The struggle goes on

That original petition was presented to Parliament by John Stuart Mill in 1867 as an amendment to the Reform Bill. The women went on to form the London and National Society for Women's Suffrage, and Millicent Garrett Fawcett, from whom the society takes its name, was one of the few who lived to see their battle won. At the age of 81, she was in the House of Lords to witness peers passing the Equal Franchise Act, having seen Mills introduce his amendment more than 60 years before.

Women had, of course, been handed something of a sop after their contribution to the First World War. They had suspended their campaigning in 1914 and manned the fort in offices and factories while men fought at the front. As they were pushed back into their domestic roles in 1918, women over 30 were granted the vote. It took that extra decade of intense struggle to achieve the vote on equal terms with men.

Not that it was universally accepted that women could think for themselves and cast that vote sensibly. Janey Buchan, the former Euro MP, was two years old when the Act was passed. Her mother was in service as a young woman, and recalled a fellow servant telling her that her mistress made it very clear that when she went to vote, ''the man for this house is Sir James Horne, Maggie.'' Maggie duly bobbed and said ''Yes, ma'am,'' but ''put my 10 fingers to my nose'' on the safe side of the door.

So where has it all got us in 70 years? It was just one year after the Act that the first woman Cabinet Minister was appointed. The suffrage movement must have been euphoric, yet it was to be 50 years before Britain was to have a woman Prime Minister. Along the way, women were admitted to full degrees at Cambridge University in 1948, were awarded equal pay in the teaching profession in 1953, and in 1964, the Married Women's Property Act gave wives a legal right to half of any savings they made from their housekeeping allowance. The first women peers were admitted to the House of Lords in 1958, and in 1971, women were given equal rights with men to be guardians of their children.

The big milestone was the 1975 Sex Discrimination Act, and also in that year the Equal Opportunities Commission was established, the UN Decade for Women began, Child Benefit was introduced, and there was a number of pension and benefit allowances which made life easier for women. Last year's General Election gave us the highest number of women MPs ever, but 82 out of every 100 MPs are still men, women still earn less than men, and 41% of lone parents, most of whom are women, have a weekly income of less than #100 a week.

Morag Alexander, director of the Equal Opportunities Commission, Scotland, says the 1928 Act was a breakthrough because women suddenly could make the difference between a party winning or losing an election. Despite the range of changes, Alexander still believes that the campaigners for equal voting rights who saw the Act as the start of true equality between men an women would be disappointed that women are still under-represented at Westminster and in council chambers throughout the country, and in the higher echelons of business and public life.

In the 1970s, Elspeth King created an exhibition at Glasgow's People's Palace about the suffragette movement. As a young whizz kid with the

museums department, she felt she was dealing with history. Today she says: ''It makes me see how little we have had for so little time,'' and adds: ''I don't think that many people realise the price at which that vote was bought. If they knew, they might use it better.'' That price, as King reminds us, included imprisonment and force feeding during hunger strikes. ''People died for their cause,'' she says.

In the seventies, King was shocked by some of the school children who came to see her suffrage exhibition

at the People's Palace and said they didn't think that women should have the vote at all. ''There was an incredible misogyny in these very young kids,'' she says. Speaking at the Smith Art Gallery and Museum in Stirling where she is currently staging an exhibition about Victorian Stirling, which charts the social history of women in the 19th century, she agrees that the brave women who fought for equal suffrage during that ''fierce and vicious'' period would be ''deeply disappointed'' in how few women there have been in Parliament until the last election and how little has, in effect, been achieved. She blames that lack of progress on the fact that women are not in charge of their own history. ''The greatest sorrow is that the links keep getting broken and women are not told their own history,'' she claims. In the 1840s and 1860s, women stood up on platforms to fight for their rights. Yet

in the 1870s, the communist MP Willie Gallagher spoke about the novelty of hearing a woman speak in public when women were first elected to school boards in Paisley.

King says: ''When I was a young woman in the 1960s, we all thought we were in the first women's movement. We keep re-inventing fire and rain, and that is the thing I find the most negative,'' she says. ''The women of the suffrage movement would have envisaged it all coming a lot faster.''

King points out that in a poem called The Dream, written around 1875 and featured in the book Radical Renfrew, edited by Tom Leonard, Marion Bernstein envisaged that by the end of the 19th century, women's rights would be established. Bernstein saw ''female chiefs in the Cabinet,/(Much better than males I'm sure!)/ And the Commons were three-parts feminine,/ While the Lords were seen no more.'' Her dream also pictured female influence bring an end to war and domestic violence.

At the end of the 20th century, and 70 years after the Equal Franchise Act, the Bernstein ''dream'' still has far to go, but as Morag Alexander says: ''There are high expectations not just that women will be better represented among the ranks of MSPs, but that equal opportunities, as one of the four key principles on which the Scottish Parliament will be based, will be mainstreamed into Scottish legislation and life in the future.''