Three generations of Scottish women show how our lives have improved – Christine Grahame MSP

As we celebrate International Women’s Day, I suggest women’s opportunities have greatly improved in the short period of three generations, illustrated through the lives of my grandmother and mother.

During the Second World War, Christine Grahame's mother Margie volunteered to join the Women's Land Army like these women (Picture: B. Marshall/Fox Photos/Getty Images)

Margaret Grahame, my paternal grandmother, was born in 1877. A shepherd’s daughter, her father travelled for work, so her formal education was limited.

At 14, she became a lady’s maid. With compensation for a heart condition, she put down a deposit on 305 Easter Road, Leith, living there until her death aged 93.

She sent her four children, including a daughter, to the then fee-paying Leith Academy. That shepherd’s daughter recognised education as the route to improvement, as it remains, though she advised me as a teenager was to become a clerkess and marry early.

I resisted the latter until my mid-20s, unusual for the time. However, the importance of education remained and so I became the first girl in my road in Clermiston to stay at school beyond 15, and the first to go to university.

Another Margaret Grahame, my mother, had a tougher life. Born in 1922, her father was a miner. Her mother died at the birth of her brother Anthony. Margaret was only 15 months old. Aged six, her father died from a mining injury.

On the day of his funeral, she was forcibly taken by strangers, with her young brother, to an orphanage and separated from him the following day. Eventually she became a ward of court and was placed, with her brother, in the care of an aunt.

Those were bad years of real poverty and tragedy; Anthony, died of meningitis aged just 11. At 14, Margie, as she was known, took a live-in job at a vicarage, for four shillings weekly.

Rebellious even at that age, she refused to wear the servile grey suit ordered by the vicar’s wife and quit. She progressed to an enamel works in Burton-on-Trent for six shillings a week, then a factory for seven shillings and sixpence.

By 1940, she was making de-icers for war planes, before volunteering for the land army. In March 1942, she met my father. Those sorrows and hardships during her formative years became the foundation of her indomitable spirit and compassion for anyone who was troubled.

Principled to breaking point, she was fearless in defending underdogs and attacking injustices. I recognise how much influence she’s had on my values.

Me? I left school before I was 17 but, remembering the value of education, with Highers in my back pocket.

I approached Ferranti, a major electronics company in Edinburgh at the time, for a job. On the factory tour, a woman scientific researcher told me there was no future for women at Ferranti. I took her advice.

Unfortunately, I went for a clerkess job, as granny had suggested… There, I saw young men promoted over bright able women so I packed that in and went to university.

I must have inherited some of the determination of those women, steering me away from my predetermined destiny – school-leaver at 15, engaged at 18, married at 20, first child at 22 – to having the confidence to aim beyond that clerkess job and early marriage.

We should encourage all girls to have that confidence and self-belief.

Christine Grahame is SNP MSP for Midlothian South, Tweeddale and Lauderdale

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