Marsali Taylor's story about A Guid Cause

I knew almost nothing about the suffrage cause when I began reading; I was more interested in Dr Elsie Inglis' Russian Unit, and knew she'd been suffrage funded. The vague ideas I had focused on London: women chaining themselves to railings, storming Downing Street and being force-fed. Nobody had ever said anything about Scotland, or explained that Asquith and Churchill's seats here made it a front-line. Nobody'd mentioned defiant middle-aged women bombing railway stations and firing houses, or shipping-heiress Janie Allan firing blanks at the police from a revolver. I looked up the Shetland Society, my local, and found a committee here, in 1872.

I read the original Hansard speeches, and longed to kick the pompous MPs who kept saying "Women don't really want the vote" when thousands of women were petitioning and marching to say that they did. I learned that women wanted the vote to be able to change their lives: to get equal wages, to be allowed to keep their own earnings, to be able to leave violent husbands, to be allowed to go to University. I fulminated over 1912 letters in the local newspaper, with men called 'Patriarch' and 'Observer' saying suffragists couldn't be Christians, and a 'fatherly tap' was good for a woman. And I learned what women really did in the war. They drove ambulances up to the front line, under appalling conditions, over and over again, and nursed the wrecks of men brought back. They serviced planes, ploughed fields, filled shells with gunpowder. One, in the Serbian army, even commanded a platoon.

Reading this book didn't just change my life; it had a fair effect on others around me. I hassled the local Council to get a plaque on the house where the Shetland committee met; I've persuaded the local Museum to celebrate their centenary with an exhibition. I joined the Gude Cause march in Edinburgh in October, with a Shetland banner painted by my sister, and I've spent so much time in the local Archives that my husband has begun saying plaintively "Will this book of yours ever be finished?' Well, it will be, so that Shetland girls can know what their amazing grandmothers and great-grandmothers did to get them the vote. It's a story that shouldn't be forgotten by any of us.