Read Part One HERE
In this post I will focus on a woman named Mary Anne Rawson. She lived from 1801 - 1887. Her parents were Joseph Read and his wife Elizabeth of Wincobank Hall, Sheffield. They were wealthy and encouraged Mary Anne's involvement in good causes. She married William Bacon Rawson, a Notthingham banker and iron founder, but the marriage was short-lived due to William's early death in 1829.
Her abiding interest fom the mid-1820s to the 1850s was a campaign in the Sheffield area against slavery. She was a founding member in 1825 of the Sheffield Female Anti-Slavery society, which campaigned for the rights of slaves in the British Empire. The Sheffield Scoiety was the first to campaign not for a gradual and managed end, but for an immediate end to slavery. The society used lectures and pamphlets to achieve a decrease in sales of slave-produced West Indian goods, such as sugar and coffee. It formally wound up after the passage of the abolition legislation in 1833.
In 1837 Mary Anne became secretary of the Sheffield Ladies Association for the Universal Abolition of Slavery, which continued the case of enslaved workers across the world. The anti-slavery organisations run by women were first started by Lucy Townsend and they were sometimes dismissed as of as marginal interest, but these groups had, in fact, a national impact.
Read Part Eighty HERE
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