To celebrate LGBT History Month, I want to look back at an important moment from Scotland’s recent history. Eight years ago this month, on the 4th of February 2014, the Scottish Parliament passed a momentous piece of legislation that campaigners had been working towards for decades.

Because women throughout history have mostly been excluded from male-dominated spheres of power like politics and higher education, their more domestic revolutions were often overlooked. We tend to associate early women’s rights activism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries with suffrage campaigns, but women at all levels of society were also engaged with the project of improving daily life.

Burns Night is celebrated on the 25th of January both in Scotland and by members of the Scottish diaspora around the world, and traditionally it involves eating some haggis, reciting some Burns poetry and general Scottish merriment (read: drinking). But Robert Burns himself died in 1796, so what made him such an enduring figure in Scottish culture that we still celebrate his birthday over 200 years later?