The letters of Isobel Ramsay were written from 1939 to 1946 and detail her work in the Middle East while serving in the N.A.A.F.I.(British Armed Forces) as part of the war effort. All are addressed to her father. Ramsay left for Cairo in April 1939 and spent four years attending to the soldiers, in the midst of which she met Tony Marks, a fellow N.A.A.F.I. member, and married him in August 1940. They moved to Jerusalem in 1943, where Ramsay joined the Auxialiary Territorial Service (A.T.S) . Ramsay and Marks later had a son in 1944, and returned home to Scotland in June 1946.
Ingrid McClements (Dec 27th 1948 – Dec 5th 2008) was a women’s and racial rights activist who spent her life campaigning for equality in both London and Glasgow. She studied in Leeds before moving to London in 1974, where she worked for Brent Council and was involved in many political events and campaigns, including equal pay, trade union right, setting up the first women’s centre in Brent, was heavily involved in the Working Women’s Charter Campaign. She was also a member of the International Marxist Group. She continued her activism through the 70s and 80s, eventually moving to Glasgow in 1993. There, she worked with the Glasgow Council promoting equality issues and capacity building for voluntary sector organisations. She was also involved in Gara, the Glasgow Anti Racist Alliance, which was established to tackle the social exclusion of young people caused by racism in Glasgow. She continued her activism even after being diagnosed with breast cancer, working tirelessly until her death in December 2008.
Clare Henry was born in Sheffield, Yorkshire in 1947. She worked as an art critic for The herald for 20 years, moved to New York in 2000 and started writing for The Financial Times. Henry was a founding member of Glasgow Print Studio and editor-at-large of State of Art Magazine. She has curated a number of exhibitions and was the commissioner for Scotland at the Venice Biennale in 1990.
Jackie Forster (née Jacqueline Moir Mackenzie; 6 November 1926 – 10 October 1998) was an English lesbian activist, journalist and actress and a prominent figure within the feminist movement. She was a pioneer who helped set up Sappho magazine, that reached out to many isolated lesbian women for over ten years. After Sappho disbanded in 1984, Jackie helped set up the Lesbian Archive and Information Centre (LAIC). It became a unique resource of cataloguing and recording the history of lesbians, specifically within the United Kingdom but includes material from across the world. LAIC’s funds were heavily cut in 1995 and LAIC was moved to Glasgow Women’s Library (GWL). Jackie remained involved in the administration of LAIC until her death in 1998.
Catherine Eschle is a British political scientist, scholar, feminist and researcher who is best known for her research which centres around the concepts of feminism, resistance, intersectionality, social movements, gender-politics, democracy, and International Relations. Since 2001 Eschle has been published in journals such as: Westview press, Security Dialogues International Studies Quarterly, and the European Journal of Politics and Gender, and Political Studies.
Eschle currently holds a position at the University of Strathclyde in Scotland where she is a senior lecturer as well as a position at Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt in Austria as a guest lecturer where she focuses on gender studies.