by Irene Janes
The efforts of Emmeline Pankhurst, the leader of the suffragist movement are not denied but perhaps in this year of 2018 when women, in this country, celebrate a hundred years of having the right to vote we should raise awareness of our very own Rose Mary.
Here in our town, Rose (I feel I know her so well I can drop the Mary) was one the most vocal members of the early feminist movement. The Women’s Herald described her as ‘one of the most enlightened pioneers of women’s emancipation’. She and twenty-six other women gave Welsh addresses when they signed the first women’s suffrage petition 1866.
1870 saw Rose became the first woman appointed to the school board in the wake of the Education Act of the same year.
What confidence and conviction she must have had when she spoke at meetings in Merthyr about the rights of women, one of which was held in The Temperance Hall, (now the Scala snooker hall), John Street. She spoke of how the vote would ‘benefit women’s characters’. Perhaps not surprisingly for those days, she was taken to task for ‘disturbing the peace and leading the women of Wales astray’.
Late in 1884 there was a decision by the delegates of the Aberdare, Merthyr Tydfil and Dowlais District Mine Association to support a series of talks by Jeanette Wilkinson on the rights for women to be able to vote. This may have been the reason there was little campaigning on the subject in Wales. This is the first recorded instance of interest by Welsh working men supporting female suffrage.
‘Lady Helpers’ this is not something I had heard before. However, Rose had some. She employed women to work alongside the male servants waiting on the Crawshay table. She hoped her scheme would encourage others to employ females for jobs other than dirty work. Rose was delighted when her husband suggested their home was becoming a home for the destitute. I would have loved to have been a fly on their bedroom wall. (Well they did have five children together so they must have met up now and again.)
This is not a rogue paragraph – these are quotes from the 1997 winner Dame Hermione Lee ‘the prize of five hundred pound isn’t a huge amount of money but the impact it has on its winners, including myself, can be huge’. Catherine Bates of author of ‘Masculinity and the Hunt’, the 2015 winner recently told me ‘Women are still under represented in academia’ ‘Wonderful to have a prize that goes some way towards addressing the gender imbalance’ ‘it helps to give women scholars a visibility and recognition they may not get otherwise and ‘an encouraging and validating experience’. Their indebtedness is down to our Mrs Crawshay.
The above was because in April 1888 Rose showed her suffrage side by setting up the ‘Byron, Shelley, Keats in Memoriam Yearly Prize Fund’ -a literary prize for female scholars. Since 1914, The British Academy has taken over the administration of the prize fund. Aptly renamed The Rose Mary Crawshay Prize Fund, one hundred and thirty years later, in this year of 2018, good old Mrs Crawshay is still enabling women.
My first conclusion, Rose Mary married an autocratic, showy, and notoriously tyrannical man in an era where woman were suppressed so she must have had a strong personality. My second, I bet she hated the title Mrs Robert Crawshay attached to her good deeds perhaps today as a philanthropist she would have been credited under her own name Rose Mary Yates.
Sadly there is a but – why did she have virtually nothing to do with her own daughters, Rose Harriette and Henrietta Louise? Odd don’t you think?
Rose Mary died in 1907 at Rose Cottage, Cathedine, Breconshire, at the age of seventy-nine.