Mary Burton

Mary Hill Burton (1819-1909) was a Scottish social and educational reformer and the first woman governor of Heriot-Watt College. Biography Mary Burton was born in Aberdeen but moved to Edinburgh in 1832 with her widowed mother and her brother, the lawyer and historian John Hill Burton. A single woman, with an independent income from rental properties, she was a supporter of the Edinburgh National Society for Women's Suffrage and an advocate for improving access to education for women and working people. In 1868, she went to court, unsuccessfully, for the right to register to vote. Mary Burton successfully campaigned for the Watt Institution to admit women students on equal terms to men in 1869, twenty-three years before legislation required Scottish universities to do so. Her niece Ella Burton was one of the early women students to benefit.