Mary Reid Anderson (née Macarthur; 13 August 1880 – 1 January 1921) was a Scottish suffragist (although at odds with the national groups who were willing to let a minority of women gain the franchise)[1][2] and was a leading trades unionist.

[8] After becoming politically active, Mary met and eventually married William Crawford Anderson, the chairman of the executive committee of the Independent Labour Party, in 1911, ten years after he first proposed.

[2] Macarthur's view was 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.

[5] Then in 1908, after six weeks in hospital with diphtheria, she presented findings of her research (in poorer areas of the capital), with sweated homeworking women, to the House of Commons Select Committee on Home Working.

[5] A form of minimum wage law, the Trade Board Act 1909 was eventually passed from the activism and the evidence Macarthur and others had gathered and the changes that she had lobbied for.

The highlight was a mass rally in Southwark Park where the blistering oratory of Macarthur was backed up by suffragists Sylvia Pankhurst, Charlotte Despard and George Lansbury.

[15] In 1911, Macarthur also married William Crawford Anderson,[16] chairman of the executive committee of the Labour party,[5] who was from 1914 to 1918 member for the Attercliffe division of Sheffield.

McKenna was unwilling to talk to them and when the women refused to leave the House of Commons, Macarthur and Margaret McMillan were physically ejected but Evelyn Sharp and Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence were arrested and sent to Holloway Prison.

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 also opposed by Victor Fisher of the National Democratic and Labour Party, who had the support of the Coalition, secret funding from the Unionists, and ran a particularly abusive campaign.

[5] An exhibition commemorating Macarthur is displayed in the Cradley Heath Workers' Institute, which has been rebuilt at the Black Country Living Museum.

[22] Awards are made in memory of "pioneers of trade unionism",[22] Mary Macarthur, Emma Paterson, Lady Dilke and Jessie Stephen.

On the eve of International Women's Day 2017, a blue plaque was unveiled at her home at 42 Woodstock Road in Golders Green,[25] where she lived while she was at her most prominent.

[26] 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.

[30] There is an annual festival organised by local trade unionists each July in Cradley Heath to commemorate the 1910 chain makers' strike.