Helen Crawfurd

Helen Crawfurd was a Glasgow suffragette and firebrand who was jailed three times for the vote, helped to lead the great rent strikes of 1915, and went on to become one of the best-known women of the British left. From a Gorbals childhood to an audience with Lenin, hers was a remarkable life of protest.

From the Gorbals to the Church

Born Helen Jack in the Gorbals in 1877, the daughter of a master baker, she was a devout young woman and, at twenty-one, married an elderly Church of Scotland minister. But the injustices she witnessed, and what she came to see as the un-Christian conduct of the Church towards the poor, turned her step by step into a radical.

The militant suffragette

About 1910 Crawfurd joined the Women’s Social and Political Union, the militant suffragettes led by Emmeline Pankhurst. She was imprisoned three times for the cause, once for smashing a government minister’s windows, and once going on hunger strike after being arrested at a Pankhurst rally in Glasgow. When the WSPU threw its support behind the First World War, she broke with it and turned instead to socialism and the cause of peace.

The rent strikes

In 1915, as landlords raised rents on a city crowded with war workers, Crawfurd was one of the women who led the resistance. As a leader of the South Govan Women’s Housing Association she stood alongside Mary Barbour against rent rises and evictions, in the movement that became one of the famous victories of Red Clydeside, the subject of our post on what Red Clydeside was. She also founded the Women’s Peace Crusade, whose first demonstration she led before a crowd of five thousand.

Communism and Lenin

After the war Crawfurd moved further to the left. In 1920 she travelled to Moscow for the Congress of the Communist International and met Lenin himself. She became a founder member of the Communist Party of Great Britain, served on its central committee and was its first national women’s organiser, and she once shared a Glasgow platform with the revolutionary John Maclean. Her life was woven through the radical politics of her age.

A life remembered

In her later years Crawfurd settled in Dunoon, where she became the town’s first woman councillor. She died there in 1954. Long overlooked, she has lately been honoured in her native city, including a stained-glass window unveiled in her memory in Glasgow in 2024.