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Mrs. Evans fach, you want butter again How will you pay for it now, little woman With your husband out on strike, and full
Of the fiery language?-Idris Davies, "The Angry Summer. A Poem of 1926"
Most Rhondda women are ambidextrous. They can throw just as well with their left hands as with their right.-Glamorgan Free Press, July 10, 1926
What is this feminism anyway? I don't think I am a feminist, but if what we're doing [in the women's support group] is helping the women, then I guess we're feminists, too.
-Margaret Donovan, South Wales Women's Support Group, March 12, 1985
Throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, women played an active role in various forms of community-based social protest in Great Britain. But as industrialization progressed, the emergence of a distinct sexual division of labor and a gradual separation of work and home redefined gender roles and relations. With the rise of a largely male labor movement in Britain that derived its structures of support from the male-dominated coal industry, avenues for political protest became increasingly formalized in mining communities. Moreover, the nineteenth century witnessed the development of a domestic ideology associated with industrialization that further circumscribed the role of women, limiting the scope and acceptability of female forms of protest. While changes in both the nature and base of social and political activism curtailed the use of some popular forms of protest by women, certain elements have remained part of the repertoire of vernacular culture in coalfield society even to the present day.
A comparison between the tactics used by women protestors during the Great Lockout of 1926 and the protest activities of women during the Great Miners' Strike of 1984-85 suggests a number of common themes.1 These forms of popular protest reveal an underlying continuity in the construction of gender relations and the reinforcement of community values associated with them during periods of communal crisis. They are also difficult to ascertain because women's protests have generally occurred outside the institutional organs of labor, such as trade unions and the Labour Party. The use of oral history and photography provide another avenue, alongside conventional research methods, for reconstructing the history of mining community women in the twentieth century.
The Tradition of...