Quines by Gerda Stevenson sampler

lazing women’s football team known as ‘Mrs Graham’s Eleven’.
But on detailed examination, the dates didn’t quite add
up. I smelled a rat, and, on further digging, discovered that, in
fact, Mrs Graham (aka Helen Matthews) and Carrie Boustead,
who was white, both grew up in Liverpool, a few streets
apart, and would have been too young to play in that first ever
recorded women’s international football match – Scotland
v England – at Hiberbian fc’s Easter Road Stadium, Edinburgh.
As the mother of a daughter who has Down’s Syndrome, I’m
keenly aware of the marginalisation of people with disabilities
in our society. In my attempt to find a woman who represented
the disabled community in some way – after phoning and
emailing various organisations – I kept drawing a blank. But
during a further bout of internet excavation, I discovered the
amazing activist, Margaret Blackwood. In this case, as with
several others, online research was essential.
Books have played the biggest part in the process of discovery.
I’ve now built a small, precious library on the lives of remarkable
women, some of whom, for various reasons, haven’t
made it into this collection. There are so many I could have
chosen, as evidenced in The Biographical Dictionary of Scottish
Women, an invaluable resource. My selection is by no means
comprehensive – it can hardly be more than a snapshot, and,
inevitably, a very personal one; nevertheless, it pays tribute to
women whose lives and legacies deserve to be examined and remembered.
They gathered skills, experience and wisdom against
great odds, and were often excluded. The barrister and pacifist,
Chrystal Macmillan, one of the organisers of the International
Committee of Women for Permanent Peace, is a case in point.
The icwpp (part of the International Congress of Women) had
planned to meet in Paris at the same time as the official Peace
Conference was being convened at Versailles in 1919. But women
delegates from Central Powers were not permitted to travel
in France, so the icwpp met in Zurich, just as the Treaty of Ver-
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