Mary Burton

Social and educational reformer Mary Burton was a consistent thorn in the side of the nineteenth-century patriarchal elite. She actively campaigned for a range of causes, including women’s suffrage, wider access to education, sex workers’ rights, and the abolition of slavery.

Born in Aberdeen, Burton moved to Edinburgh in 1832 with her widowed mother and her brother, lawyer and historian John Hill Burton. Over time, she purchased several properties in Edinburgh’s Old Town, which she kept clean and affordable and rented out to the city’s working poor.

In the 1860s, Burton was active in the Edinburgh Ladies Emancipation Society, the Edinburgh Ladies Educational Association, and the abolitionist movement which sought to end the transatlantic slave trade. In 1868, she went to court to demand voting rights for women. In 1869, she successfully campaigned at The Watt Institution (later Heriot-Watt College) to admit female students on equal terms to men, 23 years before legislation required Scottish universities to do so, and she was later appointed the institution’s first female director.

In 1871, Burton presented a petition to Parliament against the Contagious Diseases Act, which unfairly punished female sex workers for the spread of sexually transmitted infections. Florence Nightingale and Elizabeth Garrett also protested against the law, which was eventually repealed in 1886.

Burton became increasingly involved in the suffragist movement, attending the Scottish National Demonstrations of Women, where thousands gathered, before ill health from the 1890s onwards curtailed her campaigning. Burton’s life-long activism achieved several important victories and helped to pave the way for those who came after.