|
Dundee Revels In Its Fair
Ladies This week the university, or at least the students, are celebrating after the female graduates were voted the best-looking in Britain. More than a century ago, girls took the road to Dundee to become Scotland's first women to be granted degrees. Nowadays, it seems, their stunning successors make a swift detour via the Chanel cosmetic counter first. Doubtless, Baxter would have disapproved. For a city credited as the Scottish "mither of emancipation ", the accolade might be as fluffy as Ma Broon's mashed tatties. But when you look like supermodel Kirsty Hume and can converse in Serbo-Croat who cares? Finding beauties with brains to match is relatively easy. Just ask the local boys lurking outside the students' union on Friday nights. If they can't persuade passing strangers to sign them into the members' only bars, at least they can admire the girls that got away. One who does sashay past the bouncers is 22-year-old Emily Pykett. A fourth-year English literature student, she is not surprised the university came top in the alternative survey by the Red Mole student website. "You can see why when you come to the club nights. People get really, really dressed up. You notice lots of girls looking glamorous. They do their hair imaginatively by putting twists in it or spike it up. It's not the time to wear jeans and trainers." The good news for the lads on the wrong side of the door is that when the thought of hundreds of those hot dancers gets too much, they can always nip home and log on to the Internet. Sightings of shiny-haired Dundee students gyrating to the latest dance mix has become compelling viewing since the association set up its own website. "And the student's handbook is full of good-looking women." Adds Pykett. Add to this the statistic that women undergraduates outnumber the men (there are 6,493 females to 4,503 males) and - for some people at least - Dundee gets more attractive by the minute. No wonder it is called the City of Discovery. The novelist Kate Atkinson was a young, carefree undergraduate at the university in the 1970s. If she was a babe, then she's modest enough to keep it to herself. "You can't really say whether or not you're good-looking, can you?" she laughs. "I had long hair down to my waist and parted in the middle. Oh yes, and I had a cherished midi-coat. I bought it in London and was so pleased with it. I used to wear it with knee-length boots. I probably looked exactly like everyone did- a hippy." One of Atkinson's abiding memories is of how the campus was a hotbed of sin. Everybody was having sex with everyone else, she says. For the many people brought up to believe that the city was all Dundee cake and DC Thomson, might be affronted. Not so Dundonians. Locals have known for years that while it might not have the raciest image, Dundee is the Scottish home of the feisty femme. Women in the land of jam, jute and journalism have never been backward about coming forward. The place has produced so many trailblazers that a whole chapter is devoted to heroines in a new history of the city. One of the trailblazers of liberation, Fanny Wright, was born in Dundee in 1795 and orphaned at the age of three. Wright was a radical feminist whose liberal views on sex earned her the title the Red Harlot of Infidelity. During her lectures across America, where she spent many years, Wright championed sex as the "noblest of human passions". She was also the first woman to publicly oppose slavery. Mary Slessor, the former Dundee mill girl, may have been more gentle but was equally as memorable. Slessor, the Mother Teresa of her time, saved hundreds of lives in Africa in the 19th century when there as a young Scottish missionary. Their pioneering legacy has continued. In 1940, Margaret Farlie became the first woman professor at a Scottish University when Dundee appointed her to the chair of obstetrics and gynaecology. Four years ago the university announced another first; a chair in gender relations. The first post of its kind in Scotland, it is held by Professor Gerda Siann. There was no sign of Dundonian women becoming more demure as the 20th century dawned. They threw body and soul into securing the vote and in 1907 the first meetings to be disrupted by suffragettes were in Dundee, which became home to some of the country's most militant campaigners. When some of the women did get the vote they vowed to use it wisely. Many were active in the temperance movement and in 1922 they rid the city of Winston Churchill in favour of the first and only Prohibition MP Edwin Scrymgeour. The folk singer and broadcaster Sheena Wellington, who sang at the opening of the Scottish Parliament, says such traditions are still alive almost a century later. Born on the banks of the Tay, Wellington has no doubt that the matriarchal society of her youth helped shape her strong personality. "I don't go picking fights but I'm not easily daunted." She says. She is proud of her city,
which now boasts a female Lord Provost Helen Wright. As for the good-looking
tag, she does not argue: "We think we've got the best of everything
anyway." |
