MORE than a hundred years ago, the site of Glasgow ’s Mitchell Library was the scene of a wild riot. A meeting being held at what was then St Andrew’s Halls ended with police storming the platform, scenes of chaos as flowerpots and chairs were thrown and a revolver being fired.

The occasion was a visit by Emmeline Pankhurst to the city in 1914 – just one of the key moments in the history of the suffragettes in Glasgow.

The same year there was an attempted bomb attack on Kibble Palace in the Botanic Gardens which shattered a number of windows in the glass palace. It was only thwarted by an alert night attendant who cut off a burning fuse, and clues to the identity of the attackers found by police included a lady’s black silk veil, footprints of women’s shoes ... and an empty champagne bottle.

There were also acid attacks on postboxes in the city, the burning down of properties, the cutting of telegraph wires and confrontations with Winston Churchill. Suffragettes from Glasgow took part in hunger strikes and protests in London which descended into violence.

The history of the suffragette movement has long been known for high-profile names such as the Pankhursts and the death of Emily Davison, who was knocked down by the king’s horse at Epsom Derby. It was only when I started researching for a book on the subject that I realised how little I knew of how women in my own city had battled for the right to vote.

That’s not too surprising when you consider the huge gaps in history when it comes to representation of women’s stories.

My interest in writing the book on women’s lives in Glasgow and their fight for equality began in 2013 with writing an article about a project by Women’s History Scotland and Glasgow Women’s Library to map memorials to women across Scotland.

Towns and cities are littered with hundreds of statues commemorating male military figures, philanthropists and artists – and even a dog, in the form of Greyfriars Bobby. But I was astonished to discover the mapping exercise had revealed there were just 20 statues across Scotland commemorating the lives of women – five of which were dedicated to Queen Victoria.

The lack of memorials – a situation which has only slightly improved today – is a visible reflection of how much of women’s history remains unrecognised.

Some cities, including London, Manchester and Oldham, now have statues dedicated to suffragettes. In Glasgow, the city’s suffrage movement is commemorated by a storm-battered oak tree in Kelvin Way – which was planted in 1918 by the women involved in the campaign themselves.

When I learned about the tree, after many years of passing by oblivious to its existence, I wanted to find out more about the story of the fight for women’s suffrage in the city.

One of the most memorable moments during my research was looking at the original minutes of the first meeting of the Glasgow and West of Scotland Society for Women’s Suffrage, which are preserved in the archives of the Mitchell Library. The carefully hand-written notes document how a group of women met at 18 Lynedoch Crescent with the idea of forming the association.

You can’t help but wonder if they had even an inkling of how this first informal gathering would help to change the lives of generations of women to come.

More disturbing is the collection of postcards held by Glasgow Women’s Library, which includes some vicious depictions of anti-suffrage messages – such as a woman having her tongue nailed to a table with the words “Peace at Last”.

Newspaper accounts of the time reveal the daring actions of the women in their fight for the vote, often involving confrontations with the law.

Elizabeth Chalmers Smith, a hunger striker who was confined to a house in Park Gardens in the west end of Glasgow under the “Cat and Mouse” Act, managed to escape from under the nose of three plain-clothes policemen after swapping clothes with a visitor.

Suffragettes confronted then cabinet minister Winston Churchill when he left a hotel in Glasgow, with one arrested after breaking the window of his car with her hand muff.

My research expanded to look at how women in Glasgow battled for equality in areas such as education, health, work and business in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

The starting point for the establishment of the first women’s college in Glasgow came when a group of women accosted a professor at a dinner party in 1868, asking if he would give lectures to them in English literature. It was a time when the doors of higher education institutions were firmly closed to women. Less than three decades later, Queen Margaret College was incorporated in the University of Glasgow.

I was struck how some of the issues highlighted by social reformer Margaret Irwin – whose mission in life was to improve conditions for women in the workforce – are familiar to today’s world. In 1896 she spoke of issues such as a “living wage” and women being paid far less than men for the same work.

The many interesting characters I came across included Rebecca Strong, who trained with Florence Nightingale and pioneered changes in the training of nurses which helped turn it into a respected profession.

When she became matron of Glasgow Royal Infirmary in 1879 she imposed a ban on drinking. At the time, it was perfectly acceptable for nurses to have beer while on duty. In later life, Strong travelled all over the world, and according to an interview with her she had in her possession “a white feather given to her by a Red Indian chief” in Banff. When she died at the age of 100 in 1944, she attributed her long life to “hard work and simple living”.

There has been a growing awareness of the need to recognise influential women of history in recent years. After a long campaign, a statue recognising the role of Mary Barbour in Glasgow’s rent strike campaign was unveiled in 2018.

More recently, a plaque was unveiled in Edinburgh by First Minister Nicola Sturgeon which commemorated Scotland’s youngest suffragette, Bessie Watson.

She joined the movement aged just nine and played the bagpipes on marches across the country, campaigning for the right to vote.

Browsing through the current map of memorials to women in Scotland, there are of course some instantly recognisable names – such as Elsie Inglis, the founder of the Scottish Women’s Hospitals in the First World War; Jean Armour, the wife of Robert Burns; and JK Rowling, the author of the Harry Potter series of books.

But it’s striking how many of them are not more widely known, despite being pioneers of their time.

There’s Victoria Drummond, a Scottish aristocrat who was the first woman to go to sea as a marine engineer and took part in the Normandy D-Day landings. Or Jackie Crookstone, who took a heroic stance against the Scottish Militia Act of 1797, which enforced conscription, and was one of the victims of the Tranent Massacre in which soldiers killed around a dozen protesters.

Of course, it has to be acknowledged much of the bias towards men comes from history books written at a time when women’s achievements were overlooked. Looking through a “Who’s Who” of Glasgow published in 1909 while researching my book, it was stark that among biographies of nearly 500 notable citizens of the city, just seven women were listed.

There’s no excuse today for such glaring omissions. And more work has to be done to highlight the lives of influential women of Scotland which have been overlooked for so long. Not just because it is right to do so – but because there is a wealth of interesting and often astonishing stories which deserve not to be forgotten.