Emotions, Social Practices and the Changing Composition of Class, Race and Gender in the National Health Service, 1970–79: ‘Lively Discussion Ensued’

Abstract

Abstract During the 1970s, Britain’s trade unions expanded into new areas of the economy, making considerable progress among the low-paid workers of the expanding welfare state. The Confederation of Health Service Employees (COHSE) and the National Union of Public Employees (NUPE) both made huge strides recruiting women and particularly women of colour in the National Health Service, as the laundry, cleaning, catering and portering services of Britain’s hospitals became union strongholds. This article questions why the increased weight of feminized service work is so marginal in our idea of 1970s workplace activism and why it features so rarely in histories of British trade unionism, despite being one of the movement’s most significant growth areas. Drawing on NUPE’s photographic archive, I argue that by looking at the changing character of worker-activist visual culture in this period we can reinsert women and women of colour back into those histories. This is followed by a close reading of trade-union branch minutes which explores how women re-ordered the gendered hierarchy of both their male-dominated union and their hospital between 1970 and 1979, exercising new-found agency within the highly paternalist setting of the NHS.