DEAD WOMEN COUNT

She counts murdered women. Not women 

wiped out in warzones by bullets and bombs, 

nor the 63 million missing in India - Rita Banerji 

keeps count of them. Nor is she counting 

the Korean Comfort Women, piecing

together what’s left of their bones 

from the fire pits where they perished.  Though 

that too needs done. No, she is counting close 

to home. But not the victims of wild-eyed strangers 

they drilled us to evade: stay with your pals when 

you leave the pub, don’t walk down darkened lanes, 

don’t take shortcuts through woods alone, don’t 

get into vans, don’t wear too short skirts, too 

high heels, low-cut tops, don’t end up a headline, 

a corpse a break-a-mother’s-heart statistic 

in a ditch. Though we miss them too. Every one. 

She counts women, girlfriends, wives, killed with 

shotguns, ropes, with septic tanks and fists, 

with poison, acid, cricket bats and knives, each 

murdered by a man who said he loved her once; a 

boyfriend, husband, partner, ex; a man she’d trusted 

in her heart, her home. A man who thought her life 

no longer counts. But she is counting, every week, 

every one. And we are counting with her.

                                        Magi Gibson

The two images are of an artwork graphic designer Vahit Tuna from Turkey. 

Vahit hung a pair of women's shoes on a building in Istanbul for every woman killed in Turkey by their husband in 2018.

Women in the UK are more likely to be raped, beaten and/or murdered by men they know than by a stranger. One in four women will experience domestic violence.


Two women a week will be killed by a partner or ex-partner.

40% of cases feature over-killing. That is, being way, way more violent than he had to be if he'd simply wanted to "kill" her.


Yet to a great extent this domestic violence, this femicide, has become so normalised that we don't even recognise it as a major problem.

In fact, our news headlines often go out of their way to make up excuses for perpetrators. "Good fathers" snap and kill their "cheating" wives. "Lovesick" men kill the women they adore. As if the woman is responsible for his - an adult male's actions.

Time and again we are invited to feel sympathy for the man, who, we're told, now faces a future in ruins...  while the woman, no longer there, is already fading from view.

Which is why it is so important that the murders of these women are recorded - that we honour the memory of each individual woman, as well as record the build up of statistics.

Murdered women 2018 - Karen Ingala Smith

In the UK Jean Hatchett does sponsored bike rides every week for women killed by men they know.  But Jean doesn't just ride her bike, she also publishes something about the woman she's riding for, enabling the public to see her - and remember her as a fully rounded person in her own right, with friends and family who are grieving. Not just a victim whose last moments are being argued about in a court case, as if she's already become the female corpse we see far too often kicking off the story for detective series and thrillers, whether books or films. 

All part of the horrendous normalisation of male violence towards women in our society. As if by the end of the film/book we really do believe it's all okay, the world is steady on its axis once more because the killer is behind bars, justice has been meted out, and our tired and exhausted cop has done a good job and deserves that weary glass of whisky.

BUT WHAT ABOUT THE WOMAN? THE ONE THE STORY SHOULD REALLY BE ABOUT?

AND THE ONE AFTER THAT.

AND THE ONE AFTER THAT.

Karen Ingala Smith has been keeping count of all women murdered in the UK since 2013 with her Counting Dead Women campaign. And again, Karen, who also runs a women's refuge in the north of England, understands the importance of restoring dignity to women who so often are only referred to on the press in such dismissive terms. She also collaborated on The Femicide Census with Women's Aid.

When Karen recorded her 1000th murder she wrote a moving piece detailing why she kept going. 


"I continued because I cannot bring myself to say that the next woman killed isn’t important. I continue because a focus on intimate partner homicides at the exclusion of other killings disguises and diminishes the true rate of men’s fatal violence against women. I continue because the killing of women by their current and former partners is so normalised that it is not recognised as a national emergency[....]I continue because the slaying of women by men, although it has happened at least 1,000 times in seven years, continues to be described by the police and reported in the media as an ‘isolated incident.’[...] I continue because I believe a different world is possible, but it is only by consciously committing to making changes that look at the multitude of factors that support and enable men’s violence against women, that will give us a hope in hell of getting there."

Inspired by Jean and Karen, a woman called Charlie started up another Dead Women Count in New Zealand. While these websites make for grim reading, they really do drive home just how normalised violence against women is in what we like to think of as our civilised western society. A society where, the narrative runs, women have equal rights, are fully protected under law, and are treated with respect.

And in the States there is Women Count USA, also known as the United States Femicide Database.  Nurse, Dawn Wilcox, started it after she saw the public outcry over the killings of two zoo animals, Cecil the Lion and Harambe the Gorilla.  She was taken aback that the public did not get so exercised over the killings of women in their own cities and hometowns. Killings which we are so inured to - why even our country and western songs contain them, complete with heartbroken lovers/husbands, such as Johnny Cash's song, Banks of the Ohio - we seem to think they are an inevitable part of everyday life.  IF YOU ARE BORN FEMALE.

Confession here. I've been singing/humming along, to the Banks of the Ohio for years not fully comprehending it was about a man brutally murdering his lover because she refuses to marry him and he suspects she's been 'untrue'. Same old, same old. And how as girls and women - and as men - we internalise this without realising. And it's not just the old songs. Eminem kept up the tradition when he rapped the pregnant girlfriend in the car trunk suicide song even though it was later censored. And hip-hop has its own streak of "ride and die" rhymes normalising/romanticising/numbing young minds to the horrendous misogyny that simultaneously reflects and shapes a culture that harms us all - but most especially women and girls.

The Women Count USA project aims not only to collect statistics on every woman and girl killed by a male, but Wilcox also works with her team of volunteers to track down photographs and details about each individual woman and girl, so they are not only recording them as murders, but as very real people. 

The statistics are chilling. In 2018, at least 1600 women and girls killed.

One of the issues in the USA is that unlike in some Latin American countries they do not have a clear definition of femicide - the killing specifically of a woman or girl by a male. This makes it much more difficult to present a clear picture of the true and horrifying extent of the problem. 

Statistics and terminology really do matter so we get a clear picture of who is killed and who is killing. 

Now, in whose interests would obfuscation be? Certainly not in those of women and girls. And in Canada Metis artist Jaime Black knows exactly who she wants to remember with The Red Dress Project, which she calls an aesthetic response to the more than 1000 missing and murdered aboriginal women in Canada. With the donated red dresses she hangs in unusual and unexpected places she honours these women - and shocks a public grown all too complacent and content to turn a blind eye. 
Isn't it amazing that in different countries around the world women are volunteering to do this work, collecting names and statistics? Highlighting the extent of the problem. Commemorating. Refusing to accept that routine killing of women by men - so often as punishment/control/revenge - should be normalised to the extent we no longer as society really notice just how bad it is.
As Dawn Wilcox says, "Femicide, it's the end of the road, where all other abuses of women sort of lead."

Dead women count. We count dead women. And we are not going to stop. Until the killing stops. 

From Women Count USA website

If you, or someone you know is at risk, please reach out. 

Domestic Abuse Helpline (Scotland) 0800 027 1234 (24 hour service)

Victim Support Scotland Phone: 0800 160 1985 (Monday to Friday, 8am to 8pm)

With thanks to Poets React (The Poets' Republic) on Facebook and BellaCaledonia where the poem Dead Women Count was first published September 2019.

How to Silence a Woman Writer #1 "Dirt, spit and poetry"

How to Silence a Woman Writer #1 "Dirt, spit and poetry"

Imagine a woman who wanted to be a writer, but didn't dare write when her husband was around.
Too far-fetched? Not in this day and age? Well, I know one that happened to. Here in Scotland. Not that she got much of a chance to write anyway, with a houseful of kids. So she'd wait till the wee ones were in bed. Then she'd wait till her man was asleep, creep downstairs, quietly shutting all the doors. Holed up in the living room she'd tap out stories on a small portable typewriter. But typewriters are noisy, clattery buggers. Even wee portable ones. So she'd balance it on a pillow on her knee to stifle the clickety-clack of the keys. For a while it worked. She started to get her stories published in magazines. Then he copped on to her infidelity. Burst in one night, caught her red-handed. In a rage he battered the typewriter off the walls. Then he battered her. The typewriter was broken beyond repair. But the writer wasn't. She eventually escaped the husband - not without a lot of difficulty - saved for a new typewriter and now has poetry collections, novels and prizes to her name.

Then there's Salma. Salma had the misfortune of being born a girl in India. Her father wasn't interested in another daughter, so she was given away to be looked after by a cousin in another village. That cousin was five years old. When Salma herself turned five she was sent back to her parents so she could go to school. But at 13 she started to menstruate, and was taken out of education.  Her fate as a woman was simply to be a wife. And until she accepted a husband she would be confined to the family house. She steadfastly refused to be wed. So she was kept locked in. Until her early 20s when her parents tricked her into a forced marriage.

Life as a married woman didn't bring freedom though. In her new home she was once more kept in confinement by her in-laws. But through 25 years of what was essentially house arrest she was allowed to read, and had access to books from the local library. So she read widely. Dostoevsky. Tolstoy. Camus. Her mind travelled and grew, and soon she started to write poetry. Secretly. On any scraps of paper she could find. The backs of old calendars. On discarded newspapers. Sometimes she got her hands on notebooks. And when her husband found the notebooks and scraps she'd squirrelled away, what did he do? He ripped them up. He destroyed them. So Salma started over again. Infuriated, he threatened her. He would beat her, he said. But she continued to write. He'd throw acid in her face while she slept, he said.

Salma is beautiful. A serene, calm presence. Perhaps, like the American poet Audre Lorde she had reached that point Audre reached when she wrote her famous essay, The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action. In it Audre wrote, "Your silence will not protect you." Six words I find infinitely powerful. (EDITED LATER: I've just discovered the quote should be attributed to Adrienne Rich in 1976.) The poet may as well use her voice, Lorde explains, for the injustices will continue whether or not she speaks out. Salma was not going to be silenced.

Magi with Salma
Glasgow Women's Library 2014

When confronted with the threat of acid, she slept with her baby hugged close to her face, trusting that her husband would not assault her with the child there. It worked. And she kept writing. Her mother smuggled her poems out in the folds of saris being taken to the laundry, and on instructions from Salma, sent them to a literary magazine. The editor recognised her extraordinary voice, the poems were published, and if you'd like to know how Salma's story unfolded, and how she eventually helped change the lives of other Tamil girls and women, listen to this podcast I made after you've finished reading the blog. The recording I made talking about Salma's story for the Dangerous Women project. There is also a documentary about Salma, made by Kim Longinotto.

Both these stories are true.

Both are about living women poets whose voices would have been silenced but for their extraordinary bravery and tenacity.

The first took place a few decades ago in Scotland. The second from not very long ago in India.

In writing groups I've tutored I've often worked with women whose husbands or partners were opposed to, or 'not keen' on, them writing. Of course, writing can be threatening for a partner, regardless of whether it's the man or woman taking it up. There can be fear of unwanted exposure, of revelations about private lives and emotions, fear of betrayals. Fear that the partner might grow and change through writing,  a very real and grounded fear, because they often do.

And Salma did write of the intimacies of her life as a Tamil woman living in an arranged marriage. Sensitively, brutally, beautifully.

A Midnight Tale

These nights
following the children’s birth
you seek, dissatisfied,
within the nakedness you know so well,

my once unblemished beauty.
You are much repelled,
you say,
by a thickened body
and a belly crisscrossed with birthmarks;
my body, though, is unchanging
you say
today, hereafter and forevermore.

My voice, deep-buried
in the valley of silence,
mutters to itself:

True indeed,
your body is not like mine:
it proclaims itself,
it stands manifest.

Before this too,
your children, perhaps, were born
in many places, to many others;
you may be proud
you bear no traces of their birth.

And what must I do?
These birthmarks cannot be
repaired, any more than my own decline—
this body isn’t paper
to cut and paste together, or restore.

Nature has been
more perfidious to me
than even you;
but from you began
the first stage of my downfall.

More bizarre
than the early hours of night
is the hour past midnight
when dreams teem.

It is now, at this midnight hour
the tiger which sat quietly
within the picture on the wall
takes its place at my head
and stares
and stares.

(Translated by Lakshmi Holmstrom)

It is undeniable - and some would say almost inevitable - that power imbalance will exist within a marriage or, indeed, any relationship. It is also undeniable that historically within marriage that imbalance has almost always been in favour of the man. As Friedrich Engels wrote in Origins of Family, Private Property and the State in 1884:

"In an old unpublished manuscript, written by Marx and myself in 1846, I find the words: “The first division of labor is that between man and woman for the propagation of children.” And today I can add: The first class opposition that appears in history coincides with the development of the antagonism between man and woman in monogamous marriage, and the first class oppression coincides with that of the female sex by the male."

So it should not surprise us that a writing woman might be seen as a threat to a marriage, and that her husband, even in the early twenty-first century might try to block her development. Whoever has the upper hand in a power relationship will inevitably favour the status quo. Change presents threat.

And although middle and upper middle class women writers like Virginia Woolf and Charlotte Perkins Gilman (author of amongst many other feminist tracts, the famous short story, The Yellow Wallpaper in 1892) did meet with adversity as writers in the masculine literary world of their era, I would argue that working class women today often feel most sharply the dark undertow of deep-rooted oppressive attitudes. After all, their voices are not only outside the establishment like the working class voices in the writing of, for example, James Kelman and Tom Leonard, but they're also, in that other sub-class, the one that makes up 50% of the population. Women.

Edinburgh poet Sandie Craigie (1963 - 2005), whose unique voice is sorely missed in the Scottish poetry world, captured this double oppression in this prose poem.

A Good Man by Sandie Craigie
  

Gie him aes due, never laid a finger oan mi, never lifted his hand. When he met me ah wiz shy an blushin an aw that shit, ah wiz sixteen. Ah wizny a fuckin wimp tho, an ah wizny inti marij or that ken, or huvin things, or styin poot – anywhere. Ah sez "ivry man wants ti make yi his fuckin mother" he sez that's what he liked aboot mi, ah wiz difrint. Blusht like a virgin, tawkt like a skeemy, thoat like a fuckin hippy. Twelve years oan am mairryd wi a bairn, nae munny an the three piece suite. An him sayin how he quite fancyz ma best mate, sez mibby we should huv wan ae they open relationships.
            Ah gret fir three dayz. Then wan night ah askt him how the fuck he kent ah wizny awready huvin wan ae they open hings. He sed, YOU, youv no gote the GALL, no gote the NERVE ti stand nakid in front ae any man, what's fir tea. Then he undressed mi. Gie him his due tho, never layed a finger oan mi, never lifted his hand. Never hud ti.

Of course, as individual writers we can choose to get out of oppressive relationships, to stay out of them, or not get into them in the first place. But we are still stuck with the country we live in. And Scotland has got 'previous' on silencing its women.

As much as Scottish women like to think they have a 'guid Scots tongue in thur heids' that can give as good as it gets, as much as we like to think no one would be able to silence us, the reality is that we are carrying the weight of centuries of being silenced, of our voices and opinions, both as women and for many of us, as working class people, of being undervalued and deemed as not worthy of being heard, as we take up our pens and open our mouths. To be both working class and female, is to inherit a double whammy.

Our museums have a fine array of so-called Scold's Bridles, also known as Witch's Bridles, branks and jougs. 'Brank', according to my dictionary, comes from: ‘a pillory or bit for a horse’ and Dutch prang  ‘a fetter’; also with late Middle English barnacle(s), denoting a powerful bit for restraining a horse. 

Brank or witch's bridle. Kelvingrove Museum. Glasgow

Woman - horse - nag. The association is all too clear.

The first reference in writing to a scold's bridle is in 1653 in the Lanark Borough Records. Imagine the disgrace of it! To be shamed in your village as a woman who talks too much. Your chin immobilised. A spike pushing up under your tongue. Your head literally clamped in iron. Unable to eat or drink. Historically, children should be seen and not heard, we all know, and mouthy women should be brutally disgraced.

In my group work with women I hear them constantly self-disciplining, apologising for talking too much. Self-chastising. If this is explored as a theme in creative writing, stories and poems emerge of being reined in as a child, punished at school, given lines, put outside the door.  The chatterbox child. I've tutored mixed groups, all-male groups and all-female groups. I've not done scientific data collecting, but this seems to be a predominantly female experience. I do have a male neighbour, who has OCD, who apologises for talking too much. But in all my years of teaching and tutoring I've come across very few men who are apologetic for talking too much. But women? They apologise constantly. So maybe that's why sixteenth century law-keepers came up with the brand and the bridle? Maybe women are just predisposed to letting those tongues wag wag wag?

Scottish bridles - see the spikes!

Yet evidence abounds that boys speak much more than girls in school, and that this behaviour is the result of early social conditioning. "Boys talk nine times more than girls in the classroom—and are encouraged to do so—according to findings from a new language dynamics study." There are many other studies. Here's another recent study suggesting girls are silenced by 'rowdy' boys in the classroom.

Historically in Scotland, a woman with too much to say not only met with social disapproval in life, but in the Western Isles, could be buried after death face down to halt her tongue as Kathleen Jamie's beautiful and haunting poem describes.

MEADOWSWEET

Tradition suggests that certain of the Gaelic women poets were buried face down.

So they buried her, and turned home,
a drab psalm
hanging about them like haar,

not knowing the liquid
trickling from her lips
would seek its way down,

and that caught in her slowly
unravelling plait of grey hair
were summer seeds:

meadowsweet, bastard balm,
tokens of honesty, already
beginning their crawl

toward light, so showing her,
when the time came,
how to dig herself out —

to surface and greet them,
mouth young, and full again
of dirt, and spit, and poetry.

Not so easy to silence a woman, then.

The American poet, Adrienne Rich, in her essay, Arts of the Possible said, “Every real poem begins in the breaking of a silence, and the first question we may ask of any poem is, What kind of voice is breaking silence, and what kind of silence is being broken?” For women and others who've been historically marginalised; the disempowered, the colonised, Rich points out that “the impulse to create begins – often terribly and fearfully in a tunnel of silence.”
For some women I've known that's meant creeping downstairs in the middle of the night to type. Or hiding poems in the folds of a sari to have them smuggled out. Or, indeed, coming along with excitement and trepidation to an all-women writing group.

For many women in today's society you may think there's no struggle at all, but it's worth remembering just how recent these gains and breakthroughs are, and just how equally easy it might be to lose them again. It's also worth remembering how important poetry is. It may be romantic, but it's also political, and it can be life-changing and culture-changing. So women's voices in poetry are not only important, they are absolutely necessary.

So we must heed the words of Jamie's poem, and no matter how beaten down we sometimes feel, we must keep our mouths "young, and full again/ of dirt, and spit, and poetry." For without our women's poems, we only hear half the story, only hear half the song. We only dream half the future.

The Death of the Pits

A day to both mourn and celebrate.

I grew up in a mining town. My grandfather hated going down the pits so much he swore he'd do anything to save his sons from the same fate. In the end my dad's older brother became a miner, and lost his hearing and his lungs to the job.
My dad went up the way instead, and became a slater. At least he had the skies to look at, even if he often got soaked and frozen.

The following poems are from my third collection, Graffiti in Red Lipstick, and are dedicated to my grandfather, and my great-grandfather who was also a miner. I never met my grandfather. He died the year I was born. Both he and my uncle loved their gardens more than anything.


Miners' Daughters

Our hair is honey blond and styled,

our clothes are well-made, warm,

and on our fingers gold rings shine.

But in the memory of our bones

rickets lurks like an ache

and our lungs still recall

the hacking coughs 

of grandfathers we never met.

At night in the dark pit of our dreams

we are down on our knees

tunneling, chipping

at the hard black face of the future

and even as we sit, well-groomed,

sipping cocktails in this posh hotel

there is a trace of coal dust

beneath our polished fingernails.

black heat - a sequence

pit wheel

slowly turning

black-spoked giant

from the mineshaft of memory

you draw a smiling child

waiting at the pit-head gate

miner

he did not have a garden

just a plot, to grow a functional crop

carrots, leeks, potatoes

but always he kept a corner

where he cultivated flowers

to feed his soul

after a twelve hour shift

of eating into darkness

lousing time

bursting from the cage

black creatures

frightening

until they smiled

white teeth human

the miners’ perk

coal castles dumped

for dirty wee rascals

to be kings on

coal

burning in the grate

wind howling in the lum

we saw castles, dungeons

fire-breathing dragons

our parents saw money

going up in smoke

and worried lest winter

last too long

bings

once they peaked like witches’ hats

brooding, dark, they shadowed us

as we skipped to park and school

but today?

shrunken sugar loaf plateaux

sparkling white with last night’s snow

Scottish Independence - a question of self-respect

When I was asked to write an essay on the question of Scottish independence for the Scott Hames' collection, Un-stated, I was flummoxed. Did I have a particular view? If so, what was it? In the end the writing of the essay became a voyage of discovery. It turned out that I did indeed have a view, and a strong one at that. So here's the essay.


 We all know one.

The woman who stays in a marriage with a husband she doesn't love or respect. In fact, she doesn't even like him. And we all wonder why she doesn't leave. Not least because she moans about him constantly; how he over-rules her, even as he insists that her opinion counts. How he belittles her, but oh-so-affectionately; can't she take a bit of gentle ribbing? How he says they're in a marriage of equals, but as he's the bigger earner it's only natural that he gets a bigger say in how they live, what they spend their money on. (And anyway, why would she want to worry herself with those things when he can take care of them for her?)

We look at this woman. She has all the trappings of someone who's doing well; stylish haircut, fashionable clothes, gold jewellery. She has her own car, a couple of credit cards, two foreign holidays a year. But the outer trappings count for nothing. Underneath she is stunted. Like a plant growing in the wrong conditions.

You go out for drinks with her sometimes. After the third drink she reminisces about what she was like before; bright, intelligent, independent-minded. She had potential. She had dreams. After the fourth drink she becmes animated about what she could have - should have - been.

Everything this woman says and does reveals one thing. One thing that over-rides all her superficial affluence: her spouse's control over how she lives affects her sense of self worth, threatens to subsume her very identity. (Of course, from time to time, he allows her little victories. He likes having a 'kept' wife. It feeds his sense of being a Big Man.)

As time goes on she mythologises her past more and more, and develops a self-indulgent bitterness as she gripes about how everything that goes wrong is HIS fault. You look at her with some sadness. You see what she cannot. No matter how materially comfortable her life is, as long as she stays in this union of unequals, she will never realise her own unique potential.

So why doesn't she leave?

FEAR.

Fear of what? Of failure? Of taking full responsibility for herself? Of being the architect of her own future? Of not having someone else to blame when things go wrong?

To be fair, this fear has not grown and developed totally by chance. It's the result of years and years of being told (mostly by him, and he can be very persuasive) that she's not strong enough to cope on her own. In Harlot Red, a short story I wrote at the time of devolution, the woman tells her partner she's being stifled by their relationship, she needs to leave. As she stands in the doorway with her packed suitcases, he says: "You can't be serious. You'll be back in a fortnight. You'll not be happy on your own. Who's going to look after the bills? Who's going to fix the heating if it breaks down? Who's going to get up in the middle of the night if you hear a strange noise? You're fooling yourself. You need me." Does he really believe she needs him? Or is he psychologically manipulating her so that she is too scared to go it alone?

How many women have had these words said to them over the years?

 In the feminist classic short story, 'The Yellow Wallpaper', written by Charlotte Gilman Perkins more than a century ago, the husband – a physician in this case, presented not as a mysogynistic monster, but as a caring and moral man – diagnoses his wife with mental illness when she wants to grow and develop by writing and painting. He needs her to stay as she is, dependent and weakened, so that his control of her, necessary to his sense of being dominant, is not threatened.

 So what has all this to do with Scotland? It might seem strange to anthropormophise a country so often symbolised by whisky-swilling, pugnacious, football-playing, hairy, head-butting hardmen as a woman – and a weak woman at that. But is that what the once fierce and feisty Scotland is turning into? A scared, wee, moanin-faced woman trapped in an unequal marriage. (What's more, a polygamous marriage. Scotland is just one of England's wee wives.) No wonder the bell-ringer at St Giles Cathedral reputedly played 'Why should I be so sad on my wedding day', and civil unrest broke out in many parts of Scotland when the Act of Union was signed.

 Right from that first wedding night Scotland was never going to be an equal partner. It could even be claimed it was a forced marriage; by all accounts it was not the choice of the people. It was certainly a marriage of financial convenience - if not necessity - and yes, Scotland may well have benefitted in some ways over the past three centuries. But perhaps it's time for Scotland to get off her knees, stop snivelling, and prove that she's got the balls to determine her own future – like the lineage of feisty Scotswomen I hail from, who would have lived on bread and water before they'd compromise their beliefs or kow-tow to anyone.

 For amazingly, even three centuries of grudging subordination and barely disguised colonisation have not eradicated Scotland's sense that she DOES have her own distinct identity.

 As a child I was never in any doubt that I was Scottish. Oh, I was told that I was British too, but that never spoke to my heart. But my Scottishness? That flowed through my veins as strongly as the bagpipe music my father occasionally played on winter nights.

 In our wonderful, wee council house, I was taught to be proud of Scottish education. I attended one of the first comprehensive schools in the country. I learned that to be Scottish meant to be part of a co-operative, caring community; to have a socialist mindset where hard work with either your hands or your brain was honorable and should be rewarded with decent wages; that everyone should have free healthcare and decent living conditions; that tolerance and acceptance of difference was a good thing. I loved the lyrics of the Burns' song, A Man's A Man For A' That, and (despite being a girl) thought it was speaking directly to me and epitomised the best of what being Scottish meant.

 But that is my sense of Scottishness. What is happening to our collective sense of Scottishness now, in the twenty-first century? Like that woman we both know, does today's Scotland spend too much time harking back to an unfulfilled past, rather than planning for a fulfilled future? A Scotland that loves nothing more than greetin into its whisky glass about how it hates the bastard English? Is that the Scotland we have today? A nation happy to package up and sell its sense of self in couthy tartan shortbread tins and tartan tammies and faux-fur sporrans? To peddle a plastic-heather-kitsch-and-keech culture while its young people develop an alarming sense of victimhood, and despite (apparently) better education than ever before, confuse nationalism - with all its negative connotations of nasty and nazi - with national pride? If we want to be treated as a nation inside or oustide the union our sense of who we collectively are has to be more than a snazzy collection of designer kilts; an absentee, mysogynistic film star; and a horde of Saltire-draped, ginger-wigged football fans famous for being good-natured losers.

 Scotland will continue to have a crisis of identity until she stands on her own two feet and faces down the demons – many of them imaginary as demons so often are – stationed between her and her future. A future which could offer so much; not least self-respect; the opportunity to close the ever-widening gap between rich and poor; and a true democracy unfettered by inherited privilege and historically-evolved undemocratic structures.

 But will twenty first century Scotland have the guts? Remember that unfulfilled woman we all know?

One day you get fed up with her constant moaning about her husband, so you challenge her.
'Why don't you leave him?' you ask. 'Strike out on your own. Be who you want to be.'
 She stares into the bottom of her whisky glass as if she might find the answer there.
'It's complicated,' she sighs. 'We've been together a long time. I wouldn't know where to start.'
 'It's not that complicated,' you answer. 'Scientists decoded the human genome. Now that was complicated.'
 'I might end up with less than I've got now,' she mutters.
 'There are different ways of having less,' you say.
 She doesn't answer. Just goes up to the bar and orders more drinks. 'Make mine a double,' she says to the barman.

 Then there was the woman in the story, Harlot Red. She left despite her partner's infantilisation of her and his fear-mongering. She's her own woman now, and a dab-hand at fixing the heating. Her husband, meanwhile, has been set free to forge a new and different sense of self too.

 And the woman in The Yellow Wallpaper? Unable to grow and develop her creativity in a positive way, she descends into madness, her unused energies turning inwards. Soon she loses all sense of who she is and spends her days crawling round the attic room, a pitiful, twisted version of the woman she could have been.

 Of course, Harlot Red is a contemporary story. The Yellow Wallpaper was written over a century ago. Women – and nations, even small ones – have much more ability to be independent these days. If that's what they really want.