Women and the Miners' Strike, 1984-1985

Abstract Women and the Miners’ Strike, 1984–1985 is the first academic study of women’s experiences in the miners’ strike of 1984–5, in coalfields all around England, Scotland, and Wales. It uncovers how women’s activism to support the strike developed, the struggles activists had to support the strike, and their achievements—though it also qualifies the popular impression that the support movement was a mass uprising of apolitical coalfield women who were transformed for ever by their activism. It looks at experiences that are typically much less visible in accounts of the strike: the women who went out to work to support their families, who remained within the home during the strike, and even those who opposed the strike, offering their support to husbands who chose to work through the strike, or to return to work early. Through examining the stories of women and their varied experiences during the strike, the book sheds new light on working-class women’s relationship to ‘feminism’, to the ‘political’, and the ‘ordinary’, and demonstrates the ways in which gender roles, working-class lifestyles, and coalfield communities, had changed in Britain over the postwar period.