A WHILE ago, I had a fascinating chat with Women’s History Scotland convener Alison McCall, in which we covered, in no particular order - chickenpox, her son’s first novel and the wisdom or otherwise of helping out at my seven-year-old son’s after-school book club.

When she mentioned, in passing, that the last time she had been in a primary school was when she was dressed up as a suffragette, discussing the role Scottish women played in the fight to win the right to vote, I was intrigued.

I know about the Suffragettes, of course – history lessons at secondary school got much more interesting when Emmeline Pankhurst and Emily Davison entered the picture.

I remember the shock I felt hearing about Emily Wilding Davison, killed when the king’s horse knocked her over as she tried to attach a flag to its bridle during the Derby in 1913 – how desperate were things, that these women would go to such lengths?

But while the national figures, like Pankhurst and Davison, were given the spotlight in my secondary school history lessons, the Scottish women hardly got a look in.

After hearing Alison’s tale, about the work she does in primary schools to raise awareness of the Scotswomen who fought for equal rights, I was annoyed I didn’t know my countrywomen played such a pivotal role.

I headed for the history books and discovered that in fact, one of the earliest suffrage societies of the 1870s was based in Edinburgh.

I also found out (with more than a little satisfaction) that Scottish suffrage campaigners made Winston Churchill hide in a shed when he came to Dundee in 1908.

He had been followed to the city by 27 of the national leaders of women's suffrage movements who wouldn’t leave him alone, so he resorted to holding a meeting in a shed to escape from them.

I also found the mighty Flora Drummond, a postmistress from Arran who led, on horseback, a huge rally in Scotland in 1909 and Ethel Moorhead, who threw an egg at Churchill and ended up being jailed for breaking a glass case at the Wallace monument.

And I discovered Elsie Inglis, founder member of the Scottish Women’s Suffragette Federation in 1906.

She was a doctor (who had to wait to qualify until the degree became available to women) who raised thousands of pounds to set up the Scottish Women’s Hospitals Unit, which provided medical units staffed by women in France, Russia, Corsica, Romania and Serbia.

When Elsie first suggested teams of women doctors and nurses be sent to the Western Front during the Great War, the War Office replied: ‘My good lady, go home and sit still.'

Thank goodness she – and Emmeline and Emily and Flora and Ethel and many more like them - did nothing of the sort.