Stewart-Murray was active in
Scottish social service and
local government and in 1912 served on the hugely influential "Highlands and Islands Medical Service Committee" (authors of the
Dewar Report) that has been widely credited with creating the forerunner of the
National Health Service. She was the chairman of the Consultative Council on Highlands and Islands.
Anti-suffrage As the Marchioness of Tullibardine she was an opponent of
female suffrage, with Leah Leneman describing her as 'a key speaker at the most important Scottish anti-suffrage demonstration', which took place in 1912. In 1913 she became vice-president of the branch of the
Anti-Suffrage League based in Dundee.
Political career Despite this opposition to women gaining the right to vote in parliamentary elections, Stewart-Murray went on to be the
Scottish Unionist Member of Parliament (MP) for
Kinross and West Perthshire from 1923 to 1938, and served as
Parliamentary Secretary to the Board of Education from 1924 to 1929, the first woman other than a
mistress of the robes to serve in a British Conservative government. She was the first woman elected to represent a Scottish seat at
Westminster. It has been argued that, like other early female MPs in the UK, Stewart-Murray "inherited" her seat from her husband. However, her husband had stood down from the former
West Perthshire seat in 1917, when he succeeded to the dukedom, and it had then been won by a
Liberal candidate in both 1918 and 1922. Her victory in 1923 was not seen as "a foregone conclusion". Stewart-Murray often placed her political allegiance ahead of gender unity, and campaigned for the male Unionist candidate in
Edinburgh South at the
1922 general election against the Liberal
Catherine Buchanan Alderton, though Labour and Liberal women had refused to campaign against Lady Astor in Plymouth.
Anti-fascism Stewart-Murray argued that she actively opposed totalitarian regimes and practices. In 1931, she published
The Conscription of a People—a protest against the abuse of
human rights in the
Soviet Union. After reading the German edition of
Mein Kampf she also condemned
Nazi Germany. In 1936, she was involved in a long-running battle in the pages of various newspapers with
Lady Houston after the latter had become notorious for her outspoken support of
Benito Mussolini. Stewart-Murray had taken issue with Houston calling in the pages of the
Saturday Review for
Edward VIII to become a dictator in imitation of
European interwar dictatorships. In February 1937 three leading British women made a tour of
Romania,
Czechoslavakia and
Yugoslavia. They were
Dorothy Layton,
Eleanor Rathbone and the Duchess of Atholl. They observed the conditions and they were received by Deputy
Františka Zeminová in Prague. Zeminová used the occasion to laud the support of Britain. Atholl recalls that it was at the prompting of
Ellen Wilkinson that in April 1937 she, Rathbone, and Wilkinson went to Spain to observe the effects of the
Spanish Civil War. In
Valencia,
Barcelona and
Madrid she saw the impact of
Luftwaffe bombing on behalf of the
Nationalists, visited prisoners of war held by the
Republicans and considered the impact of the conflict on women and children, in particular. Her book
Searchlight on Spain resulted from the involvement, and sold more than 100,000 copies in its first week of publication. Her support for the Republican side in the conflict led to her being nicknamed by some the
Red Duchess. She became active in the
National Joint Committee for Spanish Relief, a cross-party group coordinating aid to Spain. She later served as the group's chairwoman. She was instrumental in persuading the British government to accept child refugees fleeing the combat, 4,000 of which arrived on the SS
Habana which sailed from
Bilbao to
Southampton in May 1937. Her role in the Spanish Civil War, however, was years later criticized by
George Orwell, who saw the Duchess as the "pet of the
Daily Worker", and someone who "lent the considerable weight of her authority to every lie the
Communists happened to be uttering at the moment. Now she is fighting against the monster that she helped create. I am sure that neither she nor her Communist ex-friends see any moral in this." Shortly before or even during 1938, she travelled to Romania where she visited Satu Mare Romanian Women Association in the city of
Satu Mare, aiming to support the Romanian cause to preserve the state borders established in 1918, and to keep
Hungary from regaining the territory that it lost in the
Treaty of Trianon. She campaigned against the Soviet control of
Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary as the chairman of the League for European Freedom in Britain from 1945. ==Other work==