Born: 3 June 1820, Ireland
Died: 14 February 1912
Country most active: Ireland, International
Also known as: NA
This biography is republished from The Dictionary of Irish Biography and was written by Peter Gray. Shared by permission in line with Creative Commons ‘Attribution’ (CC BY) licencing.
Crawford, Mabel Sharman (1820‒1912), author and feminist reformer, was born on 3 June 1820 in Dublin, the third daughter and ninth child (of eight sons and four daughters) of the radical reformer, MP and landowner William Sharman Crawford and Mabel Frideswid Sharman Crawford (née Crawford, 1785‒1844). Following the death of his father-in-law, John Crawford, in 1827, William inherited both his estates and surname and the family moved to Crawfordsburn House in north Co. Down, which would remain Mabel’s home until after her father’s death in 1861. Educated, like her siblings, at home, it is likely that Mabel became imbued with the radical politics of the household at a time when her father was the Chartist-endorsed MP for Rochdale and a leading figure in the Irish tenant right movement. During the Great Famine she was, with her sisters Arminella and Eleanor, involved with the Belfast Ladies’ Association for the Relief of Connaught, and she was a vice-president (in 1846) of the Belfast Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Association.
In 1852 Sharman Crawford came to public attention as the author of a novel, Fanny Denison, published in London under her own name. Although praised by one reviewer as ‘of the first class’, it was a relatively conventional moral tale aimed at an English audience (Globe, 27 Sept. 1852). A second novel, The Wilmot family, followed in 1864. Of greater significance were two substantial travel narratives based on her personal experience. The first, Life in Tuscany (which she dedicated to her father), was based on ten months spent travelling with a female companion in Italy in 1856‒7, and appeared in April 1859, attracting attention in part due to its coincidence with the outbreak of the second Italian war of independence. Sharman Crawford’s principal concerns were with the social conditions of the Tuscan rural ‘contadini’, of whom she wrote with a combination of sympathy and with an eye for economic parallels with the Irish peasantry, as well as with what she regarded as the infantilised condition of Tuscan women of the better-off classes. Her conclusion was that a political revolution in Italy would prove fruitless unless it led to the restoration of a ‘free peasantry’ and liberated women from their social subordination. Answering reviewers who had commented negatively on her gender, she prefaced her next travelogue, Through Algeria (1863), with an impassioned ‘plea for lady tourists’ which defended the principle of ‘feminine liberty of action’ for those, like herself, who chose to travel for instruction and enjoyment. Based on extensive travel in Algeria in 1859‒60, the book showed the same close attention to local customs and conditions, but Sharman Crawford was shocked by what she viewed as the barbarous superstitions of north African life and the denial of freedom to women. Falling back on orientalist tropes to make sense of this, she came to regard the Islamic faith as inherently misogynist and to support the French colonial project, despite her awareness of its violent record in Algeria. She would continue to take an interest in colonial matters and visited British-controlled Egypt in 1894.
Following her father’s death, Sharman Crawford received a large bequest of £4,000 and invested a portion of this in an agrarian experiment she believed would demonstrate the veracity of his cooperative approach to landlordism. In 1869 she purchased a small property of 135 acres at Shanacoole in west Co. Waterford and proceeded to make ‘tenant right’ arrangements with the tenants and to promote education and cooperative improvements. In 1880 she gave them leases for ever on their holdings and later encouraged them to become owner-occupiers with an advance secured under the 1885 Ashbourne land act. Sympathetic to the Land League and increasingly critical of the ‘gloomy political creed of Orange Ulster’, she wrote to the London Times to advocate legislation to protect small tenants from eviction and unfair rent demands (15 Sept. 1880); she later supported W. E. Gladstone’s 1881 land bill as a means to deliver these protections. She also gave attention to the living conditions of agricultural labourers, and in 1879 read a paper to the Social Science Congress in Manchester proposing legislation to oblige landowners to repair or replace labourers’ cottages or forfeit all claim to rent. She summarised her agrarian experience and opinions in an 1887 article for the Contemporary Review and a subsequent pamphlet.
From the later 1860s Sharman Crawford became increasingly involved in campaigns to advance women’s rights, beginning with participation in a Belfast committee (along with Isabella Tod) advocating for George Shaw Lefevre’s married women’s property bill. By 1869 she was principally resident in Dublin (and by the 1880s in London) but remained involved with feminist networks in Ulster as well as in those cities. An advocate of women’s education, she contributed generously to the scholarships and prizes fund of the Belfast Ladies’ Institute and in 1878 was part of a northern delegation that lobbied (successfully) for the inclusion of girls’ schools in the Irish intermediate education bill.
A strong supporter of women’s suffrage, she was a member in 1870 of a Dublin committee to establish a suffrage society in the city following a popular lecture there by Millicent Fawcett, and she represented that committee at national conferences. She spoke for the cause at the 1878 Dublin meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (as did her brother, James Sharman Crawford, then Liberal MP for Co. Down) and was on the platform at a Dublin rally of the Women’s Suffrage Association in 1881. Not a leading speaker, she contributed in 1879 to Opinions of women on women’s suffrage, which collated the opinions of over 100 women in public life and was published by the central committee of the National Society for Women’s Suffrage. Relocating to London, she remained active in suffrage organisations into the early 1900s. She also took an interest in other feminist causes, writing in support of the Female Protection Society (established to protect vulnerable young Irish migrant women in Britain from exploitation), in support of the practical education of girls in Ireland, in favour of ‘rational dress’ reform, against the confinement of female visitors to the house of commons behind a metal grille, and, in 1893, against the legal loopholes that continued to permit domestic abuse.
Gladstone’s embrace of home rule for Ireland in 1886 bitterly divided both Ulster liberalism and the women’s suffrage movement. Unlike her brother Arthur (now head of the family) and her long-time allies Tod and Fawcett, Sharman Crawford remained loyal to Gladstone, speaking in support of home rule along with Michael Davitt at a meeting of the National Political Union in London in June 1886. She was later a member of the ladies’ branch of the English Home Rule Union and supported its campaigns, and wrote to Gladstone to argue that her father, through his embrace of Irish ‘federalism’ in the 1830s and 1840s, had been an early advocate of the policy. As a member of the advanced Irish liberal coterie in London, she participated in its literary as well as political life, becoming a member of the Irish Literary Society in 1892 and writing for Oscar Wilde’s Woman’s World in 1888. Mabel Sharman Crawford died at her home in Kensington on 14 February 1912 and left a bequest of £2,000 to the London School of Medicine for Women to endow an annual scholarship in her name.