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Helen Crawfurd ( Jack, later Anderson; 9 November 1877 – 18 April 1954) was a Scottish suffragette, rent strike organiser, Communist activist and politician. Born in Glasgow, she was brought up there and in London.
Initially religious herself and a Sunday School teacher, Crawfurd felt a call to be married at 21 to the 67-year-old widower Alexander Montgomerie Crawfurd (29 August 1828 – 31 May 1914), a Church of Scotland minister and family friend. However, she became increasingly radical, after witnessing injustices, and what she deemed to be "un-Christian" behaviour from the Church.A. T. Lane, ed., Biographical Dictionary of European Labor Leaders, Vol. 1, pp. 224–226. For example, not helping widows financially before they had sold all their belongings in their home. Alexander died, aged 85, at 17 Sutherland Street in Partick, Glasgow.
In 1944, Crawfurd remarried, to widower George Anderson of Anderson Brothers Engineers, Coatbridge. Her second husband was a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain. George Anderson died on 2 February 1952 and Crawfurd two years later at Mahson Cottage, Kilbride Avenue, Dunoon, Argyll, aged 76.
During WWI, Crawfurd was involved with the Red Clydeside movement, including the Glasgow rent strikes in 1915 when she led the South Govan Women's Housing Association to resist rent increases and prevent evictions, alongside Mary Barbour, Mary Laird, Mary Jeff, Jessie Stephen and Agnes Dollan. Crawfurd had co-founded the Glasgow branch of the Women's International League and become secretary of the Women's Peace Crusade. By then she had met Agnes Harben and others, who held the same international perspectives. On 23 July 1916, Crawfurd organised the first demonstration of the Women's Peace Crusade, which was attended by 5,000. Crawfurd formed a branch of the United Suffragists in Glasgow. These women used the realms of domesticity entrenched within society to support their campaign, known as "Wives and Weans Socialism".
Crawfurd ran in 1921 as the first Communist Party candidate in the Govan ward of Glasgow.
In 1927, Crawfurd was an official delegate to the Brussels International Conference against Oppressed Nationalities, at which the League against Imperialism was established. Crawfurd joined the executive of the British section.
Crawfurd stood for the CPGB in Bothwell at the 1929 general election, and Aberdeen North in 1931, but did not come close to being elected.
During the 1930s, Crawfurd was prominent in the Friends of the Soviet Union. She unsuccessfully stood for Dunoon Town Council in 1938. However, she was elected as Dunoon's first woman town councillor shortly after the war, but retired from it in 1947 due to poor health. Crawfurd Helen, Compendium of Communist Biography Helen Crawfurd (by then Mrs Anderson) died in 1954 at Mahson Cottage, Kilbride Avenue, Dunoon, Argyll, aged 76.
Crawfurd was also memorialised in 2024 in stained glass window by Artist Keira McLean in Glasgow's Woodside Library, working with young people from the local community. The window also features Suffragette Jessie Soga and was co-designed with young people from SiMY Community Development in Townhead. Artist McLean said "there are so many forgotten histories of people who made a real difference' to Glasgow, and that the window is "restoring the neglected histories of communities often marginalised or dismissed.” The unveiling of the window took place at an event hosted by Glasgow Life on 5 September 2024 and featured new musical arrangements by Musician Lorna Morgan of the Holloway Jingles poems written by imprisoned suffragettes. Historical information about Jessie Soga and Helen Crawfurd was shared by Clare Thompson from Protests and Suffragettes.
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