Complexities of class and gender relations: Recollections of women active in the 1984-5 miner's strike

Abstract

Based on qualitative data collected from women who were activists in the 1984-85 miner's strike in Northumberland and County Durham, this paper challenges romanticised and over-simplistic accounts of women's participation in the 1984-5 miner's strike. Interview data from two periods—1985-7 and 2002-4—is used in order to illustrate the ambivalence and contradictions of women's experience in relation to four themes: personal strength and vulnerability; solidarity, support and betrayal; solidarity amongst women, and the dilemmas of sisterhood; and solidarity with men, and power struggles. In so doing, the paper explores complexities of class and gender in the context of the strike.