Hansard

Today, on international women’s day, it is great to see a woman presiding over us.

History is written by the winners and, for as long as we have been living in a patriarchal society, the winners have been men. In “A Room of One’s Own”, Virginia Woolf wrote:

“the majority of women are neither harlots nor courtesans”—

I heartily agree—

“nor do they sit clasping pug dogs to dusty velvet all through the summer afternoon. But what do they do then?”

She continues:

“For all the dinners are cooked; the plates and cups are washed; the children sent to school and gone out into the world … No biography or history has a word to say about it.”

When Oscar winner Frances McDormand invited women to stand up and be visible because their stories should be told, it made me think of my countless sisters who have been invisible, in Scotland and across the world. International women’s day is here to celebrate and create a space for women, where our stories should be told.

Today, to misquote RuPaul, we celebrate herstory. The fight for women’s equality is intertwined with the history of the labour movement. A working class woman, Selina Cooper, a suffragist and mill worker from the north of England, put it best when she said that women did not want the vote “as a mere plaything”. Instead,

“Every woman … is longing for her political freedom in order to make the lot of the worker pleasanter and to bring about reforms”.

Emmeline Pankhurst was one of the founding members of the Labour Party, and the Labour movement agreed with her when she said that she hoped that our movement might be the means of

“righting every political and social wrong.”

Of course, it is not the only means of doing that—people across all parties, and those of no party, do it—but I am proud of the Labour movement’s history.

As the cabinet secretary said, today some MSPs are going to commemorate Mary Barbour with the unveiling of her statue in Glasgow. She was Glasgow’s first Scottish female councillor and led the South Govan Women’s Housing Association during the Glasgow rent strikes of 1915, actively organising tenant committees and eviction resistance, which cannot have been easy.

Women here in Scotland and across the world have always stood up for the rights of others, writing themselves into history in the process. Ida B Wells, one of my mother’s countrywomen, was one of the first ever investigative journalists in the USA. She wrote about and led an anti-lynching crusade in the United States in the 1890s, travelling, as a black woman, to the southern states—a hugely dangerous undertaking while the Jim Crow laws were in full force.

With works from Austen to Brontë, to Eliot, to Angelou and Sarah Waters, women’s writing is seen as the very best in our literary history. Why, then, after 100 years, are women journalists like Ida B Wells still in the minority? She broke new ground and her voice and work have echoes in today’s Zero Tolerance write to end violence against women awards, which take place every year here in our Parliament and drive up standards in journalism by awarding those committed to furthering the cause of gender equality through their work.

Yesterday, Zero Tolerance, the 25th anniversary of which we celebrate this year, reminded us that the portrayal of women and girls in the media has a direct influence on people’s attitudes and behaviour. Although we all know that, media monitoring by the charity shows that the skewed and dangerous perspective of nine major newspapers exposes people to the wrong sort of language—and language matters. It is distressing that this year major newspapers are still reporting such grievous crimes as rape and sexual assault as “sex”, failing to set the story in the context of violence against women and giving sensationalised and graphic descriptions.

Part of the solution is the employment of more women journalists. However, whatever our gender, we have a collective responsibility to use the right language. I am pleased that, at the most recent awards, which many of us here today attended, the National Union of Journalists Scotland highlighted the importance of that and supported the awards.

I spoke about Virginia Woolf at the beginning of this short speech. She discussed what it would take to have more female writers and identified

“A room of one’s own”

and £500 a year—perhaps that has gone up a bit now. In doing so, she summed up the fact that women will achieve equality only through economic independence. It was a Labour Government that put her words into law through the Equal Pay Act 1970, but as others have highlighted, we are still nowhere near where we should be with that. The fight has not ended by any means.

As Richard Leonard and my friend and colleague Rhoda Grant highlighted today, we as a Parliament have the power to help some of the most marginalised women in Scotland through economic agency—it requires ministers to bring forward regulations that will ensure that the payments of universal credit are automatically split between both members of a couple. That would be particularly helpful to women in an abusive relationship and it would give them financial empowerment.