By Alison Rowat
SHE has been called “the most dangerous woman in Britain”, but now Nicola Sturgeon has learned to embrace the title, a new collection of essays reveals.
Writing in Dangerous Women: Fifty reflections on women, power and identity, Scotland’s First Minister recalls how the Sun and Daily Mail labelled her as such during the 2015 General Election.
“Although the term was meant to give pause to those who might have been considering voting for the SNP, it could also be viewed as yet another pejorative term used to minimise women’s achievements,” she writes.
“Terms like ‘dangerous’ can belittle the positions of women in power by implying that we should be feared.”
But when she considered other women who had been branded dangerous – including Angela Merkel, then Chancellor of Germany, and Shami Chakrabarti, former director of Liberty, now a Labour peer – she decided to take “great pride” in the description.
“To be counted among those women felt like a validation of my challenge to the status quo.”
The Dangerous Women Project at the University of Edinburgh was set up in 2016. Over the years it has asked women around the world to write essays on what the term “dangerous” means to them. Other contributors to the collection, published today by Unbound, include playwright Jo Clifford and award-winning novelist Irenosen Okojie.
Ms Sturgeon names Margo MacDonald and Winnie Ewing as the role models who inspired her to go into politics and become her party’s leader.
“I am sure they too were seen as threatening to the political establishment of the day.”
Of Margo MacDonald’s landmark victory in the Glasgow Govan by-election of 1973, the First Minister writes: “She faced blatant sexism and harassment, as all women MPs suffered at the time, and dealt with this in her own inimitable way.”
Promising to lend her support to “the next generation of ‘dangerous’ women’ in Scotland, the First Minister concludes: “I want young girls to know that they should always aspire to be their best and challenge the status quo. When we are ‘dangerous’ we can change the world and our place in it.”
During the same 2015 campaign, then Mail columnist Piers Morgan upped the ante to call Ms Sturgeon “the world’s most dangerous woman” because she opposed the renewal of the Trident nuclear weapons system.
“This diminutive but sharp-witted woman has rampaged through the UK election campaign like a mini-Godzilla,” he complained.
The Sun mocked up a picture of her as pop star Miley Cyrus, clad in a tartan bikini and swinging on a wrecking ball, a stunt Ms Sturgeon condemned as sexist.
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