Girls, Wives, Factory Lives : Fifty Years On

Abstract

Anna Pollert revisits her 1970s ethnographic study of women’s working lives at the Churchman tobacco factory in Bristol to discuss her qualitative methodology and to summarize her findings. In vivid extracts, Pollert recalls the gendered world that women then faced at home as principal family carers and at work – pay, conditions, male managers, a male-dominated union – and analyses their views, values, and lives. Although the 2020s are a very different world from the 1970s, Pollert notes unwelcome continuities – occupational gender segregation, the gender pay gap (albeit narrowed), low pay, and the domestic division of labour in which women still do more work than men. A positive change is that women are more assertive about their rights. However, the greater openness and social liberalism has been accompanied by a fracturing of other certainties such as the availability of public provision and the growth of zero-hours and sub-contract labour. Pollert restates the value of ethnographic research in understanding what goes on at work ‘behind the headlines’ to understand the dynamics of workers’ consciousness and collective action.