Scottish feminist and legal pioneer

This is a life of a hugely important Scottish feminist legal pioneer, hitherto unjustly neglected, probably because she was associated with many campaigns rather than one, and used constitutional means – committees and public speaking – rather than radical ones. From her first campaign, to allow Scottish women graduates to vote in elections for MPs representing Scottish universities, to her last, to allow British women to keep their nationality when they married foreign nationals, Macmillan worked doggedly for justice and equality for women as an ‘equal-rights’ feminist. She first came to public notice when she appealed to the House of Lords, the first woman to address them in person, after the Scottish courts dismissed the women’s claims to vote (women not being considered ‘persons’ in law). This was the start of many legal engagements, in an era when women were not only denied the vote but also the right to practise as lawyers.

Fortunate in having private means, Macmillan was free to take a leading role in many women’s organisations, including the International Woman Suffrage Alliance and the International Council of Women that organised the International Women’s Congress in The Hague in 1915. She was a founder member of the Committee for Opening the Legal Profession to Women, the group that sponsored Gwyneth Bebb’s challenge to the Law Society in 1913. After the war, having moved to London, she participated in the National Union of Societies for Equal Citizenship as well as the National Union of Women Workers and the Association for Moral and Social Hygiene, tackling discriminatory legislation affecting women in a whole range of areas. After the admission of women to the legal profession in 1919, Macmillan was called to the English bar. By now in her 50s, she practised mostly in the criminal courts defending poor prisoners who could not afford to pay her.

This meticulously researched study focuses mainly on Macmillan’s public life and achievements; inevitably so, since information on the private life of women was rarely kept (and often deliberately concealed) in an era when the personal was deemed irrelevant for future records. The reader can, however, assume two things: first, that her friendship networks among her fellow activists in the many causes she took up would have been extensive; and, second, that her primary relationships, outside her family, were with other women. Indeed, ‘a rare and tantalising glimpse into her private life’ is offered in Chapter 9 of the country retreat on the North Downs where she and her women friends gathered in their leisure moments. Among her companions were Cicely Hamilton, Elizabeth Abbott and Lilian Baylis, all claimed by lesbian historians as women-identified women, as well as Labour MP Edith Picton-Turbervill who in her autobiography wrote: ‘Women’s strong attachments can be… as deep, as beautiful, and as exhilarating as any human relationship’, making this an excellent life for us to explore in LGBT+ History Month.

Rosemary Auchmuty is professor of law emerita at the University of Reading