Sarah Mair

Dame Sarah Elizabeth Siddons Mair, DBE (1846–1941) was a Scottish campaigner for women's education and women's suffrage, active in the Edinburgh Association for the University Education of Women and the Ladies' Edinburgh Debating Society, which she founded before she was 20.

Born into a well-to-do family in Edinburgh, a great-granddaughter of the actress Sarah Siddons, Mair started the Edinburgh Essay Society, soon renamed the Ladies' Edinburgh Debating Society when she was nineteen.

Mair was president of the society for 70 years. The society met in the spacious Mair family home in the New Town and offered Edinburgh women of a certain background the chance to discuss social questions while learning public speaking and debating skills. They published the Ladies' Edinburgh Magazine, called The Attempt until 1876, which linked them with readers across the country. Charlotte Yonge contributed, and Mair reviewed Josephine Butler's essay collection Women's Work and Women's Culture.

This society and its headquarters in the Mair dining-room were the focus of much effort to promote women's rights and education, spearheaded by women from professional, usually prosperous families. Louisa and Flora Stevenson were early members, as were Louisa Lumsden, founder of St Leonards School in St Andrews, and Charlotte Carmichael, mother of Marie Stopes.

The society debated the question of women's suffrage at intervals, with Mair a lifelong supporter of votes for women. In 1866 and 1872 Sarah Mair found that she and her fellow-suffragists were in the minority, but from 1884 onwards motions in favour of women's suffrage were carried by increasing majorities. Mair belonged to the Edinburgh National Society for Women's Suffrage which had been established in 1867 as the first Scottish society campaigning for votes for women and which sent speakers all over Scotland. Later she became president of the society, and then president of the Scottish Federation of Women's Suffrage Societies. She was often able to mediate between groups with different approaches to campaigning for the vote. Once women over 30 were enfranchised in 1918 she led the Suffrage Society into a new phase as the Society for Equal Citizenship.

...
Wikipedia