Marion Kirkland Reid


Marion Kirkland Reid was an influential Scottish feminist writer, notable for her A Plea for Woman which was first published in 1843 in Edinburgh by William Tait, then published in the United States in 1847, 1848, 1851, and 1852 as Woman, her Education and Influence under the name of Mrs. Hugo Reid. She was a member of the Ladies National Association for the Repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts.

Biography

Her father, James Kirkland, was a merchant in Glasgow. Her mother was called Janet Finlay.
Kirkland married Hugo Reid in 1839. Reid was a progressive educationalist from Edinburgh. After Hugo died in 1872, she lived with her only daughter in Hammersmith.
During an event in London during the month of June 1840, Kirkland witnessed some American woman delegates were unable to take part in the World Anti-Slavery Convention. There was a large debate after which Kirkland met the leader of the American woman delegates, Lucretia Mott. This event, and an article on "Women's rights and duties" in the Edinburgh Review of 1841, may have inspired Kirkland's book A Plea for Women, written in 1843. A Plea for Women is most likely the first work in Britain or the USA that gave importance to gaining both civil and political rights for women. The book was especially significant in the early years of the women's suffrage movement in the USA. A Plea for Woman was, as Susanne Ferguson points out in the preface to the modern reprint of the first edition, "a landmark book as the first to be written by a woman, for women, specifically arguing that the possession of the vote is crucial in ending discrimination" against women in education and employment, and to gain equal rights under the law.
Both Marion Reid and Mary Wollstonecraft pointed out that the democratic laws of the French Revolution had still not been enforced on half of the world's population.