Women’s rights to be championed by appointment of new UK Special Envoy

JOBS FOR THE GIRLS? Harriet Harman to champion gender equality worldwide as new UK Special Envoy for Women and Girls

  • Harriet Harman announced as new UK Special Envoy for Women and Girls.  
  • Appointment underlines the UK’s ongoing commitment to empowering women and girls around the world. 
  • New role will help champion gender equality worldwide and help deliver global economic growth as part of UK government’s Plan for Change.

The Foreign Secretary has today appointed Harriet Harman as the new UK Special Envoy for Women and Girls. She will begin her appointment on International Women’s Day (Saturday 8 March 2025). 

For International Women’s Day 2025, this Government is accelerating action to change women’s lives.  

This plan is built on the foundations of our Plan for Change for this country to have a strong economy.  

Creating opportunities for working women runs through the milestones of this government: from breaking down the barriers to opportunity which have held women back, making our streets safer, to rebuilding our public services and delivering growth that can be felt across every part of the country.  

The government is supporting stability overseas to help deliver these milestones. In her role as Envoy, Harriet Harman will coordinate efforts across the globe to ensure women and girls are empowered and have their rights protected, including sexual and reproductive health and rights, access to education, and freedom from gender-based violence.  

Throughout her career, Harriet Harman has been a vocal advocate for women and girls, including on issues such as women’s political representation, maternity rights, and tackling violence against women and girls.

In her previous role as Solicitor General, Harriet led a successful drive within Government to make tackling domestic violence a priority.

The campaign led to the introduction of a new law – the Domestic Violence Crime and Victims Act – to ensure more effective prosecutions for domestic violence and a new network of 60 specialist domestic violence courts. 

Harriet’s appointment underlines the UK’s ongoing commitment to empowering women and girls in the UK and around the world.  

Foreign Secretary David Lammy said: “I am delighted to appoint Harriet Harman as the new UK Special Envoy for Women and Girls.   

“Accelerating action on equality for women and girls is vital to delivering the global economic growth we need and, a safer, more secure world.  

“Harriet has spent her career championing women’s rights and gender equality. Her record of achievement and personal commitment make her a formidable advocate for the rights and empowerment of women and girls around the world.”

Minister for International Development Baroness Chapman said: “Harriet Harman is a legend on women’s rights and is rightly regarded as a pioneer and an inspiration to women in the UK and across the world, including me.

“I am thrilled she has been appointed Special Envoy, and I look forward to working with her on protecting hard-won rights and creating more opportunities for women”

Special Envoy for Women and Girls Harriet Harman said: “Over the last decades we have made tremendous strides towards ending women’s inequality. But the job is far from done.  Women and girls are still not equal, and many still face oppression, violence and discrimination. 

“It’s a great honour to have been appointed UK Special Envoy For Women and Girls and look forward to driving this important work.

“The UK will, in coalition with women around the world, play a key role in standing up for the rights of all women and girls at a critical time.”

National Galleries of Scotland celebrates International Women’s Day with the purchase of rare artwork by pioneering Glasgow Girl

The Glasgow Girls display

Free to visit

National Galleries Scotland: National

Until 8 June 2025

To mark International Women’s Day (8 March) the National Galleries of Scotland is celebrating the acquisition of a painting by one of Scotland’s most accomplished female artists, Olive Carleton Smyth (1882─1949).

“This vibrant work forms part of National Galleries of Scotland’s mission to represent the extraordinary generation of Scottish women who trained and taught at the Glasgow School of Art in the late 19th and early 20th century. 

Bacchanale is now on show at the National as part of the free display, The Glasgow Girls, (until 8 June 2025) alongside four exquisite drawings by renowned Scottish artists Jessie M King and Annie French.

Smyth’s work is extremely rare, with Bacchanalebeing only the second painting by the artist to enter a UK museum collection. Described by a contemporary as ‘small, fast talking and tweed suited’, she was an important figure in the Glasgow art world for over 35 years. Smyth was a brilliant and versatile artist and an effective and inspiring teacher for many generations.

Bacchanale is an energetic painting, created in the early 1920s, which beautifully depicts a group of musicians and revellers dancing ecstatically through a mountain forest, sweeping up wild animals in their midst.

The rhythmic, frieze-like composition and use of shimmering metallic paint is typical of a 1920s Art Deco design. The stylised poses of the figures are probably inspired by Japanese prints, as are the intricately patterned textiles they are wearing.

The painting is full of wild, exuberant colour and action, but also has incredible minute details – the dancers’ clothes have flamboyant spots and chevron prints and even the gold musical instruments are covered in tiny, engraved patterns.

It is full of symbols associated with Bacchus, God of wine, theatre and festivity, including gold pinecones, flower garlands and the thyrsus, a wand wreathed in ivy. Smyth may have been inspired by her love of the stage, as themes of Classical mythology were popular in theatre and dance in the early 20th century.

For over ten years the National Galleries of Scotland has been proactive in acquiring more works by women artists for Scotland’s national collection, which spans roughly from 1300 to the present day.

More needed to be done to represent works by female artists in the collection, and to reflect the important role of women artists in the history of art.

The representation of more works by Scottish women artists has been integral to the creation of the Scottish galleries at the National, with Bacchanale the latest to go on display.

Works by female artists pre-1945 are considerably rarer due to the nature of art training and the constraints put on women wishing to pursue art as a profession until well into the 20th century. However, the National Galleries of Scotland is determined to celebrate pioneering female Scottish artists such as Olive Carleton Smyth.

Born in Glasgow, Smyth studied at the Glasgow School of Art from 1899. Joining the staff in 1903, she taught a wide variety of decorative and fine arts courses, including metalwork, woodblock printing, poster design, sgraffito (a ‘scratching’ technique widely used in decorative arts), gessos (a plaster-based substance used for decorative modelling and as a base for painting), manuscript illumination and miniature painting.

Smyth left the Glasgow School of Art in 1915, concentrating on creating work for exhibition and teaching at Westbourne School for Girls in Glasgow. She returned to the Glasgow School of Art as Head of School of Design (Pictorial and Commercial Art) in 1933, teaching stage design and the history of costume.

Smyth’s earliest exhibited works were miniature portraits, soon followed by watercolours and line drawings on vellum. These were described by a critic as ‘about as splendid as Beardsley could have done’.

Her drawings appeared in The Studio, a prestigious fine and decorative arts magazine,and she exhibited regularly at the Glasgow Institute of Fine Arts for over 40 years from 1904. She showed her work internationally at the Paris Salon in 1913 and in Lyon, Munich and Cork.

In 1912 Smyth’s drawing Peer Gynt was purchased by the National Gallery of Canada from an exhibition in Toronto. Her work often combined a strong sense of colour with incredibly precise and tiny detail.

She drew inspiration from a rich range of sources, from Celtic literature and folklore to Shakespeare, Ibsen, Art Nouveau, Leon Bakst’s designs for the Russian Ballet and contemporary theatre design.

Bacchanale was likely exhibited in Glasgow in 1922 and in 1929 was presented to the Paisley Art Institute. The Paisley Art Institute was founded as an artists’ collective in 1876 for the ‘encouragement of Art Studies and the promotion of a taste for Art’ and the Institute continues to champion and nurture contemporary Scottish artists work to this day.

In 2024, the Institute made the decision to sell selected works from their collection, to raise funds to safeguard the remainder of its collection and to create new awards for artists.

Charlotte Topsfield, Senior Curator of British Drawings and Prints at National Galleries of Scotland, said: ‘We are so excited to have acquired this remarkable work by Olive Carleton Smyth.

“A dynamic artist, who worked across so many different media, Olive is an outstanding representative of the extraordinary generation of women who trained and taught at the Glasgow School of Art around 1900.

“Full of colour, energy and amazing detail, Bacchanale is an intriguing and spectacular painting and we hope our visitors love it as much as we do!’

The acquisition was made possible by funds from the Cowan Smith Bequest, the Iain Paul Fund and the Treaty of Union Bequest.

International Women’s Day at Corstorphine Community Centre

International Women’s Day Saturday 8th March. Calling all women, pop in and join us for a day of inspirational Speakers, crafty bits n pieces, cake and coffee, collective art making, as well as making our voices heard to “Accelerate Action” the theme for 2025 IWD.

#internationalwomensday 

#AccelerateAction 

#women 

#womensupportingwomen 

#corstorphine

#JoinUs 

#womeninbusiness 

#womenshealth

#CorstorphineCommunityCentre