Born to a prominent liberal Presbyterian family, she combined entrepreneurship in Belfast's growing textile industry with support for the democratic programme of the United Irishmen; advocacy for women; the organising of relief and education for the poor; and, in a town that was heavily engaged in trans-Atlantic trade, a lifelong commitment to the abolition of slavery.

[3] Along with children of other enlightened Presbyterian families, Mary Ann and her elder brother Henry Joy ("Harry") attended David Manson's progressive "play school" in Donegall Street.

As a result, they were not long in session before the town’s Anglican rector (and Lord Donegall's factotum), William Bristow, appeared at the door of their Market House schoolroom and, with several stick-wielding ladies, put "the humble pioneers" to flight.

On the pretext of securing the Kingdom against the French in the American War, the volunteer militia or National Guard as it was later styled, allowed Presbyterians to arm, drill and convene independently of the Anglican Ascendancy.

[14] Initially a small scale operation employing workers in their own homes, by 1809 having gathered and taught a number of young women to work at the tambour frame it had moved into factory production.

[19] When in the early 1790s linen and cotton weavers began to unionise in protest of stagnant wages and rising prices, in his News Letter her uncle, Henry Joy, objected that in competition with England, lower labour costs were Ireland's only "rational hope".

While Samuel Neilson (who had pledged his woollen business to establish the paper) proposed that Volunteers assist in enforcing the laws against combination;[20] Thomas Russell urged labourers and cottiers to follow the weavers' example.

Would it not be possible, she asked her brother, "to contrive some useful machinery to supply the use of horses and servants" and as a visitor to the Poorhouse, she was to press the guardians to see whether the washerwomen might be relieved by "any new constructed washing machines, or any for wringing".

Mary Ann and Harry attended the Harpist Festival Bunting staged for the benefit of the Belfast Charitable Society (and arranged to coincide with the town's Bastille Day celebrations) in July 1792.

[25] Advertised as an appeal to those "wishing to preserve from oblivion the few fragments which have been permitted to remain, as monuments to the refined taste and genius of their ancestors", Bunting's patriotic festival may have been more antiquarian than revivalist.

[28][29] It is almost certain that Mary Ann McCracken took the United Irish pledge to "form a brotherhood of affection among Irishmen of every religious persuasion", and "to obtain an equal, full and adequate representation of all the people of Ireland".

[31] This was at a time when, with the King at war with revolutionary France and with the Viceroy, Lord Camden, rigid in his opposition to Catholic emancipation and reform, the thinking in the democratic party was turning increasingly to the prospect of a French-assisted insurrection.

With her father, McCracken was present at Harry's court martial in Belfast on the 17th, and walked with her brother, the same afternoon, to the foot of the gallows erected in front of the Market House in High Street.

[42] McCracken concluded a letter to Thomas Russell describing the "afflicting particulars" of her brother's death, by expressing the wish "that the cause for which so many of our friends have fought & have died may yet be successful, & that you may be preserved to enjoy the fruits of it".

[47] McCracken described Russell to her friend, the early historian of the United Irishmen Richard Robert Madden, as "a model of manly beauty" with a grace "which nothing but superiority of intellect can give.

Published under the name of the William Thompson, but declared by him to be a "joint property" with the Irish writer Anna Wheeler, the Appeal of One-Half the Human Race, Women, against the Pretensions of the Other Half, Men, to retain them in Political and Thence Civil and Domestic Slavery (1825)[60] called for absolute equality between the sexes based on "labour by mutual cooperation" and the collective education and upbringing of children.

[61] McCracken had found the Essays[62] of Wollstonecraft's husband, William Godwin, on education and manners "less eccentric and more consistent with common sense" than the anarchism of his more widely-read Enquiry Concerning Political Justice.

Following a meeting organised in 1827 by the visiting Quaker social reformer Elizabeth Fry, McCracken formed the Ladies Committee of the Belfast Charitable Society which she was to serve variously as treasurer, secretary and chair.

[70] In her late eighties, McCracken's correspondence continued to refer to "my out of door avocations": The Belfast Ladies’ Industrial National School for Girls, of which, having "never missed a weekly meeting", she was made president aged 90 in 1860;[71] a weekly visitor since 1813 to the town's Lancastrian school[72] (whose monitorial system had been anticipated by her own schoolmaster, Manson);[73] collecting funds for the Society for the Relief of the Destitute Sick, managing the Belfast Ladies’ Clothing Society, and preventing "the use of climbing boys for chimney sweeping".

[74] In a letter dated 1861, McCracken wrote that, while stooping and leaning to one side at age 90, she was still "able to go out on a fine day to collect for four public charities" and had a "brilliant hope" of an end to slavery in the United States.

Let us if possible, enlist in this righteous cause the sympathies of childhood as well as age, of poor as well as the rich, and not relax our efforts ...[83] The association maintained a steady correspondence with the abolitionist movement in the United States, and collected locally-made items to be shipped and sold at William Lloyd Garrison's Boston Anti-Slavery Bazaar.

Writing to the News Letter she addressed "the Proprietors of Cotton Mills, and other Factories", admonishing them to attend to the health and safety of their operatives, and reminding them of the "serious responsibility" they assume in employing children.

Looking forty years back, she wrote of how "those who were gone" would have been "delighted" at "the political changes that have taken place – which could not possibly in their day have been anticipated, by peaceful means…” [89] Presumably she refers to the delivery of promises denied at the Act of Union: Catholic Emancipation (1829) and parliamentary reform (1832).

[95][84] To Madden, she later reported that there had been those in Belfast who argued that, by inducing an "influx of strangers", the town's efforts to relieve the general destitution had been "highly injurious to own poor"; that "fever patients were known to have been frequently brought by the Railway Train & laid down in the street".

Writing to her niece in London on the occasion of Queen Victoria's visit to Belfast, she expressed the hope that "a better spirit will shortly prevail betwixt the two countries, & among all classes of Irishmen".

In 1851, she wrote: “I fear the labours of the United Irish is about to be overturned, & the Orange system of religious discord & ill will be re-established – It seems as if the world was going back, in place of advancing in just & liberal sentiments.”[98] McCracken would have been distressed by growing sectarian tensions in Belfast (in 1857 and again in 1864 these were to explode in deadly rioting).

[103] McCracken did acknowledge the achievement of Daniel O'Connell in drawing the Catholic masses onto the political stage: the "great moral regeneration" this had wrought in the Irish people entitled him, she believed, to "the lasting gratitude of all true philanthropists".

While she hoped that his history of the United Irishmen[107] would be "instructive in shewing the certain evil, and uncertain good of attempting political change by force of arms",[108] she could assure Madden: "I never once wished that my beloved brother had taken any other part than that which he did".

[116] In Belfast, Milligan was to be a leading figure in organising the centenary commemoration of 1798, and in the pages of her monthly The Shan Van Vocht, and in her fiction, celebrated what she understood as the United Irishmen's appeal to nation above both creed and class.

In proposing the motion, Councillor Michael Long (Alliance) said: Mary Ann McCracken is a perfect example of the need to showcase the diverse nature of Belfast and how not everyone can be placed into a simple descriptive box.