Mary Macarthur

Macarthur founded the National Federation of Women Workers in 1906 for women in "sweated" trades that men's unions ignored, and campaigned for the Trade Boards Act 1909, which set legal minimum wages in chain-making, box-making and tailoring. The next year she led the women chainmakers of Cradley Heath, in the Black Country, on a ten-week strike that forced employers to pay the new rate. Trade boards became wages councils, the ancestor of Britain's national minimum wage.