The 1984–85 miners’ strike is well-known for the flourishing of women’s activism within coalfields in support of the miners’ cause. During the year-long dispute that occasioned tremendous hardship, the wives, mothers, daughters and friends of miners came together to provide food and other much-needed goods to mining communities in various locally based groups, sometimes operating under the banner of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) – sponsored Women Against Pit Closures (WAPC). Both at the time and later, the stories of women who became involved in such activism were told through many different media, sometimes by other people and sometimes by themselves. Films, articles, newspapers and – most importantly from the perspective of this chapter – books abounded, celebrating the achievements of these activists. As we have discussed elsewhere, most coalfield women during the miners’ strike were not involved in such activism, and in many ways the construction of a heroic picture of working-class women acting in support of their menfolk was overblown and problematic.Footnote ¹ This chapter, however, examines the representations of this subset of women in the group books published by many women who had been involved in local strike support groups to document their history. We want to think further as to the purposes of these texts: why and how were they produced, how did the conventions of genre shape them, and who were the intended audiences? Such works were published by radical presses that both drove and were the product of the community publishing boom of the 1970s and 1980s. They can be seen as attempts by the writers and publishers involved to not simply represent politically active working-class women, but to actively construct them as a new political constituency.

The creative outputs of women from the coalfields during the strike gained significant media coverage at the time: poetry and songs were not only performed at strike meetings and political rallies but also shared in newsletters and pamphlets, and indeed, filmed by Ken Loach in a documentary Which Side Are You On?, shown on Channel 4.Footnote ² These works ranged widely in terms of their publishers and personnel. Some books, such as Raphael Samuel, Guy Boanas, and Barbara Bloomfield’s edited collection, The Enemy Within, and Vicky Seddon’s The Cutting Edge, were large projects, published by established left-wing publishers, and edited and/or written by leftist intellectuals with significant public profiles.Footnote ³ Sold across the country, they were aimed at a broad, albeit left-wing, audience. Some of these works, such as The Enemy Within, were collages of the experiences of many different men and women both within and outwith the coalfields during the strike, often using excerpts from strike diaries or recorded interviews with activists. Others, such as The Cutting Edge, focused on women alone. Published in 1986, this work had been edited by Marxism Today writer Vicky Seddon and was the product of an event at Northern College near Barnsley, where women had gathered to record and write the experiences that went into the book. The book was notably feminist in tone, emphasising the achievements of activist women and their struggles with the patriarchal NUM. Whilst not all contributors shared Seddon’s view that activism during the strike represented the ‘flowering of the mining women’ and ‘the fruit of the current phase of the movement for women’s liberation’, Seddon was not alone in her approach.Footnote ⁴ In 1987, Guardian journalist Jean Stead published a book based on interviews with coalfield activists entitled Never the Same Again: Women and the Miners’ Strike, which claimed that women of the coalfields had invented a working-class feminism.Footnote ⁵ Similarly, Here We Go, a major book funded by the London Region Co-operative Retail Services Political Committee, celebrated the activism of women’s movement from coalfields across the country through excerpts from interviews republished anonymously.Footnote ⁶ Whilst the editors Chrys Salt and Jim Layzell did attend to the complexities of the support movement, their choice of chapter headings such as ‘Grass-Roots Feminism’ suggests how a narrative of political transformation ultimately framed the book. Whether or not the support movement constituted a form of working-class feminism has been a question that has dominated both popular and academic discussions of coalfield women’s strike activism ever since.

The focus of this chapter, however, is the accounts produced by individual women’s groups and regional networks during and shortly after the strike, which, although numerous, are cited less frequently in the academic literature on the strike. It is difficult to put an exact figure on the number of books of this kind that were produced, but there were at least several dozen. They were generally much shorter than the substantial works edited by Seddon, and Salt and Layzell, and usually published by local radical presses that were part of the worker–writer and community publishing movement, which often gave significant aid in the writing and production of these books.Footnote ⁷ A few of these works centred on communities, encompassing the experiences of men and women in the strike, but the majority focused on women alone.Footnote ⁸ These works tended to be more polyfocal than the works published by larger publishers; they gave a platform to a large range of voices and were often a collage of group history, individual biography, photographs and poetry, a format that had been pioneered by the community publishing movement.Footnote ⁹ Unlike the works published by larger publishers, the political message of such works was multifaceted; some of the voices featured clearly had a sophisticated political interpretation of the strike, but in others, politics with a capital ‘P’ was less often to the fore, with discussions of the ‘ordinary’ and ‘everyday’ taking precedence instead; like the punks of the previous chapter in this collection, some women refuted the very idea of themselves as political. And, in another parallel with punk fanzines, such works were often distinctively homespun in their design and manufacture, with the limited funds available to publishers resulting in books that were often printed on cheap materials, and looked qualitatively different from the productions of mainstream publishers. Such aesthetic choices were perhaps the product more of circumstance than design; yet they also worked to underscore the ‘ordinariness’ of the women who produced the books.

Academic interpretations of this work tend to emphasise the apparently transformational qualities of the strike on coalfield women’s lives. For example, Jean Spence and Carol Stephenson have suggested that ‘after the strike, some women found it impossible to return to their previous roles and relationships and realisation of the impact of this on both men and women was recognised in performative women’s writing’.Footnote ¹⁰ Katy Shaw’s study of representations of the miners’ strike has also reproduced this ‘heroic’ narrative of women’s experiences in the strike to an even greater extent, arguing that coalfield women’s writing illuminates the transformation that women underwent in the strike: ‘women who remained untouched by the previous decade’s feminist revolution were radicalised’,Footnote ¹¹ ‘moved from the private sphere to the public, from passive to active social, political and economic roles’,Footnote ¹² and made a ‘conscious break’ with Thatcherite individualism.Footnote ¹³ But such accounts take women’s strike writing as a transparent record of experience, rather than understanding it as deeply implicated within the political struggle of the strike, shaped by the imperative to support that struggle and construct a political constituency of coalfield women, and written from within a shared culture of images, reference points and ideas. Clearly, these are works that read very differently in political intent compared to, for example, a party manifesto. Yet we would nevertheless argue that it is both appropriate and enlightening to understand these books as a distinct form of political writing. Indeed, it is precisely the genre-crossing nature of these works that allows them to constitute this distinct form. And to examine them as a form of political writing – despite the varying relationships of those featured within them to the idea of the political – allows us to understand something important about the relationship of working-class women to politics; that is to say, the way in which political claims often had to be couched in the language of ordinariness, or even of anti-politics, in order to be regarded as legitimate.

The Making of a Genre

The opportunities for these works by coalfield women to be published and read by a broad audience were hugely expanded by the community publishing boom of the 1970s and 1980s, which – as Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite has previously noted – was partly facilitated by the new popularity of ‘history from below’ and oral history.Footnote ¹⁴ Small presses set up by left-wing activists published huge numbers of pamphlets and books related to politics, history and local affairs. Often, such groups and publishers came under the umbrella of the Federation of Worker Writers and Community Publishers (FWWCP) formed in 1976.Footnote ¹⁵ This fuelled an appetite to hear more of the stories of ‘ordinary’ people from the past. Books such as Below Stairs – Margaret Powell’s memoir of her life as a servant in the 1920s – and A Child in the Forest – Winifred Foley’s account of her life growing up in the Forest of Dean – were hugely popular during the 1970s, going through many editions.Footnote ¹⁶ They were accompanied by large numbers of books from local radical publishers, such as QueensPark books in Brighton, which published titles such as Daisy Noakes’s The Town Beehive: A Young Girl’s Lot, Brighton 1920–1934.Footnote ¹⁷ The (re)turn to working-class autobiography as a form was a political act. As the FWWCP wrote, ‘Through such books many people are able to find large parts of themselves because they shared the same or a similar environment or experiences.’Footnote ¹⁸ By describing their own lives, it was hoped, other working-class women could also recognise their experiences, and potentially come to a shared recognition of their class oppression. This aim was rarely made explicit in the working-class autobiographies produced either by the FWWCP or by women during the strike – and was probably not consciously recognised by many women who took part in the making of these books – but nevertheless underpinned the politics of many of those who were involved in bringing these books into production.

These books that were written during the strike were not, therefore, the first time that working-class women had written in an autobiographical mode, or had discussed political activism in print. Indeed, they were part of a much longer tradition of working-class autobiography which had roots stretching back into the early nineteenth century. Of particular note are two landmark books that were published in the early twentieth century by the Women’s Co-operative Guild – 1915’s Maternity and 1931’s Life As We Have Known It.Footnote ¹⁹ These books were formed through the collation of autobiographical letters sent to the (middle-class) leader of the Women’s Co-operative Guild, Margaret Llewellyn Davies; in their political purpose and collective nature, these works were perhaps the closest forerunners of the books that we see from the strike. Here, the autobiographical was used to illuminate the condition of working-class women’s lives in order to motivate political action, though not all the women who wrote within these texts considered themselves to be explicitly political.Footnote ²⁰ However, as Chris Hilliard has noted, the letters for these projects – or, at least, Life As We Have Known It – did not appear to have been directly solicited for a book, but were rather collections of letters that Llewellyn Davies had received over the years.Footnote ²¹ Furthermore, whilst working-class women had produced autobiographies before the moment of community publishing, they had been very few in number compared to men. It is, thus, appropriate to understand the group biographies that were produced by working-class women during the strike as something genuinely novel within the landscape of working-class autobiography, at least in terms of the scale of the exercise.

The motivations for publishing books about women’s experiences during the strike were many.Footnote ²² Often, they were a means of raising money for the cause, both during but particularly after the strike, when there was still a great financial need to assist sacked miners and those in debt after the dispute (Northumberland miners’ wives book, We are women, we are strong, even had pictures of those miners that were sacked in the frontispiece of the book)Footnote ²³. But as Jean Spence and Carol Stephenson have suggested, the production and sale of publications authored by the women provided an opportunity for fundraising, boosting morale and continuing community activism beyond the strike’s end. Something of the motivations for publishing these books in the aftermath of the strike was revealed by a visitor from the Dearne Valley Project (run by the Northern College and the Workers’ Educational Association in the aftermath of the strike to assist the run-down community in South Yorkshire):

Confidence (a recurring trope in discussions both by and about women who had been involved in the strike)Footnote ²⁵ and self-pride were clearly key motivators here, as was the idea of recording their actions for posterity, at least in the form of providing a history for friends and family. It is not clear whether or not this group’s attempt at publication came to anything; we have not been able to locate a book for the group itself, though it is not impossible that their stories were incorporated in other works on the strike. Likewise, a series of handwritten autobiographies in the Jill Page collection at Feminist Archive North appear to relate to the activities of women who had been active during the strike in West Yorkshire, but it is not entirely clear how they were produced, for what end, or whether they saw publication (again, we have been able to find no obvious record). That these reminiscences were, however, in the archive of Page – a Women’s Liberation Movement activist and city councillor in Leeds – suggests that she was probably involved in soliciting the material in some way herself, perhaps seeing herself as encouraging or offering assistance to these women.Footnote ²⁶

There are other occasions where we get a small glimpse into the process of how these books came into being, something which occasionally comes to light in other texts. In Askern, South Yorkshire, a writer called Jane Thornton was paid – probably by Doncaster Council, though it is not entirely clear – to interview women from the local support group and write up their words into a book, All the Fun of the Fight, that was published by Doncaster Library Services.Footnote ²⁷ (Thornton later wrote a play about the strike using interviews with women across South Yorkshire, Amid the Standing Corn.) This book was unusual, however, in having a named author who was not a member of the support group. Perhaps more typical was the experience of Janine Head, Mavis Watson and Teresa Webb – members of the Normanton and Altofts Support Group in West Yorkshire, who together produced a book called Striking Figures. They inform us in a section titled ‘How We Wrote this Book’ that a friend of the group knew members of the community publishing group ‘Artivan’, who assisted with the production.Footnote ²⁸ They wrote:

The work took them 18 months.Footnote ³⁰ Collectives such as Artivan were part of the radical and community publishing boom: indeed, prior to the strike, Artivan had already been working on a book with women from Woolley Colliery in South Yorkshire; though again, we have been able to find no record of this, perhaps suggesting the number of such projects which were ultimately abandoned.Footnote ³¹ The process of constructing the working-class autobiographies that such collectives published was described thus in a book published by the FWWCP:

It seems that similar methods were employed for the production of some strike books. The Coventry Miners’ Wives book, Mummy, What did you do in the strike? acknowledged the help of a transcriber, which suggests that at least some of the biographical pieces originated in taped interviews.Footnote ³³ What is certain is that these were collective works, often produced in non-conventional ways that decentred traditional notions of authorship; and such a focus on radical co-operation was, of course, part of the politics of women’s groups in support of the strike.

The distinctiveness of these books produced by coalfield women about the strike came from the mixing of genres, and poetry as well as autobiography featured heavily. Poetry about the strike was often included in books and pamphlets about the women’s support movement; there were also a number of works published that were specifically dedicated to strike poetry. Poems were also published in broadsides and support group newsletters during the strike and performed at meetings in support of the strike; these very much circulated during the strike, too, in written and spoken forms. As with the group books published about the strike, such work also tended to be published by community publishers. Jean Gittins’ 1986 volume Striking Stuff, for example, was initially published by the ‘1 in 12 Collective’ – an anarchist social club in Bradford that had grown out of a particularly active branch of the Claimants’ Union there. This is suggestive as to the politics that undergirded such publishing enterprises.Footnote ³⁴ Unsurprisingly, the NUM also funded some publications, such as Against All the Odds, a book of poetry published whilst the strike was still underway.

This was not the first time a radical working-class movement had placed great value on poetry – the Chartist movement saw a great outpouring of poetry by working-class writers, informed by the Romantics. But the use of poetry was a striking feature of the activism of the dispute. So where did it come from? First of all, poetry had a long-standing place in working-class culture, with recitals of poems, usually comic poems, a staple of music hall and variety performances in working men’s clubs since the nineteenth century. More broadly, Jonathan Rose has pointed to the place of poetry in working-class reading culture in Britain, Christopher Hilliard has pointed to the democratisation of writing in the inter-war period, and Carolyn Steedman has written of the ways in which primary schools and some progressive secondary moderns turned to creative writing as a way of encouraging the working-class child to express herself, and hence to develop her sense of self.Footnote ³⁵ Such developments encompassed poetry as well as prose. Furthermore, as the Federation of Worker Writers and Community Publishers suggested, poetry as a form was much more amenable to being written in short bursts, as opposed to long stints of time required by longer-form writing – something rarely possible for those with exhausting manual jobs and/or domestic responsibilities.Footnote ³⁶ Poetry thus occupied a contradictory place in the democratisation of creative writing, a place which made it particularly attractive to many women during the strike. Poetry was seen as a site for the direct expression of authentic emotion, but to write a poem was also to appropriate perhaps the most culturally elite form of creative writing.Footnote ³⁷

Generally, women’s strike poems followed a rhyme scheme, often rhyming couplets throughout; very few engaged with modernist or experimental forms. Their references were not to the poetic canon but to the experience of the strike. As Spence and Stephenson have suggested, women were not ‘[not] unaware of the question of literary excellence but … this was consciously abjured in favour of expression about experiences and the women’s understanding of the meaning in their experience’.Footnote ³⁸ The meter used varied, sometimes within a poem: iambic meter, or the regular beat of folk songs, chants and nursery rhymes, or the cadences of limericks or nonsense verse like that of Edward Lear. Many of the iconic images and phrases of the strike recur repeatedly: Thatcher – referred to as the ‘Iron Lady’ – and MacGregor – referred to as the ‘butcher’ – and variations on phrases like ‘coal not dole’ and ‘side by side with our men’. To encounter the repetition of such phrases so often is to understand something of the way in which this poetry sprung from a common well of shared references, experiences and idioms, while also expressing the individual writer’s thoughts and feelings; it was a collective endeavour as well as a personal one.

A mixture of the motivations, meanings and forms of strike books and poetry was well indicated by a poem that appeared at the back of the work for Coventry Miners’ Wives Mummy … what did you do in the strike?

In this poem, we see the solidification of a certain narrative about what women’s groups did in the strike, and the narrative arc these books took. We also see a self-reflexivity about the act of writing the book itself, which serves to underscore its novelty; the final stanza also points to the fact that as well as being undertaken to raise funds, the production of the books themselves could cost considerable money. Through providing a written form, narratives such as these (both in poetry and prose) gave a framework through which to understand the activities of the women’s groups, and make them legible to the wider world. Yet, inevitably, such narratives also worked to create and fix the political meaning of the support groups, giving a sometimes spurious coherence to the vastly diverse experiences and politics of the support groups and their members. The figure of the socially conscious coalfield woman during the strike was – if not precisely created by these books – then at least considerably fleshed out.

Women’s strike books thus represented a significant moment in women’s autobiographical and political writing, where working-class women were self-consciously writing as part of a movement of working-class women on a scale that had not been seen before. Sally from the Coventry Miners’ Wives’ Support Group remembered in Mummy … What Did You Do In The Strike? that:

In North Yorkshire Women’s Against Pit Closures’ Strike 84–85, one woman remembered that:

There is a strong sense here of coalfield women becoming visible for the first time as a political constituency. The books were also an attempt at securing a place in posterity for both the strike and the women’s support groups, and to underline the importance of the latter to the former. Through the act of producing these works, women were quite literally writing themselves into the historical record and making a claim for the significance of working-class women. Indeed, the Normanton group began their book with:

This can often be seen through the titles of the works themselves. For example, Mummy, What did you do in the strike? – whilst obviously referencing World War One propaganda posters – clearly has the sense of an imagined future in which women’s role in the strike is significant enough for children to be asking about it. By writing a book with this very title, the authors were trying to will such a future into existence.

The ‘Ordinary’ and the ‘Political’

One of the key mechanisms through which this figure of the socially conscious coalfield woman was created in these works was through the inclusion of substantial biographical detail about group members. The plotted biographies that one can find within these pages often followed a common narrative arc: members would recount their life pre-strike, emphasising they had been simply ‘ordinary’ housewives and mothers, before moving onto an account of their activism during the strike, and how it had changed them as people. Regenia Gagnier observed of nineteenth-century British working-class autobiography that ‘most working-class autobiographies do not begin with a family lineage or birthdate, but rather with an apology for their author’s ordinariness’, further discussing the centrality of the ‘confession of ordinariness’ to these texts.Footnote ⁴³ This ordinariness was also key to the self-presentation of working-class writers who were published by the FWWCP one hundred years later; and in the writing produced by women during the miners’ strike, such dynamics were still central. Examples are not difficult to find. In their strike book, We are women, we are strong, Northumberland miners’ wives started a section entitled ‘The women behind the Northumberland miners’ with the words ‘we were just ordinary housewives when our men came out on strike’.Footnote ⁴⁴ In Striking Figures, Mavis Watson from Normanton recounted that:

Looking back on the strike, Royston Drift WAPC wrote, in a similar vein:

And one woman from Barnsley, Maria, remembered that:

Such women’s sense of self was fundamentally rooted in communal traditions and norms; constructed through, and not in contrast with, community. These plotted biographical accounts we see in strike accounts were not quests through which the writer established their individuality. Rather, they were accounts given precisely because the women featured were taken to be representative of their community. Unlike much auto/biography, which makes a claim for the uniqueness of its subject,Footnote ⁴⁸ the point of focusing on these women was that they were typical, not special – ordinary rather than extraordinary. In this, they were again following conventions of the genre of working-class autobiography established by community publishers in the 1970s; as the FWWCP noted in 1982, ‘The detailed autobiography can also function as a “general autobiography” – one that reflects, details, analyses and critically validates much of what has been lived in common with others.’Footnote ⁴⁹ As such, it was deeply important to these women to emphasise that they were ‘ordinary’, ‘respectable’ wives and mothers looking out for their families and communities; this is how these texts established their legitimacy. In emphasising this ordinariness, coalfield women also invoked a particular vision of the family based on heterosexual couples and ‘traditional’ gender roles, and drew on a long tradition of progressive maternalist politics which carved out a public role for women by suggesting that their ‘natural’ caring talents ideally suited them to promoting the health and wellbeing of working-class families and communities.Footnote ⁵⁰ Furthermore, women attempted to position themselves as legitimate political actors through recourse to the authority of their personal experience and the ‘authentic’ expression of personal emotion; these were key ways through which coalfield women could, as subaltern actors, legitimise their political aspirations.

‘Ordinariness’ was also underscored by an emphasis on the quotidian aspects of life in coal-mining communities both before and during the strike. Tales of daily routine abounded; and there was often inclusion of material such as children’s school work. Sheffield Women Against Pit Closures reproduced a six-year-old’s description of a rally in Barnsley, childish handwriting and all;Footnote ⁵¹ Barnsley Women Against Pit Closures and North Yorkshire Women Against Pit Closures deployed the same tactic.Footnote ⁵² Often reproduced in facsimile, such material reminded the readers not just that children were affected by the strike, but that those producing the books had the usual feminine commitments of home and childcare. The inclusion of such material suggested the maternalist basis of some of the politics of women during the strike; this was a fight for families and communities that was being staged from women’s position as mothers, rather than against it. This material further worked to underscore the idea that those involved in fighting the strike were ordinary, everyday people: after all, what could be more ordinary, more everyday, than a school exercise?

Emphasising ‘ordinariness’ also worked as a foil for the narratives of individual transformation which often characterised these accounts, where the strike was presented as a moment that occasioned deep personal change. An Ashington woman whose memories were recorded in a collection of stories from Northumberland miners’ wives said:

An anonymous woman from Sheffield wrote ‘The people I’ve met and the places I’ve been over the past months! I would never have done so if it wasn’t for joining the women’s group.’Footnote ⁵⁴ Likewise, Margaret from the Lothian Women’s Support Group, said that ‘I didn’t think much about politics .… Now, since the end of the strike, I’ve got politically motivated’.Footnote ⁵⁵ (Here, presenting oneself as not interested in politics works as a way of underscoring claims about ordinariness, or working-class authenticity.) Often, these reminiscences could be intensely personal. North Yorkshire WAPC’s Strike 84–85, for example, contained a series of striking personal vignettes about the backgrounds of the group members. One member discussed the physical violence she had suffered at the hands of her husband, who had put her in hospital several times; another discussed her agoraphobia, which had left her housebound for thirteen years; another her severe depression; and another her ‘obsession’ with housework.Footnote ⁵⁶ In all cases, these women claimed that participation in strike activism had substantially changed their lives. Whilst such stories did, of course, make the tales of post-strike transformation seem even more impressive, such intensely personal confessions do not seem to be entirely necessary. Yet we should understand the inclusion of such intimate information as part of a discursive strategy through which women positioned themselves as authentic working-class actors because of their difficult life experiences. Through the authority of their lived experiences, they positioned themselves as legitimate commentators on coalfield communities.

Much of women’s writing in the strike also elucidated and celebrated women activists’ achievements and linked those achievements to a growing self-confidence – or even ‘liberation’ – for those involved. Some of the most vivid examples of this occur in women’s strike poetry. One woman wrote, ‘Lost is our image of a timid housewife/Gained is a new outlook of a woman’s role in life’; women had ‘learned to cook for hundreds’, carrying on a tradition begun in 1926, but had also done ‘much more’, standing on picket lines beside the men.Footnote ⁵⁷ Indeed, some of the most interesting poems imagined what men thought about the shifts they saw in the lives of women. Betty Cook, for example, wrote a long poem from the perspective of a miner who had married his wife – ‘A quieter lass tha couldn’t meet’ – in 1978, but who found that in the strike she had turned into ‘a right dragon’, fighting police on the picket line, and the ‘same in t’house and all/she’s always at some meeting or shouting Coal not Dole’. Cook imagined this husband as conflicted:

However, many of the personal stories included in strike books were not constructed around a dramatic tale of coming to political consciousness, but rather, highlighted more subtle shifts in women’s habitus – their mode of being in the world and of relating to others – during the strike. In the second volume of Barnsley WAPC’s account of the group’s strike activism, for example, one ‘retired miner’s wife’ recounted how one day in summer 1984, another activist phoned to ask if she could go to London the next morning: ‘[t]hat is impossible I replied. I always go shopping to supermarket [sic] on Thursday morning. My friend replied, what happened to the women [sic] that enjoys doing unplanned things? This was a challenge! I drew breath and asked, ‘how, why, what time?’’Footnote ⁵⁹ They were going to join the lobby of parliament in support of the Miners’ Day of Action. The author described the ‘flood’ of coaches, the ‘feeling of optimism’ on the march and the ‘ecstatic’ reception of Arthur Scargill’s speech. She concluded that it was a ‘day I saw solidarity in action’, and added, ‘P.S. I went to the supermarket the day after’.Footnote ⁶⁰ This ending, whilst undoubtedly humorous, served to emphasise just how significant it was to this woman to break with her established routine. Stories like this constructed the strike as a moment when working-class women were able to assert more independence, and to subtly shift their understanding of themselves, from a relational mode of selfhood to a more autonomous sense of self.

The inclusion of so many of these tales of more subtle personal shifts, rather than of dramatic political awakenings, points to the way in which a number of these women were wary of describing themselves as ‘political’, a term which, to many, seemed to undermine their claim to ordinariness. Mavis Watson again remembered that ‘I was not a political person or anything like that, I just wanted to help’.Footnote ⁶¹ Nancy from Lothian Women’s Support Group also remembered that ‘When I got involved, I didn’t have any political reasons for doing so’.Footnote ⁶² And in Cortonwood – where, of course, the strike began – the women’s group remembered that:

Indeed, it was sometimes through the disavowal of the ‘political’ that the authors of these books were able to make claims that often read as highly political: through disavowing politics, activists were able to position themselves as women motivated not by partisan politics, but simply by concern for their communities.Footnote ⁶⁴

Conclusion

The collective accounts of the strike published by women’s support groups must be understood as a product of the community and radical publishing boom of the 1970s and 1980s, even as those involved in their production were rarely directly associated with the FWWCP. The reasons for the books were several; the fundraising efforts through which their production was often framed were only one part of a larger project of bringing working-class women to political consciousness, through giving confidence to those who took part and providing a form through which other working-class women could (it was hoped) recognise their own lives. As a form, strike books are distinguished by their collage of genres, and, within these genres, an emphasis on the everyday, quotidian and autobiographical. They are certainly distinctive as a form of political writing by their sometimes uneasy relationship with the very idea of the ‘political’. Often, the accessible and demotic nature of women’s strike accounts and poetry belies their complexity as texts. Too easily read as transparent accounts of coalfield women’s experiences and activism during the strike, they instead give us insight into the complex and symbiotic constructions of the ‘political’ and the ‘ordinary’, of ‘self’ and of ‘community’. Coalfield women staked their claim to ‘speak’ not as political activists, but rather through their position as ‘ordinary’ women. Deploying the ‘authentic’ self was crucial to being able to make these claims, and explains why writing about lived experience was so central to much of women’s writing on the strike. Furthermore, such a confession of ordinariness was demanded by the conventions of working-class autobiography as a genre. Finally, rather than being a reflection of the experiences of an already existing constituency of socially conscious ‘coalfield women’, these accounts are more accurately seen as a key part in the formation of that identity, and an attempt more broadly to construct those working-class women as a political constituency. As such, it is useful to read these books as a form of political literature and a distinctive moment in working-class writing.