International Working Women's Day - Part Two

Welcome to part two of my seven-part series on awesome women from history. This time, I'll be focusing on Mary Barbour.

In 1915, thirty-year-old Mary Barbour was living in Govan, Glasgow. The men were mostly away at war, and the landlords of the area - thinking that the women would be unable to resist - had raised rents to extortionate levels. They had already met with some resistance - along with Mary Laird and Helen Crawfurd, Mary Barbour had founded the Glasgow Women's Housing Association to fight for the right to decent housing and affordable rents. There were many protests over rents in previous years - trade unions had been putting their weight behind the struggle for housing justice since 1910 - but it was in 1915, the second year of the First World War, that things came to a head. Barbour organised a rent strike. The tenants refused en masse to pay the rents the landlords asked of them, often driving off rent collectors with violence, and quickly found widespread support. The police, of course, attempted to evict the strikers, but the women from the housing association - collectively known as Mrs Barbour's Army - were more than willing to defend themselves and their fellow workers. The rent strikers were supported by mass demonstrations, and soon more strikes broke out across Glasgow and the surrounding area - by October of 1915, an estimated fifteen thousand people were refusing to pay rent. By November, a further five thousand had joined them, and trade unions were threatening to down tools if their demands were not met. On the 17th of November, all legal proceedings against the strikers were halted, and in December the Rents and Mortgage Interest Restriction Act was passed, reducing rents to their pre-war levels.

As a working-class woman, Mary Barbour understood that it is meaningless to talk of women's liberation without also talking of the end of capitalism. The majority of women in the world belong to what could broadly be called the global working class, and have to deal with the double whammy of capitalism and patriarchy - both of those are systems of unjust hierarchy, and both need to be abolished. A feminism  that does not address the intersection of gender and class is a feminism that ignores the interests of most of the world's women - a female prime minister doesn't mean shit if she enacts policies that further the oppression of marginalised women.

Mary Barbour understood intersectionality, not as an abstract idea, but as an everyday experience. She was a woman, so she experienced misogyny; she was working-class, so she knew what it was like to get the shitty end of the capitalist stick. Barbour would have none of the insistence that marginalised people settle for fighting single-issue campaigns, because she knew that people do not live single-issue lives. She helped organise the rent strikes, and was a dedicated anti-war activist, but she also started Glasgow's first family planning centre, to help women take control of their lives and their bodies. Mary Barbour has been commemorated in songs, poems, and plays, and I'm happy to add this (very small) celebration of her life to the historical record.