Helen Kay & Rose Pipes (2020) Chrystal Macmillan, Scottish campaigner for women’s equality through law reform, Women’s History Review, 29:4, 716-736

In 2020 Helen Kay and Rose Pipes published a great article in Women’s History Review focusing on the work of Chrystal Macmillan that many of our members will find interesting.

ABSTRACT

This article will explore the work of Chrystal Macmillan, who used her knowledge of the law to further the cause of women’s equality through her committee work with several voluntary organisations, and her presentations to the British Government, the League of Nations, and the International Labour Office. Using archival material, both from committee minutes and family anecdotes, we will show the substantial amount of voluntary work undertaken by Chrystal Macmillan both before and after she became a practising lawyer in 1924. The article will also try to capture something of the woman’s character through the comments of her friends and colleagues.

You can read it here – https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09612025.2019.1702790

If you have any questions please get in touch with us at womenshistoryscotland@gmail.com

Helen Kay is an independent scholar, undertaking archival research on the life and work of Chrystal Macmillan. Helen has given presentations on various aspects of Macmillan’s work to the Women’s History Network, the WEA and to local and International groups interested in women’s history. Recently her work has focused on Macmillan’s work as lawyer and she contributed a chapter on the ‘British Nationality Act 1948’ in Rosemary Auchmuty and Erika Rackley (eds) 2018 Women’s Legal Landmarks: Celebrating the History of Women and Law in the UK and Ireland (Hart: Oxford).

Rose Pipes is a former commissioning editor for Oliver & Boyd publishers, Edinburgh, co-editor of The New Biographical Dictionary of Scottish Women (EUP 2018), and now an independent scholar. She has researched the legal career of Chrystal Macmillan, and written several articles on the subject, including ‘A Scotswoman at the Inn’ for The Middle Templar magazine (2014). She also participated in the Legal Landmarks project, and contributed to a chapter by Helen Kay on the ‘British Nationality Act 1948’ in Rosemary Auchmuty and Erika Rackley (eds) Women’s Legal Landmarks: Celebrating the History of Women and Law in the UK and Ireland (Hart: Oxford, 2018). She is the author of two books of local history, one about a unique nineteenth-century co-operative housing project in Edinburgh, The Colonies of Stockbridge, the other an oral history of the Stockbridge area of the city.

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