Breaking Their Chains: Mary Macarthur and the Chainmakers’ Strike of 1910By: Tony Barnsley

For two months in the autumn of 1910, hundreds of women chain makers in the Black Country struck against their employers and won a minimum wage which doubled their incomes. Women who had no vote, were largely illiterate, worked a 54-hour week for a pittance and had to take their children to work with them took on their bosses and proved their economic power. Tony Barnsley tells the largely forgotten story of the strike, a prelude to the Great Unrest which swept Britain in 1911 and of the remarkable figure of Mary Macarthur, the woman who led the campaign.