Mary MacArthur

Mary Reid Anderson (née MacArthur; 1880 – 1921) was a Scottish suffragist and a leading trades unionist.

MacArthur was born on 13 August 1880 in Glasgow, the eldest of six children of draper John Duncan MacArthur and his wife, Anne Elizabeth Martin. Mary attended Glasgow Girls' High School, and, having worked as editor on the school magazine, decided she wanted to become a full-time writer. Her studies took her to Germany, but she later returned to Glasgow to work as bookkeeper for her father’s business.

Passionate about a woman’s right to vote,  Mary was totally opposed to those in the NUWSS and the WSPU who were willing to accept the franchise being given to only certain groups of women. She feared that a limited franchise would disadvantage the working class and feared that it might act against the granting of full adult suffrage. Thus, she was unpopular amongst more high profile suffrage movements and she was vocally criticised by the middle-class leaders of the Votes for Woman movement who thought that a partial enfranchisement was more likely to succeed and that would make it easier to achieve a full suffrage later.

In 1903, Mary moved to London where she became Secretary of the Women's Trade Union League. The Women's Trade Union League united women-only unions from different trades including a mixed-class membership. The conflicting aims of activists affiliated with different classes and organisations barred the league from affiliation to the Trades Union Congress.

To resolve this conflict, MacArthur founded the National Federation of Women Workers in 1906. The model for the Federation was a general labour union, "open to all women in unorganised trades or who were not admitted to their appropriate trade union." This federation pre-dated the National Union of General Workers (formed in 1921) and led by and for women.

In general MacArthur favoured the universal suffrage position both within the Trade Union movement and the Women's Rights movement.  She deduced that if female suffrage was worked out according to the same specifications as men, less than 5 per cent of working women would be eligible to vote.

MacArthur was involved in the Exhibition of Sweated Industries in 1905 and the formation of Britain's Anti-Sweating League in 1906. The following year she founded the Women Worker, a monthly newspaper for women trade unionists. Then in 1908, after six weeks in hospital with diphtheria, she presented findings of her research on sweated homeworking women in the poorer parts of London to the House of Commons Select Committee on Home Working. A year later, a form of minimum wage law, the Trade Board Act 1909 was eventually passed, based largely on the evidence MacArthur had presented.  

In 1910, Mary led the women chainmakers of Cradley Heath in thei battle to establish the right to a fair wage following a 10-week strike. Their landmark victory changed the lives of thousands of workers who were earning little more than 'starvation wages'. In reference to female earnings, MacArthur commented that "women are unorganised because they are badly paid, and poorly paid because they are unorganised." The dispute ended on the 22 October 1910 when the last of the employers agreed to pay the minimum wage. The Cradley Heath Workers' Institute was funded using money left over from the strike fund of the 1910.

Because of the fame she had earned as an organiser at Cradley Heath MacArthur was immediately sent for in August, 1911, when the Bermondsey Uprising began. Early in 1911 Ada Salter had founded a Women's Labour League (WLL) branch in Bermondsey and was recruiting women in the local food and drink factories to MacArthur's NFWW. In one of the hottest Augusts on record, factory working conditions became totally intolerable and 14,000 women suddenly walked out on strike from 22 factories. This was the Bermondsey Uprising. Though inspired by Salter, it was MacArthur who organised the strikers, led the negotiations, and secured a historic victory for low-paid women.

The highlight of this uprising was a mass rally in Southwark Park where the searing speech of MacArthur was backed up by suffragists Sylvia Pankhurst, Charlotte Despard and George Lansbury.

In August 1913, MacArthur too part in a delegation with the Home Secretary to discuss this   in response to the the so called Cat and Mouse Act -  aka the Prisoners (Temporary Discharge for Ill Health) Act 1913 whereby hunger striking suffragette prisoners would be released when too weak to be active and permitting their re-arrest as soon as they were well.

The Home Secretary was unwilling to discuss with Mary, and when the women refused to leave the House of Commons, MacArthur and Margaret McMillan were physically ejected while some of their comrades were arrested.

Mary strongly opposed the first world war, but nonetheless took on the role of secretary to the Ministry of Labour's central committee on women's employment.

MacArthur was a 'firm believer in universal rather than purely women's suffrage, and she had been careful not to allow the fight for the vote to become confused with her campaigns for better pay and conditions. She was well aware that success depended to a great extent on the support of the male trade unionist and politicians. When, at the end of the war, women aged 30 and over were given the vote, and were allowed for the first time to stand for Parliament, Mary saw her next challenge'.

After becoming politically active, Mary met William Crawford Anderson, the chairman of the executive committee of the Independent Labour Party. They married in 1911, ten years after he first proposed. Their first child died at birth in 1913, and daughter Anne Elizabeth was born in 1915.

After the Representation of the People Act 1918 had enfranchised women over the age of thirty and the Parliament (Qualification of Women) Act 1918 allowed women to stand for Parliament, MacArthur stood as Labour Party candidate at the General Election on 14 December 1919.

The returning officer insisted that she was listed under her married name of Mrs W.C. Anderson. MacArthur was defeated, as were most anti-war candidates, including her husband, William Anderson, who was defending Sheffield, Attercliffe. However, MacArthur continued her work with the Women's Trade Union League and played an important role in transforming it into the Women's section of the Trade Union Congress.

William died in the 1919 influenza epidemic. Mary died of cancer on 1 January 1921, at the age of 40, in Golders Green, London.

The Mary MacArthur Scholarship Fund and Mary MacArthur Educational Trust were established in 1922 and 1968 respectively, with the aims "to advance the educational opportunities of working women".  Her name and picture (and those of 58 other women's suffrage supporters) are on the plinth of the statue of Millicent Fawcett in Parliament Square, London, unveiled in 2018. There is an annual festival organised by local trade unionists each July in Cradley Heath to commemorate the 1910 chain makers' strike.