Women of the Highlands by Katharine Stewart sampler

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women of the highlands according to historical time and individual circumstance. In other ways women’s lives do not alter, in so far as they are shaped by the very fact of being female, by marriage, childbirth, family, personal tragedy, and the proverbial women’s work which, however easy or hard it may be in any given situation, is never, and never will be, done. Women of the Highlands moves to and fro from the general to the particular, its structure a clear acknowledgement of the fact that the vast majority of women have no memorial. Whole chapters are dedicated to telling how ordinary women lived and died, from Celtic to contemporary times. In these sections there is a strong sense of how the past lives on today. Marriage, pregnancy, childbirth, and the bond with the land are themes that do not die, however much history sweeps over them. At times Highland history has been peculiarly harsh. The story of Highland women is necessarily one of loss and suffering as well as celebration. The evil is plainly told here as well as the good, notably some of the horrific history of the Scottish witch trials, including the notorious trial of Isobel Gowdie, still remembered around Auldearn today. Later on we see the terrible effects of the Clearances on Highland society as a whole, and how they affected the recorded lives of individual women. Lament goes hand in hand with celebration: the lyrical description of life at the shielings, for example, breathes life into the ruins one sees so often at the top of a remote glen or on a high hillside. The reader feels both enrichment and loss at the same time, which is very much like listening to Highland song. Weddings, births, farming customs: so much has gone, and yet it’s good to be aware of what remains, often in attenuated rituals or small customs that many readers will have experienced in their own lives today. Naturally several of the women celebrated in the book are singers, because that is the major form of expression in Gaelic 16
foreword cultures, and the text echoes the notes sounded by some of its women characters. Generations of unnamed women sang waulking songs, lullabies and laments. The names of a few live on, like Màiri MacLeod and, later, Màiri Mhór ‘the bard of the Land Reform Movement’, who was both singer and political activist (as well as nurse and obstetrician). After suffering unjust imprisonment, she went on to compose many songs, and to fight for the reforms that successfully led to the Crofters’ Act in 1886. For bards, poets and writers, Highland life at all levels meant that art was one aspect of a busy practical life. The overriding impression of Katharine Stewart’s book is its richness of texture. Women of the Highlands have led full, varied lives, sometimes within the confines of a small island, sometimes spanning countries and continents. Recorded lives are necessarily biased in favour of the aristocracy, but this book redresses that imbalance by focussing on the ways in which individual women are part of a larger, seamless tradition of women’s tasks and arts. The vignettes of individual lives show women of talent, courage and resource, who are the shapers of history as well as its victims. They suffer the violence and cruelty which have played too large a part in Highland history, but here we also see them as survivors, embodying and celebrating a living tradition. Because of their activities over the centuries, many good things have come to pass. A few heroic deeds have become part of recorded history. The abiding sense of this book is of a more wide-ranging heroism, of the countless women of the Highlands who made life rich in the fullest sense of the word, often in the poorest of circumstances, and managed not only to survive, but to protest against injustice, record their histories, emigrate, learn new skills, sing, write, paint... to celebrate who they were and where they belonged, whatever the odds. Margaret Elphinstone 17
Page 3: katharine stewart lives in Invernes
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Page 9: Acknowledgements my very real thank
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Women of the Highlands by Katharine Stewart sampler

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