MARGARET (‘Peggy’) Herbison arrived in the House of Commons in 1945, delighted to be part of Clement Attlee’s Labour landslide but knowing there was so much work to be done. Principally, she knew, in housing.

Severe shortages of labour and materials had resulted in fewer than 15,000 homes being built across the UK that year. Two-thirds of them had been pre-fabricated homes.

On Wednesday, October 17, 1945, Herbison, a coal-miner’s daughter who had latterly taught English and history at Allan Glen’s School in Glasgow, told the Commons in her maiden speech that during the parliamentary recess she had surveyed housing conditions in the mining village of Shotts, where she lived.

“I knew beforehand that our housing conditions were very bad, but it was not until I made the survey that I found that those conditions were as dreadful as they could possibly be,” she said.

“We have people who have been living in a room in somebody else’s house for 14 years—living, eating, sleeping, bearing and rearing children in one room that is not even their own room. These conditions very often lead to unhappiness and to ill-health among the children.

“Until a few weeks ago, in a miners’ row, there was a room and kitchen with no modern conveniences, and a miner and his family lived in the kitchen, and another miner and his family lived in the room. A man, woman and five children lived in the room, the walls of which were continually dripping with damp. At night the mother had to roll out mattresses on the floor for her children to sleep on.

“In many parts of my constituency and, I expect, in many parts of Great Britain”, she added, “there are people living in houses in which the Minister of Health or the Minister of Agriculture would not allow cattle to live. They would say, ‘You must not house your cattle in them; if you do, we won’t be willing to accept the milk for the children’.” It was a forceful maiden speech by the MP for North Lanarkshire.

Herbison would go on to become an Under-Secretary for Scotland under Attlee and, under Harold Wilson in the Sixties, she was Minister of Pensions and Minister for Social Security.

She resigned from the front bench in 1967 on a point of principle, widely believed to be over her failure to force through increases in pensions and child benefits.

In June 1970 readers of the Evening Times voted her their Scotswoman of the Year. She was unable to attend the ceremony as she was giving the Queen a report of her week as Lord High Commissioner to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland.

Like many MPs before and since, Herbison was concerned to improve the lives of people. She was always aware of the special challenges that faced women. “Difficult times always hit women harder than men”, she said in 1951.

“There’s no five-day week for women, and when there’s shopping to do on a wet Saturday – and the children are cross, and then on top of it all the grocer says, ‘Halfpenny up on this’ or ‘Penny up on that’ – well, it sometimes seems almost unbearable, doesn’t it?”

When Herbison died, aged 89, in December 1996, George Robertson, the then Shadow Scottish Secretary, described her as “one of the towering figures of the Labour Party this century’’. To Tony Blair she was “one of the most significant figures in Labour politics this century.’’

It is worth bearing in mind that it was only in 1918 that women were able to stand for Parliament. The first woman to be elected to the Commons was Dame Constance Markievicz, in the general election of that year. As a member of Sinn Fein she did not take her seat (she was, in any event, in Holloway prison when elected); the first female MP to sit in the chamber was Nancy Astor (Viscountess Astor), after a by-election in December 1919.

In the decades that followed, many notable, principled, outspoken Scots women came to represent Scottish seats. It is a lengthy and distinguished list: Winnie Ewing, Margo MacDonald, Margaret Ewing, Helen McElhone, Anna McCurley, Maria Fyfe, Ray Michie, Irene Adams, Helen Liddell and Roseanna Cunningham among them.

Jennie Lee is another. Lochgelly-born, she won a by-election in North Lanark in March 1929 at the age of just 24. She became the youngest MP in the House.

A great crowd greeted her outside the County Buildings in Glasgow, where the count had taken place. Addressing her ecstatic supporters, she said: “I hope you will take this meeting here as a declaration of war on poverty”. She retained her seat at the next general election but was defeated at the next-again one, two years later.

Lee went on to marry the great Labour figure, Aneurin Bevin, and to represent the Cannock seat from 1945 until 1970. She was an energetic Minister for the Arts under Harold Wilson and was one of the co-founders of the Open University. When she died, aged 84, in 1988, Neil Kinnock spoke of her as ‘’a woman of brilliance and vision, a great socialist, who inspired so many”.

Glasgow’s pioneering female MPs have included Agnes Hardie, the first woman to represent a Glasgow seat (Springburn), in 1937. She “deserves to be remembered as a champion of the voiceless”, says Anne McGuire in The Honourable Ladies Volume 1, a collection of profiles of woman MPs.

Labour’s Alice Cullen championed her Gorbals constituency from 1948 until her death in May 1969. “Gorbals has lost a great friend”, lamented one local councillor. “Many, many people in the constituency owe a great deal to Mrs Cullen”. Jean Mann, for her part, was first elected to Parliament in 1945, for Coatbridge, later Coatbridge and Airdrie.

She was, writes Ayesha Hazarika in that same array of profiles, an exceptional politician for many reasons, having been elected at a time when there were very few female politicians.

Mann’s political activities had begun with the Independent Labour Party during the First World War in Rothesay and Glasgow.

She became a Glasgow councillor in 1931 and went on to enjoy a “lively and occasionally controversial career”, which included chairing the housing committee, before becoming entering the Commons.

Her special subjects included housing and town planning, and in Parliament she raised anomalies in widows’ pensions and the care of foster children, amongst other issues.

When she died in March 1964 Harold Wilson described her as “a tremendous fighter, above all on social conditions and housing”.

There have been so many other women MPs. Betty Harvie Anderson, who represented East Renfrewshire for the Conservatives from 1959 to 1979, was the first woman to occupy the Speaker’s Chair.

Dame Judith Hart, MP for first Lanark and then Clydesdale, was a key figure in the Labour administrations of the 1960s and 1970s, and held such posts as Minister for Social Security, Paymaster General and Minister for Overseas Development.

As for Peggy Herbison, she continued to have a high profile after retiring from Parliament.

She never gave up her political work entirely. In 1994 she could be seen pounding the streets of Airdrie with a loudhailer during the by-election for Monklands East following the untimely death of Labour leader John Smith. Typically, perhaps, she even succeeded in upstaging Tony Blair when he spoke in Airdrie after the by-election.