Complexities of class and gender relations: Recollections of women active in the 1984-5 miner's strike

Capital & Class, Autumn 2005 by Shaw, Monica, Mundy, Mave

Based on qualitative data collected from women who were activists in the 1984-85 miner's strike in Northumberland and County Durham, this paper challenges romanticised and over-simplistic accounts of women's participation in the 1984-5 miner's strike. Interview data from two periods-1985-7 and 2002-4-is used in order to illustrate the ambivalence and contradictions of women's experience in relation to four themes: personal strength and vulnerability; solidarity, support and betrayal; solidarity amongst women, and the dilemmas of sisterhood; and solidarity with men, and power struggles. In so doing, the paper explores complexities of class and gender in the context of the strike.

Introduction

This fight does not just belong to the men, it belongs a us all ... In this country we aren't just separated s a class. We are separated as men and women. We, as women, have not often been encouraged to be involved actively in trade unions and organising. Organisation has always been seen as an area belonging to men. We are seen to be the domesticated element of the family. This for too many years has been the role expected of us. I have seen a change coming for years and the last few weeks has seen it at its best. If this government thinks its fight is only with miners they are sadly mistaken. They are now fighting men, women and families. (Lorraine Bowler in Barmley Women Against Pit Closures [1984] p. 23)

Lorraine Bowler delivered these stirring words to around 10,000 women, many from the evolving networks of mining support groups across the UK, at a milestone rally organised in May 1984 by Barnsley Women Against Pit Closures (WAPC)1. By this time, the 1984-5 strike was into its third month, and women's active support was gathering pace. The consensus in the literature is that they were galvanised into action by the need to combat hardship and poverty, felt initially by single striking miners and then families, caused by the draconian strike benefit rules imposed by the government.

The origins of the women's involvement are thus thought to lie in their traditional domestic role, with the organisation of fundraising, communal kitchens and food parcels seen as an extension of skills deployed in the home, and this was certainly one dominant image of them in the media (Seddon, i986;Witham, 1986; Phillips, 1987; Stead, 1987; Alien, 2001). As the strike wore on, the most active became engaged in extensive networking and fundraising both in the UK and abroad, and spoke alongside men on national and international political and trade union platforms.

Some participated in militant protests on picket lines, at times against the wishes of their menfolk and the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM). Comparing the extent and range of women's activities, their self-organisation and their staying-power with that of previous miner's disputes has led most commentators to consider that the women's action was unprecedented (Witham, 1986; Warwick & Littlejohn, 1992; Alien, 2001). It has been more temperately observed that the majority of women in mining communities were not active or active to the same degree in this dispute (Winterton & Winterton, 1989; Waddington et al., 1991; Mclntryre, 1992), although many participated in less visible forms of support through the help they provided and received from extended family and friendship networks (Measham & Allen, 1994).

Lorraine Bowler's Barnsley speech captured the potential tensions of women's mobilisation in the complex context of class and gender relations in traditional mining communities. The extent to which women's political consciousness was raised and gender relations transformed as a result have been dominant themes in the social science literature on women's role in the strike. The women's action was greeted with surprise and enthusiasm by those who considered that women had finally crossed the private-public divide in mining communities, and 'no longer identified themselves as "just" housewives and mothers, but as political beings' (Coulter et al., 1984: 204). Apart from containing implicit stereotypes of mining communities, such views have been criticised for the androcentric assumptions they make about what constitutes a 'political being' (Measham & Allen, 1994). For some, the possibility that women were 'no longer doormats' led to the view that a new working-class women's movement had been born (Segal, 1987: 23; Stead, 1987) that was feminist-inspired. This persisted even when women from mining communities contested such ideas (McCrindle, 1986).

Studies confirm that, during the strike, most women from mining communities did not think of themselves as feminists, the concept conjuring images of women whose values and lifestyle threatened family life and relationships with men (Loach, 1985; Bloomfield, 1985, 1987; Gibbon & Steyne, 1986; Shaw, 1993).

Rejection of the label 'feminist' was thought to signify class rather than gender identity as the basis of the women's action, with women in mining communities considered to have 'more in common with their working class "oppressors" than with their middle-class "sisters'" (Ali, 1986: 102). But there was evidence, as well, that gender relations were contested during the strike as women asserted their right to a place in it (Loach, 1985; Gibbon & Steyne, 1986; Shaw, 1993; Allen, 2001).