Mary Macarthur

Mary Macarthur was born in Glasgow, the daughter of a draper who was a staunch Conservative, and kept the books in his shop in Ayr. In 1901 she went to a meeting of the shop assistants' union intending to write a mocking report on it. She came out a convert, and within two years had moved to London as secretary of the Women's Trade Union League.

She found that women workers were almost entirely unorganised, scattered across small workshops and their own kitchens, and in 1906 she founded the National Federation of Women Workers as a single union open to any of them. The same year she helped stage an exhibition in London where visitors could watch women making matchboxes and chains for a few pence an hour, and the resulting outrage produced the Trade Boards Act of 1909, which set minimum wages in four of the worst-paid trades.

One of those trades was chainmaking. The women of Cradley Heath, in the Black Country, hammered out chain in sheds behind their houses for about five shillings a week, and when the new board set a rate roughly double that, the employers tried to make them sign away the increase. In August 1910 Macarthur called them out. She raised money across the country, arranged for the strike to be filmed for cinema newsreels, and after ten weeks every employer had agreed to pay the rate.

She spent the First World War fighting for the pay and conditions of women in munitions, stood for Parliament in 1918 and lost, and died of cancer in January 1921 at forty.