THIS month marks the centenary of the first law giving women – or at least some of them – the vote.

And MP Jake Berry thought it was time to pay tribute to one of the East Lancashire campaign leaders – Martha Jane Bury of Darwen.

Martha Jane, a prominent Suffragist – unlike their sisters the Suffragettes, they took a peaceful approach to securing the vote – is buried in Darwen Cemetery, where she is known as The White Lady.

Local historian Tony Foster showed Jake around and told him all about her fight for the poor and the downtrodden and, of course, her fight for women's rights.

Said Jake, MP for Rossendale and Darwen: "I had heard a lot about Martha Jane and thought this was an ideal opportunity to pay my respects."

Next month it's International Women's Day, a concept unheard of in Martha's time when women generally knew their place and stayed out of the limelight.

Martha's father died when she was two. She left school when she was 10 because the family needed the pittance she earned in the mill.

But she was determined to make something of her life even then. She went to night school and Sunday School and read avidly.

She was a social activist who joined the Co-operative Women's Guild and supported women's suffrage and took a keen interest in divorce law reform.

Born in 1850, she was 32 when she married John William Bury, who became a mill manager. They lived at the bottom of St Alban's Road and had two daughters, although one died in infancy.

Martha never forgot her working-class roots. She stood up all her life for the poor and the old, the ailing and the infirm.

She fought hard to make a better world for them, often in the face of strong opposition, not only from the menfolk but from women officials in the Co-op movement.

Martha Jane proved that a woman's practical knowledge as a wife and mother was invaluable and she and her friends finally won over the menfolk of East Lancashire.

She was in the first group of four women to be elected as a Guardian to the Blackburn Poor Law Union. Later, a long-standing member of the Co-op movement, she addressed audiences throughout the country.

Tony Foster has studied avidly the life of Martha Jane Bury and pointed out the rather quaint motto beneath her white marble statue in the Non-Conformist section of the old cemetery.

Nothing flowery, nothing to record her many achievements; it simply says: "She did what she could."

Said Jake: "Martha was certainly a modest and unassuming woman. She would have been more than pleased with that epitaph."

• Tony is giving a talk at the Heritage Centre on Tuesday, March 13 about Darwen's prominent women, entitled: 'In the thick of it.'