Esther Breitenbach

Since 2011,  Dr Esther Breitenbach (she/her) has been Honorary Fellow in the School of History, Classics and Archaeology, where she previously held teaching and research posts. Prior to that she taught and researched in Social Policy, and also held secondments to the Scottish Executive Equality Unit (1998-2001) and the UK Women and Equality Unit (2001-2003). She holds an MA from the University of Dundee (1974) and PhD from the University of Edinburgh (2005). She has had a long standing involvement with Women’s History Scotland, of which she was a founder member. She contributed to an an online learning resource about the women’s suffrage movement in Scotland, which was launched in 2018 to commemorate the centenary of women’s partial enfranchisement in 1918. Esther is a member of the Research Advisory Group for ‘Gender Equalities at Work: an Interdisciplinary History of 50 years of Legislation’.

Her research interests are:

• women and politics in Scotland
• 19th and 20th century Scottish women’s history
• Scotland and the British empire

She has written widely on gender, politics and social policy themes, and Scottish women’s history. In recent years she has focused on the impact of participation in the British empire on Scottish civil society.

Her recent publications include:

• ‘Scottish Women and Political Representation in the UK and Scottish Parliaments (1918–2020)’, Open Library of Humanities, 6(2): 14 (2020).  DOI: https://doi.org/10.16995/olh.579 
• ‘Edinburgh Suffragists: Exercising The Franchise at Local Level’, Book of the Old Edinburgh Club: New Series Vol 15 (2019), pp. 63-80.
• ‘Pro-Empire Sentiment in Twentieth-Century Scotland before Decolonisation’, in Stephanie Barczewski and Martin Farr (eds), The MacKenzie Moment and Imperial History (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), pp. 237-260.
• 'The making of a missionary icon: Mary Slessor as "Heroine of Empire"', Journal of Scottish Historical Studies, 37:2 (2017), pp. 177-197.  https://doi.org/10.3366/jshs.2017.0219
• 'In 2021, the Scottish Magazines Project at Stirling University recorded a podcast interview about her involvement with Scottish feminist magazines [link]