Principles and picket lines

Don’t judge a book by its cover, the saying goes – an apposite warning when it comes to Women And The Miners’ Strike, 1984–1985. Martin Shakeshaft’s image of singing protesters marching down a Valleys street beneath a banner for Maerdy Women’s Support Group syncs with what has become the prevailing narrative: that many women became vociferously involved in and politicised by the strike – just one aspect of its significant transformation of British society.

But Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite and Natalie Thomlinson’s book is in fact a sobering corrective to that story in many ways, suggesting that the seismic political, social and cultural impact of the strike in the popular imagination has been overstated – including (and perhaps especially) with respect to women. The reality, the researchers reveal, was much more complex.

They do so not by synthesising previous studies, published memoirs and partisan literature but by refracting them through the lens of interviews that they have themselves conducted with a diverse array of women around the country, including some who actively opposed the strike. The primacy afforded to these oral histories is a distinguishing feature of the book; the researchers’ scholarly predecessors have often relied heavily only on the views of left-wing women activists and feminist propagandists who had a vested interest in promoting the now predominant narrative, or (remarkably) even neglected to consider women’s own personal accounts at all.

Sutcliffe-Braithwaite and Thomlinson begin by arguing that the overstatement of the strike’s effects for women has arisen in part because of an understatement of social and economic shifts that had taken place over the post-war decades before strike action started. For instance, by 1984, many miners’ wives already enjoyed the relative independence that came through paid labour and productive activity outside the home.

Throughout the book, the authors adopt a scepticism towards accounts of the strike that paint it in black and white, emphasising instead the grey areas. Just as the extent of strike action varied not only inter-regionally but intra-regionally (including in South Wales, generally regarded as a hotbed of radicalism), so too did the level of women’s political engagement. Communities and commitments were divided to differing degrees, and women’s stances were largely more motivated by loyalty to their husbands than by loftier political or ideological goals.

Sutcliffe-Braithwaite and Thomlinson uncover the stories of women belonging to an offshoot of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) who were employed in a colliery canteen but who continued to work because their wages were supporting their striking husbands. Only a minority of women joined support groups like the one featured on the book’s cover, and incredibly those groups sometimes experienced friction and hostility from the very people they were set up to help; some miners and union reps, the authors argue, felt emasculated by women’s presence on the picket line and their work to put food on the table in makeshift soup kitchens.

Even those who did engage in such activities often saw themselves as “ordinary” women rather than as activists whose interest in politics had been sparked by the strike. Similarly, most did not subscribe to feminists’ framing of the support groups as empowering, regarding the women’s liberation movement ambivalently and warily as a middle-class phenomenon. If a form of feminist heroism does emerge from the book’s pages, it is quiet rather than triumphant. The focus on women’s lived experiences draws attention to the realities of everyday domestic life and to the resilience, ingenuity and thrift they needed to keep their families afloat in the face of increasing hardship.

As time wore on, the stress and strain grew, solidarities splintered and defiance waned. When the strike ended, a year after it had begun, some women continued their political or community activism – but most support groups disbanded and the entrenched gendered division of labour within households and communities largely re-emerged. Sutcliffe-Braithwaite and Thomlinson note that, far from being grateful for or desirous of change, most women simply wanted a return to “normal”.

Women And The Miners’ Strike 1984–1985 is a carefully constructed social history of how the strike was actually experienced, as well as a critical analysis of how it has been remembered. Avoiding the pitfalls of sweeping generalisations or grand narratives, the authors instead offer a clear-sighted and fascinating insight into the “messy reality”.

(An edited version of this review appeared on the Buzz website.)