It wasn’t fair and I wasn’t having it. I called a meeting
– Campaigning MP Maria Fyfe
Maria Fyfe, a former Scottish Labour MP who died at 82 in December, was a lifelong campaigner for women’s rights and equality. In this abridged excerpt from Don’t Run, she remembers her first and last campaigns.
The first campaign
After school, I worked at the Gas Board. I was a secretary. I was promoted to work for a high-level boss and that was when I took up my first battle.
I discovered that all secretarial staff were paid less than the clerical staff. I thought: this is wrong, as you can’t get a secretarial job at any level without training in shorthand and typing and other secretarial skills at your own expense, yet we’re paid less than people who have come straight out of school and done nothing extra. It was not fair, so I took it up in the union. Our male members said: “Och, it’s us that compose the letters, all you do is type them”. I wasn’t having that and got a meeting of the women together and said: “Even our union isn’t listening and the management certainly will not listen if the union doesn’t. Why don’t we, for one day, type exactly what is dictated to us, with all the umms and errs and bits that should be left out, kept in. If he coughs type caa caa caa and don’t correct grammar.” We chortled to ourselves as we carried out our plan. That happened for one day and the management said: “OK, we’ll discuss this with the union, but we’ll do it through the whole Scottish system and we will set up a working party to decide which job is equivalent to which.”
Here is the annoying bit. By the time this happened I was engaged to Jim Fyfe. He was working as a railway clerk and our plan was that he should go to university and get a degree first, I would go later. However, the wife of a student who had received the married student grant could not do full-time work, so I had to leave. That was the rule then, so I never saw the benefit of the change in pay that we had won.
The last campaign
When I retired, I got involved in a socialist women’s choir. One of their songs was Mrs Barbour’s Army. You could get the impression from the song that Mary Barbour had risen from obscurity, ran a successful campaign against rising rents and landlordism during the early 1900s and then disappeared again. I thought this very unlikely, so I researched her and found she was an amazing woman who was in the Independent Labour Party, organised a women’s housing association, campaigned against slum housing and in 1915 led a campaign that forced the government to put rents down to pre-war levels.
I started raising the issue, pointing out that Mary went on to be a councillor, one of the first women to do so, she was then a bailie, all the while promoting policies and practical action to advance the cause of working-class families.
I was asked to chair a campaign to create something in her memory. A statue was eventually erected at Govan Cross and is serving its purpose well, not just commemorating this Red Clydeside hero, but as a reminder that you can fight injustice and win.
If I look back on my political life, I would advise people never to give up if you care about an issue. Stick at it and persuade people of your case. Nothing happens without struggle, but you can win. If you don’t fight you certainly will not win.
There is no benign overlord who will make things happen, it is up to you and me.