INTRODUCTION This book begins with a challenge. Let''s say you have a five-year-old daughter growing up in Scotland in 2019. Where might you turn for examples of Scottish women to inspire her? In the modern era, you''d have it relatively easy. From politicians to actresses, artists to writers and sportswomen to singers, modern-day Scotland has produced any number of confident, successful women offering great examples to any little girl. Go back a little further, though, and you might begin to struggle. You certainly couldn''t point your daughter to traditional indicators of status such as public monuments - there are almost no statues of women in Scotland. Our capital Edinburgh groans under the weight of hundreds of statues of men and precisely three of women, one whom is Queen Victoria and another an anonymous figure symbolising victims of apartheid. Only the statue of Helen Crummy outside Craigmillar Library on the eastern outskirts of the city immortalises a named woman of Scotland, a heroine of community arts provision who transformed her local area through dedication and sheer hard work.

By contrast, Edinburgh boasts statues of several animals - the pampered pooches of Walter Scott, Robert Louis Stevenson and James Clerk Maxwell, Polish/Scottish war bear Wojtek, Greyfriars Bobby, a horse called Copenhagen and even a dog called Bum. This list makes it clear where women fall in the pecking order with sculptors and the commissioners of public art. In the relative invisibility of the women of our past, Scotland is not unusual. Until quite recently, a person reading Western history could have been forgiven for believing that women didn''t really exist at all. The world was largely run for men, by men, and history was written along these same principles. Occasional women do appear: when a queen consort produces an heir, or worse, fails in this task; very rarely when a king dies with no male heir and his daughter inherits; when a pretender''s wife or daughter is bartered as a hostage. These women are almost exclusively royal, or at least noble or aristocratic, and records tend to treat them briefly at best and unkindly at worst. As regards the ''ordinary'' women of any given country - i.

e. the vast majority - history is generally silent. In fairness, it is often silent too in regards to the lives of ''ordinary'' men. In Scotland''s case this challenge is compounded by our complex constitutional history and our rich linguistic heritage, which many of us are ill-equipped to navigate. If you did decide to brave Scotland''s archives - of which we boast many, having a proud and lengthy legal tradition - you might discover an arresting fact. In our court records, the words and deeds of ''ordinary'' Early Modern Scottish - and Scots-speaking - women are recorded unusually extensively. Sadly, these appear in the depositions and ''dittays'' of witch trials and these women are victims of a terrifying persecution which has left them fighting for their lives. Others appear as accusers and witnesses for the prosecution.

Thankfully, these accounts are far from a fair representation of the lived reality of our foremothers - surely we can do better. This book doesn''t aim to give a complete account of Scotland''s women - such a thing would be impossible - but rather begins with the idea of that five-year-old living in Scotland today. What sort of world would we wish for her, and which women''s stories could help inspire her towards it? And so here you will find a group of women selected for their wit, for their wisdom, and even for their wickedness, and some thoughts on the inspiration that a modern woman - whether young or old or in between - might take from their experience. Because the truth is, of course, that women have always made up roughly half of the people of the world, and women''s experiences have always mattered, to women if not to men. Many of these stories cannot be found in traditional histories, but they are there in oral tradition, in exaggerated caricatures, monstrous exaggerations and idealised hagiographies hiding in the margins of history proper. This book does its fair share of reading between the lines, in English and in Gaelic and in Scots, in the margins and in the gaps. Hopefully you will forgive any errors in the reading that you find, and enjoy your time in the company of these Scottish sisters.