Miners' Strike and Labor Decline

Introduction

The miners’ strike is an important event in the employment market history of the UK; it led to the change in the economic and social trajectory of the UK and more importantly in the context of this dissertation, it led to the diminished value of the labour movement and collective bargaining (Crouch, 2007). The defeat of the miners is considered to be the pivotal point in the history of the trade unions and the collective identity at workplace movement in the UK because one of the important outcomes of the strike was that the collective bargaining of the miners was seen to be diminished (Adeney & Lloyd, 1986). The miners were not able to achieve the objectives that they had sought through the strike. In the bargain, the National Union of Mineworkers, which was at one time a formidable trade union organisation, came out looking much more diminished in the power it held over government. Till this period, trade unions were largely dominated by men as they represented by and large occupations that were male dominated. The NUM is an example of one such organisation that was dominated by men. The interesting aspect is how working class women participated in the miners’ strikes and how this participation also led to the politicisation of working women. Spence and Stephenson (2012) argue that this placed women participants in the strike, especially in the mining communities in ambigious roles as they were supporting a male dominated movement which also led to the engendering of the type of gender relations that are seen in the mining communities; on the other hand, women were getting politicised and talking of class struggle and management and union relationships. There may be some merit to this argument because the miners’ strike was largely a movement to safeguard the right of miners (who were men as women were not allowed to mine under the laws of the time), in which women were expected to play secondary role as supporters of the strike. However, as the strike progressed, the participation of women in the strike went beyond the miners’ communities as feminists, women labourers, and even lesbians joined in the miners’ strike. In many ways the objectives of these diverse group of women were not synchronised because while the mining communities were largely fighting to save their way of life, which was also generally patriarchal, the women from outside the communities were bringing in different kinds of political ideas into the movement. Women’s role in the strike therefore went much beyond the mining communities. Spence and Stephenson (2009) write that women standing with the men “in class struggle was directly grounded in the conditions of female existence although the emphasis in the benefits to be gained was different for men and women” (p. 73). This is an important point. Men and women had different areas of interests and different kinds of benefits to be gained from the strike but the common interest for both men and women arose from the mining activity itself. Women were not directly interested in the work or labour conditions in the mines because they had been excluded from underground mining under the Coal Mines Act of 1842, and were therefore not involved in the strike from the perspective of the labour rights. However, women were interested in the strike and in the outcomes of the strike because they were part of the mining communities, lived in mining housing, and drew sustenance from the industry through their male relatives labour in the industry. Therefore, they were indirectly but as importantly involved in the strike. At the same time, there is a criticism that women’s role in the strike is generally shown as transformative, as something that brought women outside the domestic space of their homes into a more political sphere. This point has been criticised by Spence and Stephenson (2009) who write that this dominant narrative of women’s participation in the miners strike does not take into account the “independent aspect to the community orientation of women in mining life” (p. 73). The dominant narrative of the typical woman strike activist is that of a miner’s wife in solidarity with her husband and the metamorphosis of a housewife to political activist (Spence & Stephenson, 2009). In an earlier paper, the same authors argue that one view on women participation in the strike is more privileged than the others, where the argument is that activist women were wives of miners who passed from domesticity and political passivity into politicisation due to the miners’ strike (Spence & Stephenson, 2007a). Spence and Stephenson (2007) argue that such a depiction of striking women is driven by a masculinist view with a tendency to view political action as organisationally based. They also argue that this dominant view ignores the fact that many women were politically active even prior to 1984 strike (Spence & Stephenson, 2007a). This view is also supported in another piece of research which is based on the South Wales strikes, in which Davies (2010) writes that women of that region had involved themselves in political and social activities even prior to the 1984 strike. Women’s involvement in the two world wars in the earlier period of the twentieth century and then receding back to home life is also important to understand how women were involved in otherwise male dominated activities from time to time prior to the miners’ strike. In Wales, which had seen considerable industrialisation for example, the period between 1960s and 1970s saw industrial growth in the clothing industry and electronics and electrical engineering, where women too were involved in the labour force (Davies, 2010). Therefore, women were already to some extent a part of the labour force and it would be incorrect to see women’s roles in the strike be given a predominant colour of traditional involvement as done in some literature. It would also be incorrect to homogenise the role of women in the miners’ strike because the strike itself played out in different cultural and geographical contexts.

On the other hand, there is scholarship on women participation in the miners strike, which emphasises on how the strike helped women break out of traditional roles and become more politicised (Stone, 1985). It is stated that in the isolated mining communities attitudes tend to be traditional and the miners’ strike saw women in the coalfields beginning to break out and their roles sometimes altered overnight (Stone, 1985). It is also important to note that women were involved in political activism as well as social activities grounded in neighbourhood; women were also involved in important points of industrial action, including the 1926 strike and lockout (Spence & Stephenson, 2007b). Female participation in labour struggles are documented in literature but it tends to get lost in the dominant male centric labour movements, which means that women activism tends to get consigned to secondary places in the history of labour struggle and labour movement (Spence & Stephenson, 2007b). Therefore, while not a part of the labour unions as such, women did play an important role through their own activism in the strike. Literature portrays women as playing the role of support groups in the strike (Sutcliffe-Braithwaite & Thomlinson, 2018), or at times leading the strike (Davies, 2010), or as coming out of traditional roles to become more politicised and then move back to their homes once the strike was over (Stone, 1985). Women did form a national group in the form of the National Women Against Pit Closures movement (NWAPC), which according to Sutcliffe-Braithwaite and Thomlinson (2018) was portrayed deliberately as a group of politically naïve miners’ wives for political reasons. However, even within this group, there were not just miners’ wives but also other women who were interested in the movement, there were also politically and ideologically driven groups within the larger national group which was interested in socialist feminism and used this group and movement for the furtherance of their political interests and goals (Sutcliffe-Braithwaite & Thomlinson, 2018). The latter would suggest that contrary to being politically naïve, many members of the group were driven by ideology that found its meaning in the miners’ strike.

First Chapter: Trade Unions and the government – Rising tensions and the rise of the new political class

This chapter explores the tensions between the trade unions and the government, and whether these tensions led to the rise of a new political class. This chapter explains the tensions as background to the miners’ strike. The chapter is based on data collected from historical literature. In a lecture, Beynon (2014) outlines three phases to the miners’ strike. In the first stage, the coalfields were divided into working areas and striking areas. In the second stage, there was a confrontation between striking miners and the government. In the third stage, the striking miners slowly returned to work (Beynon, 2014). The role played by the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), and its relations with the National Coal Board and the Conservative government of the time is one of the important aspects of the Miners’ strike in 1984-85 (Phillips, 2009). One of the issues with the role of the NUM was that it imposed a strike on the industry and the miners without a national ballot (Phillips, 2009). The question is what could have been the background of the strike with respect to the relations between the government and the NUM and whether the rising tensions between the two could have led to the national imposition of the strike (Phillips, 2009). Phillips (2014) writes about two important points that became sources of tensions between the NUM and the government in the period before the strike of 1984. These two points related to the ‘hit list’ prepared by the Conservative government and National Coal Board (NCB) for the closure over a three-year period of about seventy five pits. This would have meant a loss of employment for 64,000 to 200,000 miners (Phillips, 2014). This hit list became one of the major points of tension with Scargill talking about it; however, the government denied the level of scope of the hit list saying publicly that it was only a small shrinkage that they were discussing. The second issue was the proposal of declaring a State of Emergency to allow military personnel to move coal imports and other materials through the ports in the event of a strike by the dock workers (Phillips, 2014). These events pointed at the government getting prepared for a major strike by the coal workers. Importantly, these events marked a deviation from the existing practice of the collaborated working within the coal industry. Until this time, when the tensions between the government and the NUM had become significantly high, the nationalised coal industry followed the practice of joint regulation so that any significant changes affecting the workers were reached only with the agreement of unions (Phillips, 2014). Now however, the Thatcher led government was planning closure of a number of pits without consulting the unions. Phillips (2009) argues that workplace tensions is one of the reasons for the national strike and not the tensions between the government and the NUM. The latter argument, which Phillips (2009) argues is a top down approach to the strike is not completely adequate to understand the background of the strike because it is not just the tensions between the government and the trade unions that were at rise, but also, tensions between the miners and management, which were prominent in the period before the strike (Phillips, 2009). However, it is also a fact that the personalities of some individuals became significant to the background of the strike, particularly, Margaret Thatcher, Ian Macgregor (chairman of the National Coal Board) and Arthur Scargill (President of the NUM). This presents a compelling case for arguing that the strike did have a background in the tensions between the trade unions as represented by Scargill and the government as represented by Thatcher and MacGregor. At the same time, Phillips (2009) argument does not deny that there were rising tensions between the trade unions and the government, rather he traces the origin of the conflicts between the unions and the government to the miners’ work place conflict with the managers which pushed the trade unions to more militant and aggressive positions. In other words, the source of the conflict between the unions and the government is presented as the workplace conflict and not just the conflict between the leadership of the NUM and the government. Tracing the source of the miners’ strike to the historical trajectory of the relations between the trade unions and the government, Hencke and Beckett (2009), go back to the 1926 general strike as the origin of the 1984 miners’ strike. They write that without the “1926 general strike, nothing that happened in the next sex decades make sense” (Hencke & Beckett, 2009, p. 1). The 1926 strike is important here because it represents the powers of the trade union. In the period prior to the 1926 strike, the trade unions in Britain were powerful organisations representing 45 percent of the work force of the country (Hencke & Beckett, 2009). Interestingly, in 1974, the trade union membership once again reached these historical high levels of membership, meaning that like in the 1920s, trade unions were powerful in 1980s as well and that both periods saw major strikes in Britain. More importantly, the 1920s saw merger of smaller unions with the three big trade unions leading to the 900,000 strong membership of the Miners’ Federation of Great Britain (Hencke & Beckett, 2009). Due to these parallels between the two strikes, the 1926 general strike presents an important historical link to trade unions. The important point to underline is that the trade unions were a strong force in 1980s because of the high membership in the unions. The next question is whether these strong trade unions had any tensions with the government and what were the prevailing sources of these tensions in the background of the 1984 miners’ strike.

An important point made out in literature on the relations between trade unions and the government is that of the relations between the leading figures in these organisations, particularly Margaret Thatcher and Arthur Scargill. The tensions between the two leading figures in the miners’ strike are also related to the very divergent views towards the role of the public sector in British industry. The Attlee settlement of the three decades before the Thatcher era preferred to see the public sector (and the trade unions) as an important aspect of the British indutry; however, this changed with the Thatcher era when pubic sector and the trade unions were considered to be an impediment in the improvement of the industry and there were increased tensions between the government and the trade unions (Hencke & Beckett, 2009). Also important is the fact that while Britain’s industry was nationalised, there were also significant annual losses. In the period before the strike, there were also the problems of rising unenmployment, and the doubling of the VAT. The coal industry was to face cuts because of the increased unprofitability of the industry (Hencke & Beckett, 2009). A number of collieries were shut down, which became as source of tension between the NUM and the government; the government did not publicise the figures and the NUM exagerrated the closures leading to tensions between the miners and the government. It is noteworthy that the government at this time did not possibly expect a strike because of a previous experience of ISTC where the workers accepted job cuts (Hencke & Beckett, 2009). However, the NUM was a significantly more powerful organisation as compared to the ISTC. The strike when it happened, shocked the ministers because they had not anticipated it when weeks of negotiation between the NUM and the National Coal Board failed to achieve the goals of the miners in 1981. However, the government quickly backtracked at this time, proving that the miners at the time had some political capital that worked in their favour. In 1984 however Thatcher was in a much more powerful position owing to her action in the Falkland Islands and was able to take sterner action against the miners. Her landslide victory in the 1983 elections had made her position stronger. Earlier, the tensions between the NUM and the government arose due to the closure of the mines and these tensions became more marked in the period before 1984 when more pits were to be closed by the government (Hencke & Beckett, 2009). For the government, the miners’ strike became an important and serious problem that they had to counter; speeches of Thatcher of the time shows that a lot of political rhetoric was used to create collectivities of British opposed to the miners’ strike (Reicher & Hopkins, 1996). This may also be used to show the rising levels of tensions between the government and the miners. From the perspective of the government, it was important to counter the culture of worklessness that they thought was prevalent in the nationalised industry before the 1984-5 period (Shaw, 2013). From the perspective of the NUL and the miners, there was a moral obligation of the government to take into consideration the views of the miners as well as the possible effects on them for the closure of the pits, which they believed that the government was shirking (Shaw, 2013). This is one of the documented facts of the relations between the NUM and the NCB that they had taken a negotiated approach to pit closures, which led to the general consensus in these circles that there should be consultation about closure program in 1984, which did not happen (Spence & Stephenson, 2009). Therefore, the atmosphere created in the period before the strike was divisive (Shaw, 2013). Despite the posturing of the government in public about there being no immediate plans to close the pits, the fact that the National Coal Board had decided to reduce capacity by almost 4 million tons in early 1984 led to the rising tensions between the government and the NUM (Glyn, 1985). The result was that from March 1984 to the end of the year, almost 150,000 NUM members were on strike (Glyn, 1985).

The National Coal Board’s responses to the issue have been traced by Winterton and Winterton (1989) to the oil crisis of 1973. The oil crisis led to the increased demand for coal, which had been on the decline in the decade prior to 1973. The increase in demand for coal led to the increase in the bargaining power of the miners in the UK. At the same time, the government was under pressure because of the electricity workers’ demands which also led to the calling of an emergency and restrictions on the use of electricity for some time in 1973 (Winterton & Winterton, 1989). In the midst of the electricity workers’ strike and the increased political capital and bargaining power of the miners, the National Coal Board began to rethink its own strategy towards the miners and the NUM which represented their interests. One of the important revelations made by Winterton and Winterton (1989) is related to some private correspondence between Sir Ezra of the National Coal Board and Wilfred Miron, a member of the National Coal Board. This private correspondence showed that there was a growing concern about the increased political capital of the NUM and the possiblity of the NUM making trouble for the government due to their anti capitalist, leftist, ideology that sought to overthrow the system that was then in prevalence (Winterton & Winterton, 1989). There were also concerns about the presence of more militant minded members as compared to moderate members within the NUM. In 1974 when this correspondence took place between Sir Ezra and Miron, Scargill was not yet the president of the NUM, however, the concern that he would become the president of the NUM and then he would reinforce the leftist ideology within the NUM was already raised (Winterton & Winterton, 1989). What this shows is that there was an element of distrust between the National Coal Board and the NUM even 10 years prior to the miners’ strike. This is important because it indicates that the causes for the strike while immediately related to the closure of the pits in 1984, the tensions between the principal parties in the event went much back and could be traced to the period of 1973-74 when the oil crisis brought these tensions to the surface for the first time. The government wanted to minimise the use of miners for the extraction of coal because there was a concern that miners would hold significant political capital and bargaining power as against the government if their role is maximised; on the other hand, Miron’s proposal to Lord Ezra was that coal extraction should be endeavoured with the minimum of miners and with more engineers and supervisory staff on the hand (Winterton & Winterton, 1989, p. 11). This is an interesting and important point because it indicates that the government or some key figures within the government were concerned about the bargaining power of the miners. This can point to the fact that the miners were unionised to a great degree. So by extension, it can be argued that this proposal may mean that the government was more willing to work with staff that was not unionised (engineers and supervisory staff) and not miners who were unionised. This could point at the rising tensions with the NUM in particular or the trade unions in general as the electricity workers’s case may have also brought to the fore. The 1973 emergency over the elctricity workers’ strike may have been a catalyst that led to the concerns of the government with regard to the miners as well. One key point that was made in the proposal by Miron was that they should focus on the limiting of the manning of the industries to restrict political influences of the subversive kind in the future (Winterton & Winterton, 1989, p. 11). The Miron report did not become official policy but it is representative of a dominant thinking in government circles of the time against the workers and unions as well as the key changes that did take place within the National Coal Board approach towards miners and unions after 1973 (Winterton & Winterton, 1989). The anti union and miners feeling can be seen in the political campaigning by Edward Heath for the general election in 1974 with the tagline “who governs Britain?” (Winterton & Winterton, 1989, p. 12). In general, a large section of the media as well as the government were publicly opposed to what they termed as the leftist tendencies of the unions like NUM and this also impacted the tensions between the unions and the government of the time. That the above events have happened a decade prior to the 1984 miners’ strike is important because it shows that the rising tensions between the government and the trade unions were the result of years of mistrust between them and while the strike in 1984 had immediate causes of closure of pits, the more significant causes of the strike were to be traced back in history to other events that represent the cross purposes of the government and the unions. The unions had been getting stronger and the membership had increased. For the unions, this meant greater political capital and bargaining power. However, for the government, this signalled a need to lower dependence on unionised workers and employ more non-unionised workers. There was also increase in programmes for automation to increase dependence on computers and automated processes and decrease use for workers. An example is the MINOS programme (Winterton & Winterton, 1989). The media reports of the tensions of the time is useful in increasing the understanding on how the tensions were publicly played out. An important theme in the news reports of the time is that of the ‘miner against miner’ as NUM’s initial decision to conduct the strike without a ballot led to some miners like the Nottingham miners’ refusing to join the strike (James, 2013). Thus, the tensions that were involved in the strike were not just between the NUM and the government but also the NUM and a significant portion of miners who did not support the strikes and reported to work (James, 2013). News reports around the time were also at times supporting of the government and opposed to the ‘leftist’ agenda of the strikers which was criticised by Scargill as a one sided representation of the event (James, 2013). The striking miners’ perceived betrayal by the media has also been reported in another piece of work, which focusses on the ways in which media in the 1980s reported on the strikes and created cultural messages around the miners that were very different from the messaging of an earlier time that showed miners to be brave and industrious men who risked their lives every day when they went down mines (Macdonald & Popple, 2012). Instead, the media in 1984 for the large part portrayed miners to be irrational and unreasonable. The differences in the perception of the miners, the NUM, the National Coal Board and the government were so significant that any reporting on these events was arguably bound to be divisive; the NUM was of the opinion that the only reason for the closure of the mine pits should be that coal is exhausted or mining has become unsafe. However, the National Coal Board was of the opinion that pits that had become economically expensive to manage should be closed down (Macdonald & Popple, 2012). The tensions between the government and the NUM were therefore seen to be not amenable to a middle path.

The mining community drew on the solidarity between themselves to fight against what they saw as a common enemy, which was the government and the NCB (Beale, 2005). However, as seen in literature on the miners strike, the way the support groups were created by the miners was not linear in nature. Miners and women activists created support groups through a process of social identification with the strike; geography and political leadership were also important factors to determining how socialisation took place and the strike became a common issue for a diverse groups of people (Beale, 2005). As the strike was geographically so diversely situated, it is important to note that there cannot be a universal approach to understanding the development of the community within the strike and the activism of women in the different geographical locales of the strike. For instance, a research on South Wales strike shows that women played a central role in the activism around the strike and that in some ways the role of the women activists in Wales was different from their English counterparts (Davies, 2010). Indeed, as Davies (2010) argues, the role played by women’s groups was not homogenous (Davies, 2010). Against the background of the tensions between the government and the NUM, the roles played by women, are also important (Spence & Stephenson, 2009). Women activism is an important aspect of the miners’ strike of 1984 and has been explored in literature; what is the focus of this particular chapter is to understand how women came to become a part of the strike. An important point brought out in literature is the value of ‘community’ within mining communities and how this also led to the more important role being played by women in the communities when the miners’ strike broke out (Spence & Stephenson, 2009). The way miners are bound together by community ties has been noted well in another work, excerpt from which is provided below:

“The idea of community in relation to mining seems self-evident. Interdependence among work, family, and locality in the nineteenth and early twentieth century created conditions for tight networks, affective ties, and reciprocal relationships in local settlements. Families migrated in community groups following new pits or better conditions. Group solidarity was an important protection against hostile physical conditions and conflictual employment relations” (Spence & Stephenson, 2009, p. 69).

Because of the nature of the work done by the miners and the fact that mining communities often moved together for new work opportunities or when older mines closed down, there was a concept of group solidarity which was a part of the miners’ shared lives. Community and group solidarity was also an important protection against the employment relations between miners and the employers. Because of these strong community ties within the miners’ communities at the time, women too were a part of the community and were affected by the shared concerns about employment, wages, and closure of pits. As such, while the miners were away at the pits, the women were behind in the shared communities where high levels of loyalty and support were needed to maintain the community as well as allow the community to create protection against the harsh physical conditions of the work as well as the employment relations. Women were also involved in the development of certain social organisations like the Women’s Co-operative Guild, which allowed women to participate in religious and political organisations. Mining activity was male dominated but women from the mining communities exercised their agency through the creation and development of such social networks (Spence & Stephenson, 2009). It is also important to note that while there were tensions between the miners and the mine owners and the government over issues like closure of pits, women were not immune to tensions with the mine owners because they were directly interested in conditions of their housing, which were controlled by the owners of the mines and were also interested in issues like eviction. Therefore, women activism in the miners’ strike cannot be seen as an isolated act of women activism as miners’ wives had been part of such activism from an earlier period due to the interlink between labour relations and housing conditions (Spence & Stephenson, 2009). An example of women centric activism in the mining context can be seen in the campaign for pithead baths in which miners demanded that they be allowed to wash at work after their shift, so as to take away the burden of preparing water and filling the tin baths from the women at home (Spence & Stephenson, 2009). Women played diverse roles in the miners’ strike. They participated in mass rallies, conferences, and marches and were expressive and articulate about their views of the strike (Spence & Stephenson, 2009). An important point is that women had already become part of the labour market even prior to the miners’ strike in 1984 and were not necessarily all housewives. The decline in the mining industry in the 1960s had led to the development of substitute industries with low-paid employment opportunities to women, and women from the mining communities had taken up these jobs to supplement their family’s dwindling incomes even prior to 1984 (Spence & Stephenson, 2009). When the miners’ strike happened, many such women who had been employed in the NCB, were participants in the strike in their own right and many of these women were not even miners’ wives (Spence & Stephenson, 2009). To come back to an important aspect of the women’s involvement in the Miners’ strike, that is, the National Women Against Pit Closures movement (NWAPC), one of the themes in the literature is that it was an important political movement by women which supported the miners and their families and brought feminist ideas into practice in the industrial dispute which eventually led to the empowering of women to take a public role in a community with a male-dominated sphere (Stone, 1985). However, there is some controversy involved in this dominant literature, which has been noted by Sutcliffe-Braithwaite and Thomlinson (2018). Did the movement really bring in feminist ideas into practice or were feminist ideas responsible for bringing this movement into existence? As pointed out by Sutcliffe-Braithwaite and Thomlinson (2018), NWAPC was often portrayed as a group of politically naïve miners’ wives for political reasons but the group was not made up only of miners’ wives but also other women who were interested in the movement due to their politically and ideologically driven groups within the larger national group which was interested in socialist feminism and used this group and movement for the furtherance of their political interests and goals (Sutcliffe-Braithwaite & Thomlinson, 2018). The question which is under-researched is the extent of the influence of the feminist activists on the other membership of the NWAPC and vice versa. Also important is the divergent theoretical strains of feminism and socialism (although they are both grounded in critical thought) on the NWAPC. This is considered in greater detail in the next chapter of this dissertation.

Chapter Two: The role of women in the strike: To what extent were the women of the mining communities of large importance to the strike and how did this lead to the politicisation of this specific demographic?

The significance of women to the miners’ strike has been considered from different angles in the literature. One significant angle is that of the role of women within the community, and how community making contributed to the role of the women in the miners’ strike (Spence & Stephenson, 2009). This angle has been discussed at some length in the first chapter. Another other significant discussed in this chapter is the role of the women in the context of maternalism (Rowbotham & McCrindle, 1986). This is somewhat controversial in the context of the miners’ strike because to say that women by and large accepted the gendered roles in accordance with maternalism would be to ignore the important role played by single women, lesbians, and women with socialist and feminist ideas. However, maternalism does explain to some extent how many women from the miners’ communities accepted the role of nurturers, supporters of their men, with responsiblities of taking care of the strikers through community kitchens and other allied activities. Because women were not miners but they were involved in the mining strike, their role could be generalised in the context of its supporting character. Beyond this generalisation, it would be difficult to write about the women role in generalised terms. Yet, the media of the time has portrayed women as playing the role of supportive wives and daughters of miners, who were extending their domestic role within the house to support their men outside of it (Ali, 1986). The media portrayal of women at the time has created images of women activists as dutiful wives and daughters involved in activities akin to domestic roles with activities associated with the soup kitchen and even when their activism went beyond such domestic roles, they were portrayed as loyal women standing ‘behind their men’ on the picket line (Ali, 1986). This romanticised and generalised view of women’s role in the strike has come to be challenged in literature because it fails to accurately portray the activism of many women who were involved in more political roles in the miners’ strike (Ali, 1986). Secondly, even though women were not miners’, they did not necessarily see their roles as consigned to secondary or supportive space because women were also directly affected by the closure of the mines as this affected their economic condition (Ali, 1986). In an insightful work on the way women were directly affected both by mining activity as well as the closure of the pits, Dicks, et al. (1998) writes about how mining activity, though not a source of labour for the women of the mining communities, was nevertheless, the chief source of ‘family wage’ and how the closure of the mines led to an increased burden on the women of the communities. The work is important because it brings to attention what was at stake for the women of the mining community and how the direct effect of the closures of the mines on their own lives may have structured their responses to activism and political issues of the time (Dicks, et al., 1998). Male redundancy after the closure of the pits, have had immense effects on the women of the community who as carers for their families have to deal with the increased financial and social burden of the costs of redundancy in their families (Dicks, et al., 1998). Therefore, women activism in the miners’ strike may have been impacted also by the fact of what was at stake for the women of the communities. Although, as Ali (1986) points out, it is difficult to provide oversimplistic and generalised accounts of the experiences of the women activists. As mentioned earlier, a concept that has been used to explain the role and participation of women in public and political matters is that of maternalism; in the context of the miners’ strike, maternalism has been used to explain the ‘mothering’ nature of the responsibilities that women took up during the strike (Rowbotham & McCrindle, 1986). Maternalism signifies the means of participation that emphasise on natural feminine concerns publicly played out with women participation without threatening gender stereotypes (Rowbotham & McCrindle, 1986). In public participation, maternalism has been used to explain the historical role of middle class women in social work; to some extent, there was a disruption of the concept of maternalism in the women participation in the miners’ strike, as the working class identification foreclosed the intervention of a type of maternalism which is born of class patronage and which emphasised on the role of women and men in a way of maintaining gender relations (Rowbotham and McCrindle, 1986). Even so, the imagery around the miners’ strike as reinforced by writing and primary materials like pictures in the newspapers at the time, does suggest that women from the miners’ communities did play a role akin to maternalism through a co-operative, neighbourhood endeavour based on a common understanding of their responsibilities as women to engage in collective and community action (Spence & Stephenson, 2007b). However, Ali (1986) does accept that women’s participation at the time was widely seen to be from the dominant narrative of women becoming more politicised during the strike. It is also worthwhile to remember that women were involved in activism in the early part of the nineteenth century, but the sexual division of labour at a later point due to the impact of industrialisation and the barring of women from certain vocations, like mining, led to decline in women activism in the post war period (Gier-Viskovatoff & Porter, 1998). In her work, “The Best Thing That Ever Happened to Us": Women's Role in the Coal Dispute Miller (1985) writes about the actions of women during the miners’ strike and their attitudes towards it. Miller (1985) details how women viewed this period of strike as a liberating period because they could transcend the traditional or conventional roles of womanhood especially in the mining communities, and started to play a leading role in the politics of their local communities. Miller (1985) writes that this period of strike helped women develop their political and personal identities. The portrayal of womanhood especially in the mining communities by Miller (1985) may be relevant and valid to a great extent with women having often marginalised status in the mining communities and due to the patriarchal aspects of the industry which were reflected in the male dominated trade union. This may also be relevant in the wider geographical outreach of mining in general as another work based on South Wales also points to the marginalised and traditional role status of women in the mining societies (Davies, 2010). Thus, the narrative seen in Miller (1985) and reinforced in Davies (2010) may have some relevance to the actual status of women prior to the period of the strike. Based on this narrative, it has been argued that the Miner’s Strike not only involved women but also challenged stereotypical gender norms by providing women with opportunities to participate in a political and labour movement which was largely dominated by men. The mining communities and their focus on the work of the men in the pits, the male dominated nature of the trade unions of the time, and the traditional roles of the women reinforced by barriers to labour market, may have all combined to create or engender a more marginalised position of women in the political sense. However, this cannot be true for all women. This is brought out in some of the work done on women’s role in the miners’ strike by Spence and Stephenson (2009; 2007a; 2007b). Spence and Stephenson (2007b) write about the fact that many women even from the mining communities were already in the labour market prior to 1984 because of the economic conditions caused by the dwindling of demand for coal and the consequent lesser wages of their family. Thus, it could be expected that many of the women who were involved in activism during 1984-85 were not just miners’ wives but held jobs in the NCB canteens and offices as well. Moreover, Spence and Stephenson (2007b) also write about other groups of women who were not married to miners but found the miners’ strike a common ground for their own socialist-femininist objectives and supported the miners and their families through their involvement in the NWAPC.

Although, the relationship between different aspects of female oppression, male dominance, and capitalism may be largely visible in the societies of the time, there were also spheres in which women were a part of the labour market. How did these women become a part of the women activism is also an important part of the narrative on women activism in the mining strike. In other words, it may be simplistic to portray all women activism at the time from the perspective of the positioning of the women activists as miners’ wives. While the larger or dominant narrative may not be untrue, it may be missing the important link of the other women activists, the ones who were not miners’ wives and the ones who were driven by the socialist ideology against capitalism which found an outlet in the miners’ strike. This is one of the areas of exploration for this chapter. Writing about how the women’s role in the miners’ strike also led to the shift in their political status, Shaw (2007) writes that as a result of their involvement, “women moved from the private sphere to the public, from passive to active social, political, and economic roles. This symbolic shift from standing behind men to beside them, from silence to articulation, and from the home front to the front line, launched these women into a new world of conflict, communication, and cross- gender co-operation” (p. 631). To deconstruct this, what Shaw (2007) is arguing is that the activism during the strike led to the women becoming more socially, politically and economically active because women went from largely private and domestic domain of their homes, to a more public and political domain. How does this statement match with the other testimonies or findings in literature? Does it reduce the role played by women in the miners’ strike to an oversimplification? It can be argued that Shaw (2007) is not saying that the role played by the women was secondary to men, or that women were not at all exposed to public or political activism before the miners’ strike. Both of these aspects are also justified and have been taken on in literature where the role of the women has been explored without subjecting it to simplistic generalisations (Davies, 2010; Spence & Stephenson, 2009; Ali, 1986). In the same vein, even with respect to the gendered role of activists, it is also important to note the role played by lesbians in support of the miners as this shows the contextual nature of women participation in the miners’ strike (Kelliher, 2014). The miners’ strike saw the participation of radical women activists from diverse backgrounds: women from ethnic minorities, women from lesbian communities, women’s groups and “alternative” networks (Kelliher, 2014). The Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners (LGSM) group is one such group that supported the miners’ strike and was involved in the activism around the strike at the time. Limiting to the role played by the women in the LGSM (as that is the focus of this study), it is the practice of solidarity that seems to be an important factor that drove the support to the miners’ movement. The Lesbians Against Pit Closures (LAPC) was also formed to support miners’ strike (Kelliher, 2014). Indeed, as reported by Kelliher (2014), lesbian activists became a part of the larger women movement within the miners’ strike itself. Therefore, it is likely that the lesbian activists sought to align themselves to the growing women movement within the miners’ strike as part of increasing solidarity as well as for political reasons. The intersection between sexuality and gender may have played as role for lesbian activists to align with the growing women movement as a result of the political activism in 1984-85. At the same time, these events and developments beg the question of how activism during the strike shaped the political status of women involved in the strike, not just on the basis of their gender but also sexuality. It also points at the nuanced nature of women activism at the time with different groups of women: radical; left leaning; miners’ wives and daughters; socialist; and feminists coming together in solidarity with the miners’ strike. Although the dominant narrative of the women’s activism in miners’ strike has been to portray the activists as wives and daughters of the miners, there are nuances involved that need to be explored to understand how the strike shaped the politicisation of different groups of women. It has been noted that women’s role in the group and support work grew from the communal feeding of families in April and May 1984 when the miners’ strike had just started (Miller, 1985 ). From this point, women increasingly took on more explicitly political role, and this led to the development of a new political identity emerging amongst working class women (Miller, 1985 ). At the same time, having a simplistic view of the role played by women may not be appropriate because the role women played may also have been affected by intersections of class, and gender. Shaw and Mundy (2005) conducted a qualitative research revolved around the experiences of women activists in the miner's strike in Northumberland and County Durham and found that over-simplistic and romanticised ideas of women’s role were not appropriate to explaining the range of experiences that different groups of women went through in their activism. The study found that there were contradictions of women's experience in relation to personal strength and vulnerability, solidarity, dilemmas of sisterhood, and solidarity with men, and power struggles owing not only to the status related to gender, but also class (Shaw & Mundy, 2005). In other words, the experiences of the women involved in the strike cannot be generalised and there are different aspects of the activism with the strike that need to be explored in order to understand how women activism developed during the strike. Class seems to have played a role also in the strike in the South Wales, with Rees (1985) writing about the way class was an important factor in the miners’ strike and in a way played a role of continuities between the strike and before the strike especially in how the coal industry was reorganised; how the economic and social structures underwent change in the coalfields, and how NUM and the left political parties reacted to the strikers.

At the very least, the strike was not a homogenous event playing out in the same way everywhere; there were different patterns of strike characterisation depending on the differentiated regional character of the development of the strike (Rees, 1985). This differentiated character of the strike based on geographical regions where the strike took place also could have impacted the way women activism responded to the strike may have demonstrated different patterns in different places. How women activists were involved in the different regions where the strike happened is also relevant to understanding the nuanced character of the women activism at the time. This also points at the need to avoid generalisation around the role of the women activists in the strike.

Third Chapter: Women Against Pit Closures: How did the establishment of these female based groups change the lives of working-class women to the extent that their views on politics and social issues developed?

It can be argued that even though women from the mining communities had different ideas about their role from the way feminists structured their own ideas of their role in political movement and activity; nevertheless, the interaction between the women from the mining communities and the feminists who joined the miners’ strike led to some questions on gender roles even in the traditional communities like mining communities. This eventually impacted the creation of a more politicised working class, as will be discussed next. Second wave feminism had already established itself in the period prior to the strike as it made significant contribution to the women cause in the labour market by influencing the enactment of important legislations like the Equal Pay Act 1972 and the Sex Discrimination Act 1975. These legislations were driven by strong feminism lobby at the time influenced by second wave feminism (Spence & Stephenson, 2012). The miners’ strike therefore also occurred at a time when the ‘women’s liberation’ movement had gained momentum and achieved some important goals in the context of gender equality. The miners’ strike brought some interesting equations forth through the interactions between feminists and the ‘traditional’ mining community women, not least because the popular and media conceptualisation of the former was largely negative and of the latter largely positive. The media of the time portrayed women who were feminists as radicals, while the women from the mining communities and other conservative societies were portrayed as sensible (Spence & Stephenson, 2012, p. 162). Moreover, the interests of the working class women as put forth by the second wave feminism movement and manifested in the legislations achieved through lobbying, were seen as being opposed to the interests of the men, who were represented for the most part by the powerful trade unions like NUM, where women remained unrepresented. At the same time, the women from the mining communities were supporting their men and indirectly supporting the NUM which represented the miners. The miners’ strike created an interaction and engagement between women inclined towards feminist ideas and working class women supporting the strike with women from mining communities. Did this interaction contribute to the ‘radicalisation’ and politicisation of the women from the mining communities and did this lead to a more politicised working class women? The Women’s against Pit Closures (WAPC) was concerned about the legitimacy and the authenticity of its association with the mining community and it is pointed out that they responded to this concern by ensuring that 75 percent of its membership should come from the mining families (Stead, 1987). By taking this approach, WAPC also aligned itself with the NUM which led to the acknowledgement of the value of female political activism. The interaction between the feminist and socialist oriented membership of the WAPC and the traditional women with the mining communities led to the fostering of new and extensive networks. The aims of the WAPC also articulated the need for women centric activism as it noted amongst its aims, the goal to

“include the promotion and development of education for working class women and campaigns on all issues which affect mining communities, particularly peace, jobs, health and education, and the issues of nuclear power and nuclear weapons” (Stead, 1987, p. 22).

These are decidedly political issues and go beyond what the miners’ strike was trying to achieve. At the same time, the activism involved in the strike impacted participants because they got involved in activities like attending and speaking at support events, which had transformative effects for women who had not involved themselves in such activities before (libcom, 2017). Women were involved in writing speech scripts and also addressing rallies and speaking in public (libcom, 2017). In interviews with women from WAPC, Peake (2018) found that women who had never expected to participate in a public labour movement of this type before, were also driven to become part of support groups that were membered by women. Two important observations in the interviews are relevant to this discussion and are noted below. The first is a response to the question as to whether women were changed by the strike:

“They portrayed us as someone at the kitchen sink all the time - I mean, I went through three strikes, ‘72, ‘74 and ‘84. Even if there weren’t a strike, that was me; if something was wrong, I was there, and hopefully I’ve taught my kids the same thing - if there’s something wrong, you try to fix it. It changed a lot of women - there were writers come out of it, poems, songs, there were all sorts come out of that strike - so we achieved something, even if we didn’t stop them closing the pits. Something was evolving, women were changing. I mean you had the roaring 60s didn’t you, well this was like the roaring 80s - women were not being tied to the kitchen sink. Like I say, if it happened again we’d be there, we’d do it again if we had to (Dot quoted in Peake, 2018).

The second important observation was a response to the question as to whether were expected to go back to being housewives after the strike was over:

“All of a sudden because of the strike - and we’d gone speaking all over - I suddenly realised I know as much as some of these people at university; in fact, I know a bit more I’m sure. So I was determined that I was going to get me some education and I went to college, and after two years I was going to go back and work in the community, but then I got in the system and I went to uni and I got my degree for my mum, because her ambition had always been for me to get my cap and gown and I’d rebelled against that; but I did it for my mum on one hand and the Women Against Pit Closures in the other, because there’s no way I would’ve done what I did without that strike, no way at all” (Betty quoted in Peake, 2018).

The above observations by two women who participated in the strike and who came from traditional mining communities with no prior experience with political movements suggests that the miners’ strike did have a politicising effect on the women who participated in the strike. These effects may also be attributed to the formation of women support groups and the Women Against Pit Closures as mentioned in the observation above. It can be said that the strike has a politicising effect on women because it brought them to address the issues of gender relations, and class, which although not directly involved in the strike, but which were raised due to the conditions created by the strike. As the formation of women groups brought diverse groups of women together in a common cause, there was an impact on the way women conceptualised gender relations and their roles in the economic society even after the strike. The poetry and personal experiences of women activists of the time of miners’ strike provides a glimpse into the way the women constructed the movement and their role in it, and this has been explored by Spence and Stephenson (2012). During the miners’ strike, women activists published their poetry in pamphlets and books, much of which was released by the labour presses. These primary sources offer an insight into the way women engaged with th largely male dominated experience of the miner’s strike and also provides examples of strike activism of the time by women participants. One such poem by Ellen Roberts is reproduced below to provide a sense of the loss that women experienced due to the closure of the pits.

“Easington colliery, a place by the sea/ there is a pit here you can see/ If this pit closes down, how will we survive/ for this pit work we have known all our lives,/ with houses and families all around/ Church bells and other sounds/ Young people will have to move awa/ What will happen to our Village today/ No shops, no bus stops/ Just you and me and the sea/ What will happen to the sick and old/ Has all been told?” (Spence & Stephenson, 2012, p. 155).

The poetry is a good example of how women from the mining community may have looked at the closure of the pits as a threat to their way of life and community. The closure of the pits signified loss of income, loss of homes, and community. The poetry is not reflective of any activist or radical emotions of the poet, rather it emphasises the role of family, village and community in the way the closure of the pits was thought of for the women of the mining communities. For women of the mining communities, the use of poetry has been described as a means for emotional outlet caused by an event that was traumatising to entire families and communities (Spence & Stephenson, 2012). However, some of the poetry written at the time moves beyond the themes of community and loss and emphasises on more political issues, such as, responses to the police deployed in the midst of the communities during the strikes as well as the perceptions of those miners who chose to go back to the mines and who were described as ‘scabs’ or traiters (Spence & Stephenson, 2012). The themes of justice, law, police, and traitors were reflective of increasing politicisation of the women from the mining community who chose to use poetry as a means of their expression and articulation of the strike. The politicisation of women also has to be seen in the context of class because mining communities women were not just articulating their objections to the closure of the pits, but also the class divide that made it possible for some people or leaders to take steps affecting a great many working class people in the mining communities. An example of such themes can be seen in another piece of poetry by a woman from the mining community:

“So lets muster our forces, the whole working class/ They have done it before to our kind/ Lets stand up and tell them enough is enough/ If we all stick together, we will find/ That there’s plenty of people who are willing to fight” (Spence & Stephenson, 2012, p. 159).

The above example of poetry expresses a class struggle that the women of the mining communities were also fighting and this is another angle of their politicisation as they were standing at the intersection of gender and class. The effect of the closure of pits affected them as women whose families depended on the wages; but, the manner in which the closure of pits was taking place also reinforced the class struggle between the management and the working class. The women of the mining communities were not directly involved in this labour dispute, however, the above example of poetry emphasises on the way in which women were engaged with the labour struggle and articulated this as a class struggle that they also had to fight against the management. This is a new aspect of women’s engagement with issues that affected the mining community. Women were involved in activism around issues of housing in the period prior to the miners’ strike (Spence & Stephenson, 2009); however, this emphasis on the class struggle was largely new in the engagement between women of the mining communities and the issues related to mining conditions. Therefore, it can be said that women were moving beyond just supporting roles in the mining strike. Rowbotham and McCrindle (1986) write that women’s support groups were not always about women’s liberation from domestic drudgery but also about fighting for their husband’s job. This presents the complex manner in which women responded to the strike because different groups of women may have had different reasons and agendas for their involvement in the miners’ strike. For the group of women whose involvement in the strike was driven by the need to fight for the jobs of the male members of their families, there may have been an emphasis on the preserving of the traditions affecting patriarchal gender relations, which was different from the way in which other women were driven to participate in the miners’ strike (Rowbotham & McCrindle, 1986). Women like Jean McCrindle (treasurer of Women Against Pit Closures), there was a definite leaning towards socialist-feminist politics and she brought this politics into the participation in the miners’ strike. In her interviews to Rowbotham, Mc Crindle has spoken about the interaction between feminists like her within the miners’ movement and women from the mining communities and how these interactions (at times suspicious) had implications of the experience for socialism (Rowbotham & McCrindle, 1986). Considering the first hand experience of McCrindle that she recounts for Rowbotham, one point can be deduced. The miners’ strike played a role in politicisation of women in two ways: in the first, there was an emphasis on the reaffirmation of the traditional female roles within the mining communities, which are also explained to some extent by the concept of maternalism discussed elsewhere; second, the miners’ strike also created the circumstances in which the traditional roles of the women became articulated with the class struggle as women were increasingly drawn into more active roles in the trade union political action (Spence & Stephenson, 2007a). To the more pointed question of how the miners’ strike and the consequent establishment of female based groups change the lives of working-class women to the extent that their views on politics and social issues developed, an important point is that there was a process of engagement between the women and the political and social constructs of class, labour and gender issues. Some writers have considered that this may have led to the radicalisation of the women activists (Rowbotham & McCrindle, 1986). Spence and Stephenson (2012) write that “feminism was therefore important but problematic for women in mining families who were supporting the miners’ union, whose organisation was understood primarily in the terms of masculine class politics of the strike. Most felt little sympathy for feminism as represented by the popular media and the men dominating the trade union movement” (p. 162). On the other hand, the self-organisation tactics that women in the mining communities employed were also a part of the feminist movement which asked women to act on their own account and organise themselves. Therefore, there was a crucial politicising message in feminism for the women of the mining communities, which was to encourage women to take action on their own account, and even though for some reasons feminism was problematic for women from the mining communities, it was also useful in some ways. The feminists also made common cause with the women from the mining communities and one of the famous action was the Greenham Common Protest (Shaw & Mundy, 2005). Women involved in the mining strike, even those who were from the mining community had already begun to play a role in the contribution to the family income through their labour even in the period prior to the miners’ strike of 1984-85. Even in the otherwise traditional communities like mining communities, where gender roles were established, the financial upheaval caused by the gradual closure of the pits had led to the women of these communities seeking work. For instance, Spence and Stephenson (2007b) have written about women from the mining communities employed in the labour market prior to and also held jobs in the NCB canteens and offices as well. The question of how the miners’ strike led to the politicisation of women already in the labour market and those who were to enter the market later, due to the participation in the miners’ strike where women from mining communities also engaged with feminists, is therefore an important one. Stead (1987) writes that the miners’ strike relied on women’s economic support of families throughout the crisis, and not just on their active political roles as protesters. Women’s participation in the strike has been viewed as one of the positive aspects of the movement because it allowed women to become more visible in political movements in the labour market (Briggs, 2019). Even after the strike was over, the politicisation of the women did not stop and many of the women support groups formed during the strike survived the end of the strike (Briggs, 2019).

One of the remarkable ways in which women participated in the miners’ strike was at the picket lines, which was contrary to the gender specific perceptions and even against the wishes of many miners who did not think it was appropriate for women to be standing at picket lines (Briggs, 2019). The participation of women at picket lines was important because it transgressed gendered roles. Thus, women were not conforming to stereotypes around gendered roled at the time of the miners’ strike. After the strike as well, some women resisted the return to the pre strike gender roles and relations (Winterton & Winterton, 1989). An interesting aspect of the strike is that some members of the women’s groups had envisaged a potential increase of trade union membership for women after the strike as well as the possiblity of participation in NUM conferences; however, the male dominated trade unions were not receptive to this idea despite the women participation in the miners’ strike. The 1985 NUM conference officially negated any such developments in the trade unions as far as women membership was concerned (Winterton & Winterton, 1989). The WAPC conference in August 1985 raised these issues and also decided to affiiliate with those trade unions that were in favour of women joining as members of their organisations (Winterton & Winterton, 1989, p. 239). This was an important step in the politicisation of women workers as they had never before been able to get affiliated to trade unions as they were largely male dominated. Even the NUM opened up for membership for women provided that they apply individually. However, it is also a fact that the National WAPC did not sustain its growth over time because there were many divided opinions within its membership on pressing questions like relationships with Arthur Scargill and the National Union of Mineworkers, and which women should be allowed to be members (Sutcliffe-Braithwaite & Thomlinson, 2018).

Conclusion: To what extent did the strike create a more politicised female working-class?

The miners strike was in a way a watershed event in the history of British labour market because it created conditions for the reaasessment of many pressing issues, including the role of the women in the political movement. As women played a very important role in the miners strike, they cannot be considered to be secondary or supporting participants even though the dominant narrative on women participation is that it was driven by the need to support the miners and the miners were the primary participants in the strike. The research and literature on strike suggests that the role played by women was complex and even ambiguous at times. The membership of the women groups was made up of not just the miners’ wives and female members of their families, but also women activists who had joined cause with the women from the mining communities. Also within the membership of associations like the WPAC were women who were driven by feminist agendas and socialist causes. Many of these women were working women. The strike was a way for them to express their solidarity with the women within the communities but also articulate their own causes. One of the goals was purely politicised which was to align more closer with the trade unions that were largely membered by men. Women had so far not been given widescale membership of trade unions. At the same time, there were women who were from traditional families of the mining communities and who were more comfortable with the gendered roles within their communities. The interaction with the feminists and socialists of the WPAC brought them to address the issues of gender relations and roles. This played a role in their eventual politicisation.

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