The young Chrystal Macmillan who stood at the Bar of the House of Lords in 1908 to address the Lord Chancellor, and accompanying Law Lords, was to become famous overnight. Perhaps surprisingly, that early experience of fame did not lead her to seek further public acclaim: rather, the experience inspired her to work for the rest of her life to challenge and seek change in the laws and circumstances that discriminated against women and denied them equality with men in so many spheres of activity.

On her appearance in the House of Lords, when she argued the claim of the Scottish women graduates to vote for the university candidate in Parliamentary elections, she gave evidence of being intellectually interested in the interpretation of laws. She learned from the judgement of the Lords that the law discriminated against women because laws were written by men for men's benefit, and that it was of no interest or concern to them that women had a different perspective. Once she had experienced the male bias in the administration of the law, this remarkable woman spent the rest of her life trying to redraft and reform legislation that discriminated against women, both nationally and internationally. Some campaigns resulted in a change in the law during her lifetime, notably women's right to vote in Parliamentary elections, but other campaigns, like the struggle to gain a married woman's right to independent nationality, took many more years to achieve: indeed, British legislation granting that right was not passed into law until 19481 and the International Convention on the Nationality of Married Women was not agreed until 1957, twenty years after her death.