Mary
Macarthur, the daughter of John Macarthur and
Anne Martin, was born in Glasgow in 1880.
The couple had six children, but only three survived, all of them
girls. Mary attended the local school and after editing the school
magazine, decided she wanted to become a full-time writer.
In 1895 the family opened a drapery business in Ayr
and Mary was taken on as a book-keeper. John Macarthur
was a supporter of the Conservative Party
and an opponent of trade unions and sent his
daughter to observe a meeting of the Shop Assistants' Union. Mary
was converted to the cause of trade unions by a speech made by John
Turner about how badly some workers were being treated by their employers.
Mary became secretary of the Ayr branch and at socialist meeting
in the town, she met and fell in love with Will
Anderson, an active member of the Independent
Labour Party.
In 1902 Mary became friends with Margaret
Bondfield who encouraged her to attend the union's national conference.
Mary did, and was elected to the union's national executive. Mary's
political activities created conflict with her father who had a strong
hatred for socialism. Anderson proposed
marriage but Mary decided to pursue a career instead, and in 1903
moved to London where she became Secretary
of the Women's Trade Union League.
As well as her trade union activities, Macarthur
was an active member of the Independent Labour
Party in London where she worked closely with two other Scots,
James Keir Hardie and Ramsay
MacDonald. Macarthur was involved in the Exhibition
of Sweated Industries in 1905 and the formation of the Anti-Sweating
League in 1906. The following year she
founded the Women Worker, a monthly
newspaper for women trade unionists.
Mary Macarthur was an inspirational figure and recruited many women
into the movement. This included Dorothy Jewson
and Susan Lawrence, who both went on
to become Labour Party MPs. Active in the
fight for the vote, she was totally opposed to those women in the
NUWSS and the WSPU
who were willing to accept the franchise being given to only certain
categories of women. Macarthur believed that a limited franchise would
disadvantage the working class and feared that it might act as a barrier
against the granting of full adult suffrage. This made Macarthur unpopular
with middle class suffragettes who saw limited suffrage as an important
step in the struggle to win the vote.
Will
Anderson followed Macarthur down to London
and the couple married in 1911. Anderson was elected to the House
of Commons in 1914 but was defeated in 1918. Macarthur also stood
as a Labour candidate, but like the others
who opposed the First World War, she was defeated
in the 1918 General Election.
Mary was devastated when Will Anderson
died in the 1919 influenza epidemic.
She 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. Mary Macarthur
died of cancer on 1st January, 1921.
National Federation of Women
Women Workers
(1)
John Turner, an official of he Shop Assistants Union, met Mary Macarthur
in 1901.
I
visited Ayr to open a branch of the Union, and a fairly well-attended
meeting was held in a rather dark and dreary schoolroom in an obscure
part of the town. Among those present I noticed an animated group
of young ladies in the centre of the room, with a laughing, vivacious,
fair-haired girl in their midst. I immediately turned my attention
to them, and I remember even now that I felt I had got to arrest the
attention of this part of the audience if we were to get a branch
opened. As soon as I sat down, and questions had been answered, I
made straight for this group, and asked the fair-haired girl (who,
I could tell was the leader) whether I could persuade her to join
the Union. This seemed to surprise her, and she smilingly said she
feared she was not eligible. I then learned that she was engaged in
her father's business, and therefore she expected it was not possible
for her to join. She, however, frankly said that she thought all the
young ladies (who, she told me, were assistants in her father's shop)
should join.
(2)
Margaret Bondfield, A Life's Work
(1948)
In
1902 Mary Macarthur came as a delegate, and leader of the Scottish
contingent, to the Newcastle Conference of the Union. I had written
to welcome her into the Union, but, when she came to meet me at the
station, I was overcome with the sense of a great event. Here was
genius, allied to boundless enthusiasm and leadership of a high order,
coming to build our little Union into a more effective instrument.
(3)
During the First World War Mary Macarthur was
active in the National Federation of Women Workers. Margaret
Bondfield, wrote about her activities in a A Life's Work
(1948)
Mary
Macarthur had endeavoured for a long time to get a minimum wage ruling
for a very large class of operatives in munitions work. In 1916 she
had secured an award from the Munitions Tribunal for an increase in
the wage rate for a large firm in the Newcastle area employing 8,000
women. Week after week went by, and still the firm was not given authority
to pay the increased rate.
One morning Mary was rung up, and the furious voice of Winston Churchill,
Minister of Munitions, asked her in effect what did she think she
was up to, allowing the girls to stop work. Mary answered that the
girls had waited patiently for the wages award granted them three
months ago. She had not advised them to come out, and she would not
advise them to go back until the firm was instructed not only to pay
the rate, but promptly to pay the back money.
It was a stay-in strike, and the girls sat on their seats before the
machines, knitting socks for soldiers. Within twenty-four hours the
authorization to pay the rates came to the firm and work was resumed.
(4)
Editorial, Time
and Tide
(27th February, 1925)
The growing unrest which culminated in the Dock Strike of 1889
stimulated the organised women to revolt in the sweated trades of
matchmaking and laundry work. Meetings held by the Amalgamated Society
of Laundresses to protest against their exclusion from the Factory
and Workshops Bill of 1891, enlisted public sympathy on their side.
Women's unions - some eighty or ninety - sprang up under the auspices
of the League, most of which expired through lack of money and of
co-ordinated direction. It was not until 1903 that the woman capable
of supplying both those essentials to successful agitation appeared
upon the horizon. Her name was Mary Macarthur.
In amalgamating all these
isolated efforts in the National Federation of Women Workers, Miss
Macarthur rendered an
inestimable service to the cause of the woman worker. Without her
opportune support the strike among women employed at Millwall Food
Preserving Factory, and those of the Cradley Heath Chainmakers and
the Kilburnie netmakers would have been doomed to failure. Relief
from their starvation wages and intolerable conditions was largely
due to Miss Macarthur's able championship of their claims. As a result
the membership of the Federation rapidly increased, and the movement
spread from the ranks of industrial workers to the equally underpaid
but better educated women employed in the distributive trades. To
the establishment of Trade Boards, in 1909, for the purpose of regulating
women's as well as men's wages, Miss Macarthur lent all her energy
and influence. This innovation had the double effect of imposing minimum
wage-rates in sweated industries and of demonstrating to the workers
engaged therein the value
of Union backing.
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