Female Involvement in the Miners' Strike 1984-1985: Trajectories of Activism by Jean Spence and Carol Stephenson University of Durham; University of Northumbria Sociological Research Online, Volume 12, Issue 1, < http://www.socresonline.org.uk/12/1/spence.html> doi:10.5153/sro.1461 Received: 8 Sep 2005 Accepted: 23 Jan 2007 Published: 31 Jan 2007 Abstract This paper is based on recent primary research interviews with women who were active in the 1984-1985 miners' strike. The paper claims that one depiction of women's engagement in the strike has been privileged above others: activist women were miners' wives who embarked on a linear passage from domesticity and political passivity into politicisation and then retreated from political engagement following the defeat. This depiction is based on a masculinist view which sees political action as organisationally based and which fails to recognise the importance of small scale and emotional political work which women did and continue to undertake within their communities. In reality many women were politically active and aware prior to the dispute though not necessarily in a traditional sense. Women's activism is characterised by continuity: those women who have maintained activism were likely to have been socially and/or politically active prior to the dispute. Keywords: Miners' Strike, Masculine Understandings of Female Activism Introduction 1.1 [1] A popular reading of women’s participation in the 1984-5 Miners’ Strike suggests that this was a singular moment of working class female activism. Media representations from the period, including photographs, newspaper reports and the women’s own publications show them in collective kitchens, at community and cultural events, at rallies and on picket lines (e.g. The Times, June 18th 1984,2; Coventry Miners’ Wives Support Group 1986). At one level the messages being communicated speak of the value of the traditional roles of support and sustenance associated with women and mining. At another they focus upon the importance of a politicised and self directing female organisation and activism. The message, which is also reflected in other literature associated with the strike is that the women’s struggle was exemplified by their adopting both roles and that it was this combination which ensured that their campaign was particularly powerful (ed. Samuel et al, 1986; ed. Seddon, 1986). The miners’ strike apparently drew upon and reaffirmed traditional female roles whilst at the same time creating the circumstances whereby these roles became articulated with the class struggle by drawing women into the arena of trade union political action. The process of engagement with the strike is often understood to have radicalised the women, precipitating their engagement with class, labour and gender issues in a manner which extended the reach of, but at the same time was consonant with traditional industrial politics (ed. Beynon, 1985; Rowbotham and McCrindle, 1986) 1.2 It is possible to deduce from these characterisations of women in the strike a simple narrative of linear progression from individual/family concerns, to collective action, to political engagement (Coulter et al, 1984). The idea of the strike as a journey towards political consciousness which at one and the same time both reaffirmed and transformed class and gender identities, retains its influence in the public imagination and is apparent in recent historical characterisations, exemplified by the BBC1 Drama, Faith, (first shown in February 2005). However, a number of commentators have suggested that this model is too simple. For example, in 1991 Waddington et al. argued that the impact of the strike upon the political awareness of all those involved had been exaggerated (p148) both in terms of socialist and feminist understanding. Echoing some of the findings of this study, Shaw’s research (1993) describes for some a movement away from political activity back into private concerns, expressed as a desire to ‘return to normal’ and to pick up the pieces of disrupted lives in the years immediately following the strike. Strangleman’s work meanwhile (2001), demonstrates that by the end of the century, the strong community networks which were so important to the political solidarity of the strike are now more likely to be mobilised as welfare support