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.Edinburgh and Leith Post Office Directory 1872-73
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.
Women's rights Macmillan was active in the Edinburgh National Society for Women's Suffrage (ENSWS). In 1897, two women's groups in Great Britain united to become the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies (NUWSS), of whom Macmillan, along with Louisa Stevenson, served as executive committee members from Edinburgh. She was known as Chrystal Macmillan—she did not use the name Jessie, her mother's first name and her own birth name.
As graduates, Macmillan and four other women were full members of the General Council of Edinburgh University, but they were denied the opportunity to vote in February 1906 to determine the Member of Parliament who would represent the university seat. Macmillan argued that the wording of the General Council's voting statutes used the word persons throughout, and that she and the other female graduates were indeed persons.Crawford, 2001, p. 363–365. 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." Elmy recommended she contact Charlotte Carmichael Stopes for additional useful arguments. Macmillan brought the case before the University Courts in 1907 but lost, and lost a subsequent appeal. Scottish suffragists banded together to raise the £1000 required to present a case to the House of Lords. They hoped to raise awareness in Great Britain of the absurdity and injustice of denying the vote to educated women such as themselves.
In November 1908, Macmillan appeared in London to argue, as a university graduate, for her right to vote for Scottish University seats. During her speech, the buildings of Parliament were made to suspend the temporary arrangements put in place to prevent women from entering—such arrangements had been instituted after the first militant suffrage agitations. Macmillan was the first woman to argue a case before the bar of the House of Lords.Rappaport, 2001, pp. 413–414. 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". Two days later she continued to plead her case, this time in "complete self-possession", wearing a dark red outfit and hat trimmed with ermine furs. Like other suffragists in Britain and the United States, she based her case on the words person and persons in the voting statutes, arguing that such unspecific words were no basis for the exclusion of one entire sex from voting. The court upheld both lower courts' decisions that the word persons did not include women when referring to privileges granted by the state. She lost the case, but The New York Times reported that she responded to the decision against her with the words "We'll live to fight another day". 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.
A lunch celebrating MacMillan and Simson's presentation to the House of Lords was held in the Edinburgh University Women Students' Union on Saturday 9th January 1909. According to the Scotsman newspaper, it was to acknowledge their "energy, skill and ability" in presenting the appeal. Dr Elsie Inglis presided.
In 1906-1908 Macmillan was the honorary secretary and treasurer of the Women Graduates of the Scottish Universities (Parliamentary Franchise) Committee. She was active in several suffrage organisations: The Scottish University Women's Suffrage Union (SUWSU), the NUWSS (on their executive committee), the Edinburgh branch of the NUWSS (vice-president) 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’Groats 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. In 1914, she authored a 30-page booklet entitled Facts versus fancies on woman suffrage published by the NUWSS.
Peace activism When World War I began, Macmillan looked for peace activism on the part of NUWSS. Instead, she found a majority of British women were in favour of helping the men win the war. 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.Oldfield, 2003, p. 18.