Mary named her younger children after some of the notable political figures of the day: John Cartwright, Thomas Paine and Henry Hunt.

[2][3] The London radical journalist Richard Carlile, who was present at the rally, described her as a heroic figure and gave her a prominent place in his print of the event, 'To Henry Hunt Esquire'.

The Manchester and Salford Yeomanry arrived first, and once Hunt had been arrested they attacked the platform and those around it, seizing and destroying flags and banners and causing panic.

The regular troops arriving soon afterwards charged to clear the field, causing further casualties; the eventual toll was eighteen killed and nearly seven hundred seriously injured.

Other female reformers including Hargreaves and Gaunt, apparently mistaken for Fildes, were beaten up, arrested, and detained for many days without charge.

When the next year the London reformer Francis Place sent her a package of birth control propaganda to distribute, mistaking her for a midwife cousin of her husband's, she wrote 'as a woman, a wife, and a mother' to radical journals to denounce 'this infamous handbill'.

[1] [7] She remained a reformer, speaking at a meeting in Heywood, Lancashire, in 1833 to launch a branch of the Female Political Union,[8] and giving lectures on 'War' at Chorlton near Manchester in 1843,[9] both advertised in the radical press.

In 1854, she travelled to Liverpool, home of her indigent son James and his Irish wife, and brought her eleven-year-old grandson Luke Fildes to live with her in Chester.