[4] Ker then undertook further studies for a year in Bern, Switzerland, funded by her campaigning aunts Flora and Louisa Stevenson.
[3] In 1887, she returned to Edinburgh working as a self-employed doctor, and taking the Royal College of Surgeons Conjoint Examinations, one of only two women in that year to pass the finals.
[3] She became chair of the local Suffrage Society but finding them too moderate, in 1907 with Alice Morrissey,[7] she joined the more progressive Women's Social and Political Union.
She was force fed whilst in Holloway prison, and as result she was released with ill health before the end of her two-month sentence.
[1][3] She wrote poetry while in prison, contributing to "Holloway Jingles, a collection published by the Glasgow branch of the Women's Social and Political Union.
She moved to Liverpool,[4] where she wrote to her two daughters to seek out Patricia Woodlock and offer their services to the cause of women's rights to vote.
[7] Margaret indeed followed in her mother's footsteps, and in November 1912 was sentenced to three months in prison for placing a "dangerous substance" in a post box in Liverpool[9] Her mother joined with Patricia Woodlock and Isabel Buxton, the Pethick-Lawrence's United Suffragists, and later joining the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, took a pacifist line during the First World War.