Tuesday 17 May 2016

Dare to be Free






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THE Mary Quaile Club will be launching its second publication; Dare to Be Free : women  in trade unions, past and present as part of the Manchester Histories Festival. The event is free.
This will take place   on Saturday 4 June at Three Minute Theatre,  Afflecks Arcade, 35-39  Oldham Street Manchester M1 1JG,   The launch  will start at 2pm.  The authors will be present, as will Sarah Woolley (BFAWU) and Nilufer Erdem (UNITE) . At 3.30pm  there will be the final performance  of  Dare to Be Free, a play about Mary Quaile, written by Jane McNulty.
In the first part  historian Michael Herbert  tells the remarkable story of Mary Quaile (1886-1958). An Irish migrant from Dublin to Manchester,  Mary rose from working as a  cafe waitress to fame as one of the most active women trade unionists in Britain. She organised women workers through the Manchester and Salford Women’s Trades Council, and later as a national officer in TGWU. In 1925 she led a TUC delegation of British women trade unionists to the Soviet Union to see this new society for themselves.  For   fifty years Mary never wavered from her belief that trade unions were the key to women achieving
In the second part journalist and writer Bernadette Hyland  interviews ten women of 2016  from different unions  about  how  and why they became active in the trade  union movement. Working in both the public and private sector, and of different ages, they too are united in their belief that trade unionism can make a real difference to the lives of working women and men.

More information about this event can be found here.

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