WOMEN MSPs stood together to mark 100 years since the first women won the right to vote yesterday – but Nicola Sturgeon warned equality is an “unwon cause”.
In a debate marking the centenary of the law change, the First Minister told Holyrood: “Some women secured the parliamentary vote a century ago, women have had equal voting rights to men for 90 years, but the uncomfortable truth is that gender equality is still an unwon cause. An unwon cause that it is the duty of our generation to win.”
The 1918 Representation of the People Act gave the franchise to property-owning women aged over 30.
It also introduced voting rights for all men over the age of 21, something withheld from women until 1928.
Sturgeon, Scotland’s first woman leader, hailed recent achievements including the passage of the Domestic Abuse Bill and legislation to secure 50 per cent female representation on public boards.
However, she also highlighted the continuing equal pay gap and the reduction of female representation from 37 per cent to 35 per cent since the Scottish Parliament reconvened in 1999.
Sturgeon said: “I hope that this parliament can play a vital role in consigning these issues to history.
“I want young people in the future to be able to see them in the same way that we see voting rights for women – as a cause that was argued for and won by earlier generations.”
She went on: “It falls to us in our generation through deeds not words to complete the work that the suffrage work started.”
Former Labour leader Kezia Dugdale highlighted there are more statues of dogs in Edinburgh than of women as evidence of the continued lack of parity for men and women.
She said: “The evidence that women are still unequal can be seen everywhere we turn.
“We must redouble our efforts to deliver that gender equality. Commemorate yes, celebrate no – I’m too angry and I’m still marching.”
Alison Johnstone of the Greens also stated that “the job is not yet done,” continuing: “Let’s honour the memory and legacy of all of these remarkable campaigners and let us work to close the gap.”
Meanwhile, Tory leader Ruth Davidson described the centenary as a “staging post to a better system”.
She said: “The idea of equal only exists if women are given the same opportunity to make progress, the same rewards for hard work and the same treatment in the job as the man standing next to her, and that’s the next fight.
“Closing the gender pay gap, gender blind recruitment and promotion, confronting sexual harassment and cracking down on real life and online misogynistic attacks are the next frontiers in a war which is not yet won.
“There is much more for all of us to do and anniversaries like today can help focus our attention on that work and prompt us into action.”
And Lib Dem leader Willie Rennie said his party would work to “remove the barrier to get good women elected” by initiatives such as all-women shortlists for the next Holyrood election.
In a speech in Manchester marking the 100-year milestone, Prime Minister Theresa May, the second woman to hold the keys to 10 Downing Street, warned online abuse and intimidation is threatening British democracy.
She said: “As we remember the heroic campaigners of the past, who fought to include the voices of all citizens in our public debate, we should consider what values and principles guide our conduct of that debate today.”
Highlighting harassment of women and minorities, the speech said public debate is “coarsening”, going on: “I believe it is for all of us - individuals, governments, and media old and new - must accept our responsibility to help sustain a genuinely pluralist public debate for the future.”
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