Chrystal Macmillan

Jessie Chrystal Macmillan (13 June 1872 – 21 September 1937) was a British suffragist, peace activist, barrister, feminist and the first female science graduate from the University of Edinburgh as well as that institution's first female honours graduate in mathematics. She was an activist for women's right to vote, and for other women's causes. She was the second woman to plead a case before the House of Lords, and was one of the founders of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom.

In the first year of World War I, Macmillan spoke for the peace-seeking women of the United Kingdom at the International Congress of Women, a women's congress convened at The Hague. The Congress elected five delegates to take their message to political leaders in Europe and the United States. She travelled to the neutral states of Northern Europe and Russia before meeting up with other delegates in the U.S. She met with world leaders such as President Woodrow Wilson, whose countries were still neutral, to present the proposals formulated at The Hague. Wilson subsequently used these proposals as some of his Fourteen Points, his justification for making war to forge a lasting peace. At war's end, Macmillan helped to organise the second women's congress in Zurich and was one of the delegates elected to take the resolutions passed at the congress to the political leaders meeting in Paris to formulate the Versailles Peace Treaty. She supported the founding of the League of Nations. Macmillan tried but did not succeed in getting the League to establish nationality for women independent of the nationality of their husbands.

Early career Jessie Chrystal Macmillan was born on 13 June 1872 to Jessie Chrystal (née) Finlayson and John Macmillan, a tea merchant working for Melrose & Co in Leith. The family lived at 8 Duke Street (Dublin Street as of 1922) in Edinburgh's New Town.

Macmillan was the only daughter among her parents' eight sons. After an early education in Edinburgh she boarded at St Leonards School in St Andrews on the east coast of Scotland. In October 1892 Macmillan was among the first female students to enrol at the university, she was however not the first to graduate as others were either more advanced in their studies or taking higher degrees. Macmillan studied science subjects including Honours Mathematics with George Chrystal, Astronomy with Ralph Copeland, and Natural Philosophy with Peter Guthrie Tait and Cargill Gilston Knott. In April 1896 she graduated with a BSc with first-class honours in mathematics and natural philosophy, the first woman at the university to do so.

In the summer of 1896 she went to Berlin for further university study, then returned to Edinburgh and passed an examination in Greek language to enter the Faculty of Arts in October 1896. She studied a number of social subjects including politics, and graduated in April 1900. Macmillan was the first woman to earn First-class honours from Edinburgh in Mathematics and Natural Philosophy, also earning Second-class honours in Moral Philosophy and Logic. During this time she was a member of the Edinburgh Ladies' Debating Society, a forum which helped her gain confidence arguing in the face of opposition. She also joined the Edinburgh Mathematical Society in May 1897, the second woman member after Flora Philip in 1896. She was known as Chrystal Macmillan—she did not use the name Jessie, her mother's first name and her own birth name. In March, Macmillan wrote to Elizabeth Clarke Wolstenholme Elmy to ask for aid, as Elmy was the author of the pamphlet The Enfranchisement of Women. Macmillan told Elmy "I formed my beliefs on your pamphlet." Macmillan was the first woman to argue a case before the bar of the House of Lords. She was backed by her contemporary, Frances Simson, one of the first eight female graduates of Edinburgh. Given audience late in the day, Macmillan spoke for three-quarters of an hour. Press reports of the appearance described her as a "modern Portia," Shakespeare's fictional heiress and legal dilettante. In Scotland, Glasgow's The Herald reported that she began nervously but warmed to her subject and "argued law in an admirable speaking voice". In Wellington, New Zealand, the Evening Post wrote a less strident account, noting that Macmillan was cheerful in defeat. After the court adjourned, she said to a reporter from the London Daily Chronicle, "I don't suppose that there is anything more to be done just now, but we shall live to fight another day." No matter her exact words, her time at the House of Lords attracted worldwide publicity which proved valuable to the women's cause. Macmillan spoke at many suffrage meetings during this period; for example, in 1909, she was a speaker at an NUWSS meeting along with Dr Elsie Inglis and Alice Low in Edinburgh's Café Oak Hall. A guest speaker was J A Scott from New Zealand, where women already had the right to vote.

In 1909 the SUWSU mounted tours in southwest Scotland (led mainly by Frances Parker), and northern Scotland, led by Chrystal Macmillan. Macmillan's first visited Dingwall and Ullapool. As she remarked, Ullapool was more challenging, as it was not on the rail network. She then headed to Caithness. The John o’Groat Journal was not overly sympathetic: ‘The women of Wick and Pultneytown … have never aspired to air their grievances other than on the stairhead. The suffragettes have come to educate them.’ Nevertheless, the Rifle Hall was filled, and it seated 800, with all standing room taken too.

Chrystal Macmillan then headed further north to Orkney and Shetland. On her return to the Highlands, she spoke at Helmsdale, Golspie, Dornoch, Cromarty and Alness. Her visit led to the first formation of a society in Dornoch. At the end of the trip, Chrystal Macmillan reported: ‘This brings the Northern campaign to an end. Our society has held twenty meetings in the North of Scotland. Sixteen were indoor meetings, at which the audiences varied in number from 100 to 1,000 (the average was about 300), and in 17 places the meeting was the first that had been held on the subject. Nothing has impressed me more than the intelligent sympathy we have met in almost every place, not only in the meetings, but also from those to whom we talked.' Her visit was still remarked upon four years later in Caithness.

In 1911, Macmillan attended the sixth congress of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance (IWSA) in Stockholm. There, she embarked upon a long-term project, in cooperation with Marie Stritt, president of the German Union for Woman Suffrage, and Maria Vérone, president of the French League for Women's Rights, to document women's voting conditions around the world. In May 1913, after two years of correspondence with widely separated women's rights activists to gather global information, the women completed Woman Suffrage in Practice, 1913, a book to which Carrie Chapman Catt added a foreword. Published in conjunction with the NUWSS and the National American Woman Suffrage Association, the book described current women's voting practices in 35 countries and empires, with the authors dividing the work by country. Macmillan was responsible for writing about the UK, the US, New Zealand, Australia, India, China, South Africa and five smaller countries. Macmillan noticed that in few countries and empires were women excluded specifically by statute—they were instead kept from voting by custom alone. She wrote from both personal experience and outside observation of women's activists: "as soon as they become alive to this fact, they have tested the legality of their exclusion in the law courts." In 1913, Macmillan attended the seventh IWSA congress in Budapest, and began to serve the IWSA as vice president, a position she would hold for ten years. Her pacifism was not at all passive—soon after hostilities broke out, she travelled to Flushing, Netherlands on a mission of mercy. By late October 1914 she was providing food for refugees from the fall of Antwerp. Macmillan signed the Open Christmas Letter, a peace-seeking exchange between women of warring nations, in late 1914.

Elsewhere in the world, pacifist women were forced to adjust to the realities of war. After "the guns of August", Rosika Schwimmer, a native of Austria-Hungary working in England but prevented by war from returning home, outlined her idea for an international conference of neutrals to mediate between warring nations. In September 1914, Stritt wrote to Catt in America with "deep personal regret" for the "terrible war". Taking these messages as her inspiration, Catt proposed that, rather than holding a woman suffrage convention in Berlin, an international peace congress of women should meet in The Hague for four days beginning 28 April 1915. which would have supported a delegation of women at The Hague. Because of this, women such as Margaret Ashton, Helena Swanwick and Maude Royden resigned from the NUWSS and made plans to attend at The Hague, some 180 women in total. Macmillan was the only internationalist executive of NUWSS who did not resign; she was away performing relief work. Volunteering near The Hague, Macmillan prepared to join the ex-NUWSS members after the group crossed the English Channel.

Macmillan was photographed at The Hague in 1915 for an article published in The Survey. International Congress of Women in 1915. left to right:1. Lucy Thoumaian – Armenia, 2. Leopoldine Kulka, 3. Laura Hughes – Canada, 4. Rosika Schwimmer – Hungary, 5. Anita Augspurg – Germany, 6. Jane Addams – U.S., 7. Eugenie Hamer, 8. Aletta Jacobs – Netherlands, 9. Chrystal Macmillan – UK, 10. Rosa Genoni – Italy, 11. Anna Kleman – Sweden, 12. Thora Daugaard – Denmark, 13. Louisa Keilhau – Norway At The Hague 28 April to 1 May 1915, a large congress of 1,150 women from North America and Europe gathered to discuss peace proposals. The event was called the International Congress of Women, or the Women's Peace Congress. The 180-strong contingent of British women was greatly reduced by Winston Churchill's purposeful cancellation of British ferry service across the Channel, stranding most of the British activists.

In the same period, she worked to stem the traffic in females used as sexual slaves. To that end, she worked with Alison Roberta Noble Neilans' Association for Moral and Social Hygiene. Macmillan was in favour of women having the right to independent nationality with the same right to retain or change as men. To that end, she wrote a piece entitled "The Nationality of Married Women" that was published twice in Jus Suffragii, once in July 1917 and again with updated statistics in June 1918. However, no new laws were passed about it, and a woman's citizenship remained tied to that of her husband.

The subject came up again in 1930, during the Conference on Codification of International Law, held in The Hague. A strong contingent of women from America joined international women's groups to change the existing nationality laws, but the women were unable to agree on wording. Intense lobbying by women, and a massive parade demonstration, failed to influence the conferees, and the international law continued to hold that a woman's nationality followed her husband's. In response, Macmillan organised an International Committee for Action on the Nationality of Married Women early the next year. Six of the most influential international women's groups sought a broad base of support from working women. Macmillan's stated goal was to delay ratification of the Hague Convention, and to make certain that a woman's nationality would not change without her consent, and that the nationality of a couple's children would not be more influenced by the father's nationality. Her remains were buried with her parents in Corstorphine churchyard in the west of the city. The grave is marked by a substantial granite cross just north of the church.

In her will, she specified bequests to the Open Door International for the Economic Emancipation of the Woman Worker, and to the Association for Moral and Social Hygiene. The prize was founded as an annual grant to benefit female law students scoring the highest in the bar's final examination, and to support societies with which Macmillan was associated. Since 2008, it houses the majority of the School of Social and Political Science.

A Millennial Plaque honouring Macmillan is placed at the King's Buildings, a science campus at the university. The plaque notes that she was a "suffragist, founder of Women's International League for Peace and Freedom", as well as the being the "first woman science graduate of the University" in acknowledgment of her achievement in 1896.

In 1957, the United Nations established independent nationality for each married person, a ruling Macmillan had worked toward without success in her lifetime.