Breaking Their Chains

Mary Macarther and the Chainmakers' Strike of 1910

Plot

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.