Women of the British coalfields on strike in 1926 and 1984: Documenting lives using oral history and photography

Frontiers, 1998 by Gier-Viskovatoff, Jaclyn J, Porter, Abigail

Mrs. Evans fach, you want butter again How will you pay for it now, little woman With your husband out on strike, and full

Of the fiery language?-Idris Davies, "The Angry Summer. A Poem of 1926"

Most Rhondda women are ambidextrous. They can throw just as well with their left hands as with their right.-Glamorgan Free Press, July 10, 1926

What is this feminism anyway? I don't think I am a feminist, but if what we're doing [in the women's support group] is helping the women, then I guess we're feminists, too.

-Margaret Donovan, South Wales Women's Support Group, March 12, 1985

Throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, women played an active role in various forms of community-based social protest in Great Britain. But as industrialization progressed, the emergence of a distinct sexual division of labor and a gradual separation of work and home redefined gender roles and relations. With the rise of a largely male labor movement in Britain that derived its structures of support from the male-dominated coal industry, avenues for political protest became increasingly formalized in mining communities. Moreover, the nineteenth century witnessed the development of a domestic ideology associated with industrialization that further circumscribed the role of women, limiting the scope and acceptability of female forms of protest. While changes in both the nature and base of social and political activism curtailed the use of some popular forms of protest by women, certain elements have remained part of the repertoire of vernacular culture in coalfield society even to the present day.

A comparison between the tactics used by women protestors during the Great Lockout of 1926 and the protest activities of women during the Great Miners' Strike of 1984-85 suggests a number of common themes.1 These forms of popular protest reveal an underlying continuity in the construction of gender relations and the reinforcement of community values associated with them during periods of communal crisis. They are also difficult to ascertain because women's protests have generally occurred outside the institutional organs of labor, such as trade unions and the Labour Party. The use of oral history and photography provide another avenue, alongside conventional research methods, for reconstructing the history of mining community women in the twentieth century.

The Tradition of Womens Protests in Mining Communities

The history of female popular protest in British mining regions points to an older tradition of protests by women that suggests a continuity of form, if not content, in women's activism. The historical evidence is highly evocative when viewed in relation to the protests of women in twentieth-century mining communities. It is critical to understanding more contemporary forms of female popular agitation and the role they play in the formation of a collective political identity. Incidents of female protest against community "blacklegs" (men who continued to work in the mines during periods of strike) have been documented for the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. During the 1873 lockout, Dowlais women and girls publicly denounced the blackleg miners with cries of "turncoat."2 Men who refused to join the union, like strikebreakers, were similarly abused, as in a 1906 episode in Maesteg in which the miners' wives splashed the unlucky victim with pig slop, removed his shirt, and painted him with blacklead (a type of graphite commonly used on fireplace grates).3

The blackleg miners were sometimes taunted with poles hung with women's clothing-a symbolic questioning of their manhood. By the 1920s and 1930s, this practice, known as "white shirting," was a common and largely female tactic for intimidating blackleg miners. Oral testimony relating to strikes in the 1920s confirms the effectiveness of this method:

There was a man that was lodging in the village here and he went to work. And so we women got together, we decided to go to the pit to meet him coming out. And we had sticks and brooms, you know, like you had and one of our members pinned a white nightdress on a broom and we marched right to the pit and waited for him to come out. And when he came out we marched behind him bleating and whatyoucall until he came up to a house up here in the avenue where he was lodging and we chanted outside and then went away to our homes, like. And we heard the next morning that he had gone away in the night.4

Menna Gallie, a Welsh novelist from the anthracite mining area of South Wales, recalled in an interview the following incident from her childhood:

I was still a child, you see, at the time of the 1926 strike, and I remember hearing a lot of noise outside one evening and, peeking through the curtains, I was terrified to see this man being paraded down the street. He looked as though he'd been tarred and feathered, anyway he was covered in black and white and the crowd was carrying him on their shoulders and quite a lot of shouting and screaming going on. He must have been a blackleg.5