On 26 March 1960 the Scottish activist for women’s rights Eunice Guthrie Murray died of a stroke. She was eighty-two, and her historical links reached back through her American mother to the campaign for the abolition of slavery. Her mother and her two sisters (both of whom earned university degrees) joined Charlotte Despard’s Women’s Freedom League along with Eunice, but it was Eunice who went on to become the League’s “secretary for ‘scattered members’” and later its president. She is notable too for compiling, over the key years 1908-14, “a collection of cuttings from national and local newspapers, relating to the suffrage struggle,” which is now held by the Women’s Library. She showed her sense of history not only by amassing this collection but by pasting the cuttings into a scrapbook begun by Frances Power Cobbe in 1893 and given by her to Annie Leigh Browne.
As President of the Women’s Freedom League, Guthrie was arrested for speaking outside 10 Downing Street. Her suffrage activities took her not only to England but as far afield as Budapest in Hungary. In the election after the First World War she became the first Scotswoman to stand for parliament (for a Glasgow constituency). She was not elected to parliament, but later served on Dunbartonshire County Council.
Murray had been keeping a diary for years before she made her voice publicly heard in a letter to The Times from herself and Chrystal Macmillan on 2 December 1907 to protest the wilful caricaturing of suffrage issues in a recent leader. They found it astonishing that something so well?known as the suffrage movement “should be so curiously misrepresented.” They vigorously argued the concern of the movement for women of the lower classes, and denied the existence of light-hearted or frivolous suffragists. They also objected to linguistic gender bias: the use of “we” in a manner that deliberately excluded women. Murray went on to pamphlets, public speaking, novels (political fiction, dealing with the suffrage struggle and with the harsh conditions in which working-class women led their lives), a memoir of her mother, books about places (both exotic and local), and books on the history of Scottish women.
In 1913 the Glasgow Herald printed a letter from a male correspondent suggesting that if only more people, particularly cabinet ministers, could hear Eunice Guthrie Murray speak, “the vote would be won without delay.” In 1930 she dedicated her Scottish Women of Bygone Days “To the Women of All Ages who Defied Convention and Held Aloft the Banner of Progress”.
This information is provided by Dr Isobel Grundy, University of Alberta, and comes from Orlando: Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present, Cambridge University Press, by subscription: see http://orlando.cambridge.org.
