Played a key role

“The Suffragette legacy in Tayside is interesting,” emails Dr Kenneth Baxter of the University of Dundee. “Scotland’s first female MP, the Duchess of Atholl, was elected in Kinross and West Perthshire in 1923, and Dundee became the first Scottish city to elect a female member of parliament, when the Unionist Florence Horsburgh was elected in 1931. Historians have also suggested it was the recently enfranchised female electorate who played a key role in ensuring Churchill’s defeat in Dundee in 1922.

“On the other hand Dundee took a very long time to elect a woman to its Town Council, not doing so until 1935 (in contrast Edinburgh elected its first woman councillor in 1919 and Glasgow followed suit in 1920), and the city has still only ever sent one woman to Westminster.

“Equally, it is somewhat ironic that Atholl was Scotland’s first female MP as she had been a strong campaigner against female suffrage.

“The key question that is almost impossible to answer is did the suffragettes’ more extreme actions help or hinder their cause? On the one hand the fact that in 1918 some women voted and stood as candidates in parliamentary elections would suggest a victory.

“Yet it has also been argued women’s war work played a bigger part in winning these new rights and we must also remember there was already a process of gradually extending women’s political rights that had seen the municipal franchise opened up to women for example.

“The fact that it was not until 1928 that the male and female franchises were equalised also suggests what happened in 1918 was partly the result of a gradual process of democratic evolution in Britain.”