Sara Sheridan interviews Mairi Kidd about her latest book, We Are All Witches.
WHEN Kate Pankhurst discovered that celebrated suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst was a distant cousin, she had recently graduated from an illustration degree in Preston and was working, illustrating several other writers’ stories as well as teaching drawing workshops to primary schoolchildren.
IF there’s one thing we have proved in the last few years it’s that our understanding of our history frames how we live today, from the political choices we make to the responsibility we feel to minority communities and more generally to how we take our place in the world individually and as a society.
IN 2018 I was commissioned to remap Scotland according to female history for Historic Environment Scotland. The resulting book, Where are the Women? was chosen for the David Hume First Minister’s Summer Reading List 2019 and changed my political views.
BURNS is as much a legend as a man. His poetry is gritty and lyrical and bespeaks the Enlight-enment era in Scotland, painting a vivid image of the rambunctious sexuality of Georgian Britain as much as the forward-thinking, ground-breaking, pragmatic intelligence with which Scotland changed the world.
WE think we have equality – or at least, much of the language in mainstream culture assumes that we (more or less) do. As a historical writer I’d say that we have more rights than any other generation of women. But we live our lives to a background male beat – the patriarchy is still with us despite the tide of feminism rising from the 1960s on.
FINDING women’s voices from history is like treasure hunting. There I am, in a sea of papers in an archive, digging for days, and if I’m lucky, I come across a letter, a journal or an old book. And wham, it’s like that woman is right next to me, telling me what she had for breakfast, or what she’s afraid of, or best of all, what she is dreaming about.
A love letter to Europe, from Scotland:
