This educational tradition rested on a powerful historical myth of democracy , of universality. In practice, there was social and sexual inequaUty, which continued after the 1872 educational reforms. Certainly, historians have already revised...