Women of the Highlands by Katharine Stewart sampler

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
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