Before we plunge into its pages, there are three things worth noting about this valuable collection of essays edited for Polygon by Esther Breitenbach and Fiona Mackay. The first is that despite its title and its cover made up of repeated images of prominent women MSPs it is not really a book about women in contemporary Scottish politics. There is no study here of women who have reached significant positions in Scottish politics now, or of the experience of those who have failed to do so; indeed, of the 62 sitting Scottish women MSPs, MPs and MEPs listed in a useful if now slightly outof-date appendix to the text, only one the former Labour MP Maria Fyfe, who chaired the Scottish Constitutional Convention's Women's Issues Group in the early Nineties even rates a mention in the body of the book, apart from a brief listing, towards the end, of the five who were appointed ministers in the first Scottish Executive of 1999, and a perfunctory foreword by Wendy Alexander. What the book is, on the other hand, is a comprehensive and useful survey of organised feminist campaigning in Scottish politics between 1979 and 1999, its methods, its impact, and the main issues and challenges it faced; its focus is not on what women did or were prevented from doing, but on the equally significant subject of what feminist groups did, and how their campaigning helped change the climate of Scottish politics over two critically important decades.