Maud Crofts

Maud Crofts (born 1889), née Maud Ingram, was a British suffragist, and an author and solicitor.^[1][2]

She graduated from Girton College, Cambridge with First Class Honours, but she was refused a degree because she was a woman.^[1]

In 1913 she and three other women started an unsuccessful legal action, known as Bebb vs. the Law Society, claiming that the Law Society should be compelled to admit them to its preliminary examinations.^[1][2] The three other women were Gwyneth Bebb, who the action was named after, Karin Costelloe, who became a psychoanalyst after marrying Adrian Stephen (brother of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell), and Lucy Nettlefold.^[2][3]

Maud Crofts then joined the Committee for the Opening of the Legal Profession to Women, an organization which succeeded in getting the Sex Disqualification Act passed in 1919, after which women were allowed to practice law in the United Kingdom.^[1][2]

In 1922 Maud Crofts, Mary Pickup, Mary Sykes, and Carrie Morrison became the first women in England to qualify as solicitors; Morrison was the first of them to finish her articles, and was the first woman admitted to the role of solicitor.^[4] Maud Crofts was admitted as a solicitor on 11 January 1923.^[2]

She had married John Cecil Crofts in 1922, and after she became a solicitor she, John, and her brother, Robert Ingram, set up a law practice together.^[2]

She also wrote the 1925 book Women under English Law, which made her the first female British lawyer to write a book on women’s position in society.^[2]

Her daughter Rosemary and her granddaughter Mary both became solicitors, thus making her family England’s first three-generational family of women solicitors.^[2]

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