Stirling’s National Wallace Monument is an imposing place of historical resonance. Within its strong grey walls sits a gallery which features the marble busts of sixteen men from Scottish history, men who have been deemed to have played an extra special role in our nation’s long and esteemed history and rich culture. Recently, however, more and more visitors to the gallery had been asking a very pertinent question of staff: why are there no women?
But now, after a public poll that attracted thousands of votes from all over the globe, two women have been chosen from a shortlist of fourteen very special ladies to join the likes of Sir Walter Scott and King Robert the Bruce in the Monument’s stirringly named Hall of Heroes.
With acknowledgement for their enormous contributions to Scottish health, history and heritage, 19th century missionary Mary Slessor and Maggie Keswick Jencks, the co-founder of Maggie’s Centres for cancer sufferers and their loved ones, will be the first women whose marble busts will be displayed in the gallery.
Slessor, born in Aberdeen in 1848 has long been held as the most notable Scottish missionary since the great David Livingstone, a man who was her lifelong hero and whose work inspired her to embark upon a life of service and exploration that defied the contemporary roles of her gender. Slessor combined her altruistic ardour with a useful practicality that proved to be a winning mix that saw her work tirelessly to improve the quality of life for the people of southern Nigeria, transcending and rebelling against the deep rooted prejudice and opposition that prevailed at the time.
Dumfries-born Maggie Keswick Jencks (1941-1995) was an extremely multi-talented woman who, aside being a philanthropist and avid gardener was also an artist, writer and designer. She founded the Maggie’s Centres with her husband Charles in 1995, while fighting a terminal cancer that she felt she was receiving non-tailored emotional and physical support for. In this regard, she drew up a blueprint for a pioneering kind of centre which have since come to offer invaluable kinds of practical, emotional and social support to thousands of families battling the disease.
Slessor and Jencks came almost joint top of an esteemed list that also included Glaswegian artist Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh, whose pioneering work in design became one of the defining features of the Glasgow and broader Scottish styles of the 1890s, Dr Elsie Inglis, suffragist and founder of the Scottish Women’s Hospitals and folk singer Jean Redpath, whose haunting and passionate renditions of Burns’ greatest works were some of my grannies’ personal favourites.
Having followed the poll closely since a visit to the monument last autumn, I’d like to say that it has been an incredible opportunity to learn more about inspirational women who have achieved amazing things, most of them while still part of an overwhelming man’s world. Moreover, the passionate calls for these women -from all across the world – to be given pride of place alongside the likes of William Wallace has been truly encouraging, making me proud and renewing my hope for a fairer, more equal future.
Please continue to give your support to all women’s charities and initiatives such as the Glasgow Women’s Library across Scotland and beyond. Together, leading by the example of these fourteen women and others like them, we can make the world a more promising and empowering place for our daughters and their daughters after them.
If you’d like to learn more about the women heroes who have helped make our country what it is today, then you might be interested in some of the following books available in our library:
A Guid Cause: the Women’s Suffrage Movement in Scotland by Leah Leneman
Into the Foreground: a Century of Scottish Women in Photographs by Leah Leneman
Out of Bounds: Women in Scottish Society 1800 – 1945 by Esther Breitenbach
Little Grey Partridge (a diary of a nurse serving with the Scottish Women’s Hospitals in Serbia during WW1) by Ishobel Ross
