Scottish Women

Can you imagine a different Scotland, a Scotland where women are commemorated in statues and streets and buildings - even in the hills and valleys? This is a guidebook to that alternative nation, where the cave on Staffa is named after Malvina rather than Fingal, and Arthur's Seat isn't Arthur's, it belongs to St Triduana. Where you arrive into Dundee at Slessor Station and the Victorian monument on Stirling's Abbey Hill interprets national identity not as a male warrior but through the women who ran hospitals during the First World War. The West Highland Way ends at Fort Mary. The Old Lady of Hoy is a prominent Orkney landmark. And the plinths in central Glasgow proudly display statues of suffragettes. In this 'imagined atlas' fictional streets, buildings, statues and monuments are dedicated to real women, telling their often untold or unknown stories.For most of recorded history, women have been sidelined, if not silenced, by men who named the built environment after themselves. Now is the time to look unflinchingly at Scotland's heritage and bring those women who have been ignored to light. Sara Sheridan explores beyond the traditional male-dominated histories to reveal a new picture of Scotland's history and heritage.

This revelatory book concentrates on Scottish women painters and sculptors from 1885, when Fra Newbery became Director of the Glasgow School of Art, until 1965, the year of Anne Redpath's death. It explores the experience and context of the artists and their place in Scottish art history, in terms of training, professional opportunities and personal links within the Scottish art world. Celebrated painters including Joan Eardley, Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh and Phoebe Anna Traquair are examined alongside lesser-known figures such as Phyllis Bone, Dorothy Johnstone and Norah Neilson Gray, in order to look afresh at the achievements of Scottish women artists of the modern period.The book accompanies a show which will be held at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art Two in Edinburgh from 7 November 2015 to 26 June 2016.

Drawing on a wide range of source materials from across Scotland, this sourcebook provides new insights into women's attitudes to the society in which they lived, and how they negotiated their identities within private and public life.

This is the first comprehensive critical analysis of Scottish women's writing from its recoverable beginnings to the present day. Essays cover individual writers - such as Margaret Oliphant, Nan Shepherd, Muriel Spark and Liz Lochhead - as well as groups of writers or kinds of writing - such as women poets and dramatists, or Gaelic writing and the legacy of the Kailyard. In addition to poetry, drama and fiction, a varied body of non-fiction writing is also covered, including diaries, memoirs, biography and autobiography, didactic and polemic writing, and popular and periodical writing for and by women.

This book tells the remarkable stories of ten women whose inspirational lives and struggles exemplify the concerns and problems that other women have faced throughout the last two centuries. Each is the subject of a chapter devoted to her particular story and the times in which she lived. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries witnessed great changes in women's position in Scotland, and yet little is known about the achievements of the Scottish women who were the main agents of these changes. In presenting the life stories of ten women, William Knox provides evidence of the huge contribution made by women to the shaping of modern Scotland. At the same time he shows how the life histories of individuals can reveal previously dark corners of historical understanding and allow a more nuanced picture of Scottish society as a whole. Subjects include Jane Welsh Carlyle, brilliantly gifted, but married to the wayward and demanding Thomas, Sophia Jex-Blake, Scotland's first female doctor, and Mary Slessor,

This book offers an original interdisciplinary analysis of the relations between myth, identity and social reality, involving elements of narratology theory, linguistics, philosophy, anthropology and social theory, harnessed to support an argument firmly located in the area of literary criticism. This analysis yields a fairly extensive reinterpretation of the concept of myth, which is applied to the examination of the relationship between narrative and social reality as represented in texts by contemporary Scottish and Irish women writers. The main theoretical sources are Mikhail Bakhtin’s theories of heteroglossia, Jacques Derrida’s theories of citationality and Judith Butler’s theories of subjectivity. The analysis framework developed in the book uses these theories to create a new way of understanding how literary texts change readers’ worldviews by enticing them to accept alternative possibilities of cultural expression of identity and social order. The texts analysed in this book reconfigure naturalised stories that have become normative and constraining in conveying identities and visions of legitimate social orders. The book’s focus on feminine identities places it alongside feminist analyses of reconstructions of fairy tales, myths or canonical stories that establish what counts as legitimate feminine identity. Studied here for the first time together, the writers whose texts form the interest of this book continue the revisionist work begun by other women writers who engage with the male generated literary, philosophical and humanist tradition. They share a view of narratives as tools for continually negotiating our identities, social worlds and socialisation scenarios. While the high-level theoretical discourse of the first part of the book requires specialised knowledge, the second part of the book, offering close readings of the texts, is both lively and accessible and should engage the interest of the general reader and academic alike. This book is written for all those who are interested in the power words have to hold sway over our inner and outer (social) worlds.

Introducing the neglected tradition of Scottish women's writing to readers who may already be familiar with English Victorian realism or the historical romances of Walter Scott and Robert Louis Stevenson, this book corrects male-dominated histories of the Scottish novel by demonstrating how women appropriated the masculine genre of romance.

Kids will love this cumulative and hysterical read-aloud! The original viral sensation! "I was walking down the road and I saw... a donkey, Hee Haw! And he only had three legs! He was a wonky donkey." Children will be in fits of laughter with this perfect read-aloud tale of an endearing donkey. By the book's final page, readers end up with a spunky hanky-panky cranky stinky-dinky lanky honky-tonky winky wonky donkey!