Elizabeth Heyrick (1769 -1831)
Elizabeth Heyrick was an abolitionist, social reformer and campaigner on a whole range of social issues. Born in 1769 in Leicester she was one of the first activists to advocate for the immediate abolition of slavery and her influential pamphlet, “Immediate, Not Gradual Abolition” published in 1824, played a crucial role in shifting public opinion and galvanising the abolitionist movement in Britain.
In the pamphlet she began by pointing out that although the slave trade had been abolished in Britain and its possessions for seventeen years, the trade continued in practice, as did slavery itself. She rejected the parliamentary strategy preferred by Wilberforce and pursued in the House of Commons by him and other well-known campaigners. To Heyrick the call for gradualism issued by these men is “the very master-piece of satanic policy”. She believed that direct action by way of a boycott on sugar would defeat the “West Indian interests”. Many disapproved of her stance as masculine, or unwomanly just the same grounds on which the vigorous involvement of women in general in the abolition movement was disapproved.
She published several more anti-slavery pamphlets, sometimes addressing women specifically. In Leicester, in the Midlands, and among women, and in the still fairly new nation of the United States, she was warmly admired. In Leicester (where she lived for most of her life, and where she and her friend SUSANNA WATTS went door-to-door organising one of the most effective of all the local sugar boycotts), she was posthumously celebrated, with Watts, when the Abolition Act came into force on 1 August 1834. Her admirers in the USA included Benjamin Lundy, William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass, and Lucretia Mott. For Mott her work became an argument for women’s participation in public life and social reform. Garrison praised her on his visit to Britain in 1840, for instance in a public speech given at Glasgow. A Brief Sketch of Heyrick’s life, published anonymously in 1862 and probably by her niece Alicia Cooper, called her “one of the noblest pioneers of social liberty, not only for her own sex, but for mankind at large.”
The Elizabeth Heyrick Society is dedicated to honouring the legacy of Elizabeth Heyrick, a pioneering abolitionist and philanthropist, by raising a statue in Leicester in her honour and providing educational content about her life and achievements.
