‘She believed she could, so she did’

Isobel Wylie Hutchison was 39 years old when woman (aged over 21 years) got the right to vote in the UK. It was 1928, the same year the number of female participants doubled in the Amsterdam Olympic games. By then Isobel had already travelled across Iceland and Greenland and earned herself a reputation as an accomplished explorer, botanist, poet and author. She truly was an international woman.

Isboel travelling north on board the 'Trader', a seventy foot schooner trading goods with local communities on the islands in the Bering Strait

First celebrated in 1911, International Women’s Day was established to draw attention to the social, economic and political achievements of women. Isobel would undoubtedly have played down her contribution to the cause, but her life spanned three very distinctive eras in the emancipation of women.

Pre WWI a woman’s place was in the home, or in the domestic service of others. From the outset Isobel’s wealthy background and her access to education, would have given her aspirations beyond the reach of the majority, yet expectations of how she would contribute to society would have remained fixed. Isobel was raised to marry well, and her success would be measured by her conformity to the rules of polite society at the time.

It could be seen as a bold move that so much of Isobel’s life veered from the norm, but in reality, it was grief rather than self-belief that fuelled her adventures. She lost her father to pneumonia when she was 11 and then both of her brothers in quick succession, (one to a mountaineering accident in 1912 and the other on a military training exercise in 1914). The easy road would have been to find a husband and live out her days as a dutiful wife, but her despair over these deaths and the outbreak of war, galvanised Isobel’s resolve to do more than comply.

During WWI, Isobel and her sister Hilda signed up as volunteers for the Red Cross, assisting the ‘urban poor’ in Edinburgh. As women entered the workforce for the first time to fill the gaps left by men fighting overseas, the political arguments that had held them to be inferior and therefore not worthy of equality, most notably in the right to vote, disappeared. The war shifted prevailing attitudes but also gave women an opportunity to break free from the boundary’s society had made for them. We know that Isobel studied hard and self-published her first book “Lyrics from West Lothian” as the war raged on. She, like many other women at this time, recognised their usefulness to society went far beyond marriage and childbearing. Subservient 1900’s women gave way to a new breed, embodied in icons such as Coco Chanel, Amelia Earhart and Marie Stopes.

Fast forward to 1920 and Isobel the explorer makes her first appearance - not as the result of triumph over the war and progress for womankind, but out of turmoil at the death of a close friend to Spanish Flu. Isobel had a mental breakdown, withdrawing from the world to winter in Tiree. It was perhaps her first taste of solitude and a chance to step back from the rapidly changing world.

Despite completing a chaperoned Grand Tour of Europe and the Middle East thereafter, the freedom of her time on Tiree made the most long-lasting impression. It fuelled her imagination, soothed her pain and brought comfort and security in self-reliance. A subsequent 150 miles trek across the Outer Hebrides made her trip to Iceland in 1925, financially viable. Isobel the author and arctic explorer emerged like a butterfly from the chrysalis, publishing her first play “The Calling of the Bride” and making her maiden voyage to Greenland with Royal Horticultural Society endorsed, botanist credentials. And all this before women even had the right to vote.

Isobel went on to live as a trailblazer for another 57 years, (she died in 1982 aged 93).