Women in the miners' strike, 1984-5: Charting changing gender roles in working-class communities in post-1945 Britain

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This project's overall objective is to co-produce, with women from coalfield communities, a comprehensive study of women's activism during the miners' strike of 1984-5, and a new history of continuity and change in working-class women's lives from 1945 on. Working-class women's activism during the miners' strike was unprecedented in scope and key to keeping the strike going. The time is right for a major oral history project on the strike, using it as a lens to examine working-class experiences and subjectivities more broadly in postwar Britain.We will address the project's overarching aim via the following research objectives:1. We will co-produce with women from coalfield communities a major new oral history project: the first major study of women's activism in coalfields during the miners' strike, examining the causes, forms, and consequences of activism. This will involve 75 new oral history life-story interviews, 10 group interviews and one reminiscence day.2. The research will be co-produced throughout through single and group oral histories. Findings will be shared and debated with interviewees and communities through 10 public workshops. The project website and monthly e-newsletter for all project associates (interviewees and other interested parties) will be another route for sharing findings. Research will also be shared with communities through the temporary exhibition at the National Coal Mining Museum (NCMM) and online exhibition. Understanding one's own history is key to the vitality of communities, and the project aims to significantly impact coalfield communities' understandings of their own recent history.3. Our monograph (written in the 2 years after project) will be the first major historical analysis of women's activism in the miners' strike.4. It will also, however, encompass a wider study of working-class women in coalfield communities' lives since 1945: their experiences, identities and subjectivities. Our interviews will be life-story interviews, allowing us to examine continuity and change over the long-term. We will hone in on questions about 'feminism' in interviews, to develop important new understandings of the impact of 'Second Wave' feminism on British society after 1968, and of the 'vernacular' discourses of gender equality which circulated in post-1945 British society; the latter have been largely overlooked thus far in existing historiography.5. We will enhance public understanding of women's activism during the strike, working-class women's lives, and feminism, through our temporary exhibition at the NCMM and the permanent exhibition on the project website. Tapping into significant popular interest in the miners' strike and the history of 'ordinary' people, the project will highlight the importance of women's political activism (histories of activism and politics often focus on men). We also aim to provoke people to think about what different meanings 'feminism' can have. A workshop with feminist groups and History Acts will impact on contemporary feminist groups' understandings of feminist history and intersectionality. 2 complete lesson plans for Key Stage 3 history teachers (also on the project website) will enable school students to grapple with the sources and issues.6. Our work will transform the research landscape, significantly impacting on the historiography of postwar Britain, including theoretical and methodological debates, and gender and feminist studies. We will present at 2 international conferences and disseminate our findings to academic audiences through a monograph and 3 peer-reviewed journal articles.7. We will produce a major new collection of life-story oral history interviews with working-class women, to be archived at the National Coal Mining Museum (along with new physical archival collections relating to the strike). This will create a major new resource for historians to further develop understandings of working-class life in postwar Britain.