Lesser Spotted Comrades: Mary Ann McCracken
by Kay Keane
Article originally published in Issue 8 of Rupture, Ireland’s eco-socialist quarterly, buy the print issue:
Definitely one of the lesser-known social activists and campaigners in Irish history, Mary Ann McCracken was, without doubt, one of the most influential women of her era. Among the finest of the egalitarian bourgeois revolutionaries who emerged in Ireland in the aftermath of the French Revolution, her life is well worth studying by socialists today.
Born in Belfast on 8 July 1770 into a prominent Presbyterian family, she combined entrepreneurship in Belfast's growing textile industry with support for the democratic programme of the United Irishmen. She was an advocate for women, organised relief and education for the poor. Belfast was at the time heavily engaged in Trans-Atlantic trade, and McCracken was a lifelong abolitionist who would campaign against slavery at the Belfast Docks until she was in her late 80s, warning emigrants heading to America about the slave trade. Alongside campaigning for abolitionism, she was an equal rights campaigner, petitioning for education, child welfare and prison reform.
In 1788 Mary Ann and her brother established a school to educate the poor in reading and writing. At a time when the education of the poor was often used for proselytising, the McCracken’s made no concessions to Sabbatarianism or sectarianism; it was to be a school for the poor of all denominations. However, they were not successful as the Anglican Vicar of Belfast, William Bristow, and several stick-wielding ladies put the McCrackens to flight. The McCrackens were a political household in a town agitated by the American Revolution and by the low-level tenant insurgency of the surrounding countryside.
In the 1790s, following her mother’s example, along with her sister Margaret she set up a small business producing muslin. By 1809, having trained and employed young women working in their own homes, the business had moved to factory production. During earlier downturns in trade, they distinguished themselves as employers by refusing to cut costs at the expense of their employees, unlike other employers who ceased to pay their weavers. Due to the Post-Napoleonic war collapse, in 1815, they were forced to close. In the textile industry, Mary Ann had witnessed the development of machinery and was fascinated by the possibilities of mechanical substitutes for labour.
Following a visit to Belfast in 1845 by Frederick Douglass, she helped establish the Ladies Anti-Slavery Association. She wore the Wedgewood Anti-Slavery medallion, which had the image of a bound slave and the words “Am I not a man and a brother”. She noted that the arguments produced in defence of African slavery, were no different from those offered for the domestic enslavement of women.
Charitable work was one of the few openings for unmarried women in the early nineteenth-century, and McCracken was an active philanthropist and social reformer, fighting for instance, against an all-male board running one of the poor-houses in Belfast. She was not content to have children merely taught or minded; she saw education as necessary in the broader sense, as a means to escape the cycle of poverty which was prevalent among those who ended up in the poorhouse. She championed the rights of people to be not just used as a form of unpaid labour. Any suggestion that those in the poorhouse should express gratitude to the charity enraged her. She insisted on teachers of the highest quality. McCracken was clear eyed about the limits of charity, supporting the introduction of income tax to support programmes for the poor.
Mary Ann McCracken is the perfect example of how not everyone fits into a simple descriptive box. She was a Presbyterian, who, like many Belfast Presbyterians of the period so long excluded from political power, was attracted to republican ideas in the aftermath of the French Revolution. She was also a lover of traditional Irish music, a campaigner for workers, children's welfare, women's rights, an abolitionist and a successful business person at a time when most women did not have those opportunities.Yet her legacy and activism have not been fully recognised, and not many know who Mary Ann McCracken is and what she has achieved. For too long, she was remembered solely through the prism of her brother Henry Joy, who was executed for his role in 1798, rather than as an important leader in her own right who actively participated in the 1798 and 1803 rebellions.
Decades after the defeat of the 1798 Rebellion and the decline of enlightenment ideas in Belfast, she continued to uphold its ideals, opposing the sectarian influence of the Orange Order, the brutal influence of the Anglo-Irish landlords, and British atrocities in India. At the launch of the Mary Ann McCracken Foundation, historian and broadcaster Professor David Olusega said: ”Mary Ann's undeserved obscurity was partly due to gender but also the historical disappearance of the abolitionists after emancipation in 1834. It’s been asked recently: why is she not a household name? Why could a woman so well known in her lifetime, so remarkable, so engaged on so many issues on so many fronts, could be so forgotten?” [1] Mary died in July 1866 at the age of ninety-six and lived to see the end of slavery in the United States before her death.
Notes
Jessica Black, ”Mary Ann McCracken: Belfast woman who fought slavery remembered”, BBC News, 23 January 2021, https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-northern-ireland-55752571