Red Duchess

The first Scottish woman MP, the first Conservative woman minister and the only opponent of appeasement brave enough to put her beliefs to the electorate, Katharine Stewart-Murray, the Duchess of Atholl, needs this definitive biography to bring her story to a new audience. A talented pianist from an ancient Scottish family, Kitty Ramsay married into the aristocracy and found herself with an unfaithful husband who had constant money troubles. Through war nursing and charity work she was one of the most prominent women in Scotland by the time she was elected in 1923. Her diligent service as an education minister who prioritised children made her subsequent rebellions even more surprising. Her political life was full of apparent contradictions: the critic of Soviet and Nazi tyranny who opposed self-government for India, the trailblazing female politician who had thought women didn't need the vote, the Tory who spoke alongside communists, and the shy public speaker dubbed the 'Red Duchess' who travelled the world to fundraise for Spanish refugees. 'Anything the Duchess does is news', the papers wrote during her doomed by-election campaign in 1938. As a 21st century audience rediscovers its female pioneers, it is time to remember the politician who paid the highest political price for her refusal to play by the rules.