Hansard

My speech today should have been the easiest that I have had to write. My speech last year was one of the easiest that I have ever written, but my speech this year, in this week, was not. I was going to use my whole six minutes to talk about my project to map a tourist trail around Scotland that recognises the women who have shaped Scotland—and I will get on to that—but I just could not stand up today and not talk about the continued and distressingly all-too-close-to-home subject of the sexual harassment of women.

I am all for free speech, but I find myself wanting to erase phrases from our discourse around the rights that women should have to feel safe, unimpeded and respected in the workplace in particular. One such phrase is “It’s only banter”. Maybe to the person who is delivering it, who thinks that he is being the most hilarious man on the planet, it is “only banter”. However, to the woman on the receiving end, who is too polite to say what she really thinks, or who feels that to speak vociferously would put her at risk, it is not “only banter”. They are words that diminish, control, objectify, insult, embarrass and distress.

Outright abuse and obvious unwanted physical contact are horrific, but they are not the only type of abuse. Insidious, sustained and thinly veiled sexual comments are not to be ignored, as they have a pernicious and cumulative effect. Women worry that they will not be believed. Women know that they will be told that they are overreacting. Women know that people will question their complaint’s validity. Women find it hard to put across the effect that the abuse has had on them. Women will also lie awake at night, wondering how they can escape the abuse—whether that is by leaving their job, by making arrangements never to be in that person’s company or by voicing their complaints in a way that they know might reap the whirlwind.

On this day, I wear purple, the colour of feminism, and stand with all women who have ever felt abused, diminished and controlled by persistent, insidious workplace harassment—because I was one of those women. Even 25 years on from my harassment, I still think about what I could have done to stop it, and how hard it was to take any action. I salute those who, in the past year, were braver than me and who have taken action.

I can now talk about my project. Claudia Beamish has already said that history is written by the winners. I think that it is more accurate to say that history is written by the patriarchy. Some of the proof of that is on our high streets. If we look up, we see a statue of a general, a king, a male writer or a male poet. A Glasgow traffic cone does not sit upon the head of the bronzed hair bun of a suffragette; it sits upon the short back and sides of a military man.

There are simply not enough landmarks to represent the women who made Scotland, and those that there are should be given more importance. That is why I am pleased to say that I am playing a small part in helping the many people who have dedicated their lives to giving Scotland’s women the recognition that they deserve, by working with VisitScotland and others to generate a tourist map of the existing landmarks of influential Scottish women. I am also asking the public, including everyone in the chamber, to get in touch with me so that I can get more information on the women in Scotland’s history who they would like to be recognised who are not already. I thank Glasgow Women’s Library, which has already been in touch to help me with the project.

I am sad to say that there is not one statue of a woman in my constituency. However, in the neighbouring constituency of Banffshire and Buchan Coast, there is Fisher Jessie, the beautiful statue of a Peterhead fish seller and her child. To me, she is a symbol of the juggling act—caring for a child by her side as she works, humphing her basket of fish with her shawl across her shoulders, and representing the ordinary north-east women who were the engine of a country.

I was delighted to see that a statue of the hero of the Glasgow rent strikes, Mary Barbour, and the others whom she led was unveiled today in Govan. However, in our capital city, there are more statues of animals than of women, despite the existence of great Edinburgh women such as Muriel Spark and Elsie Inglis.

Of course, my colleague Fiona Hyslop was instrumental in getting a plaque put up for Sophia Jex Blake, the leader of the Edinburgh seven who, along with Isabel Thorne, Edith Pechey, Matilda Chaplin, Helen Evans, Mary Anderson, and Emily Bovell, was among the first women to be admitted to a university in the UK. They were stalked and harassed by male students, and a mob of 200 rioted outside Surgeons’ Hall when the women arrived for an exam. The university ultimately refused to grant them degrees, but in 1899, following the efforts of the Edinburgh seven, an act of Parliament sanctioned degrees for women.

I put on record my support for the campaign in Ayrshire, with which my colleague Ruth Maguire is involved, to put up a monument to recognise the many women who were victimised by the Scottish witch trials. That is a part of women’s history in Scotland that is seriously overlooked.

In my constituency, which I always mention, we could do with more recognition of Strichen’s Lorna Moon, who was a novelist and Hollywood screenwriter in the cinema industry’s infancy. I would like to think that Lorna Moon was the sort of person who was behind the speech Frances McDormand made at the Oscars, which was mentioned earlier. I would also be delighted to see the suffragette Caroline Phillips recognised. Those women did not do things in order to be commemorated with plaques and statues, but they changed our world and should be recognised.

Dr Alison McCall, the convener of women’s history Scotland, says that women’s underrepresentation in the civic landscape has been partly due to the way that those women viewed themselves. She says that a lot of the women we would want to honour are women who saw a problem and set about solving it. They did not donate their diaries to an archive because they were never thinking of their own personal glorification, but glorify them we must, because they inspire others. Evening out the representation of women is another part of the jigsaw that will address women’s inequality.