Margaret Forrester

Margaret Forrester (born Margaret McDonald) became a missionary, Scottish church minister and writer. She was one of six women who successfully campaigned for the right of women to be ordained in the Church of Scotland. She supported gay-rights within the church.

Life Forrester had been educated in Edinburgh before she studied theology at New College, Oxford with an ambition to be a minister. In the year before she graduated she was elected to be the University Theological Society's president.

In 1967 six women wrote an open letter to call on the Church of Scotland to allow the ordination of women. The six were Mary Weir, Claude Marie Barbour, Elizabeth Hewat, Mary Levison, Sheila White (later Sheila Spence and Forrester and they wrote an open letter requesting that women should be accepted as ministers in the Church of Scotland. When the approval was given for women to be ordained Isobel sent a telegram to her daughter in law who was then in India telling Margaret of the "sweeping victory" on 22 May 1968. Margaret was ordained.

Forrester spent years in India where she again could not be a minister but she could teach. She came back to Edinburgh in 1978 and she became the minister in Edinburgh's St Michael parish. She would lead there for 22 years.

Forrester became a writer for children.

Private life Forrester, who had been born Margaret McDonald, married Duncan Baillie Forrester, who became a professor of theology at the University of Edinburgh. Her husband died in 2016 aged 83. They had two children: Donald and Catriona.