Protest, Memory and Selfhood

Abstract

This is a well-crafted, important and much-needed addition to the scholarship on women, work and protest in the second half of the twentieth century. Focused around several case studies—the Ford machinists’ strikes in 1968 and 1985, the Trico-Folberth strike in 1976 and the occupation of Sexton’s in Fakenham in 1972—this book is a significant addition to the histories of trade unionism, feminism, women’s agency, class politics and activism. The book is built around oral history interviews with women who participated in the strikes, as well as research in trade union, newspaper and local archives. Moss is candid about the fact that he was unable to secure interviews with women from minoritised ethnic backgrounds and acknowledges that an intersectional analysis which fully investigates how ‘race’ affected the strikers’ experiences and treatment is therefore not possible. A significant number of the oral histories were conducted by the author in the early 2010s and these are supplemented by archived oral histories conducted by previous scholars. The effect of these layers of oral history is a rich and often nuanced account of how the participants’ own feelings about the strikes have changed, or not, over the course of recent years. This is particularly demonstrated to good effect in the two tranches of interviews with the Dagenham strikers of 1968, one set of which were conducted in 2006 and another by the author in 2013. The two sets of interviews fall before and after the release and public reaction to the film Made in Dagenham (2010). Moss is able to trace the ways in which the women’s own reactions to their experiences of the strike have mutated, or not, since the release of the film and the prominence it gave to the strike. Moss reflects, too, on how the lesser-known second Dagenham strike was in many ways the completion of the endeavour behind the first one—that is, it brought about the regrading of female machinists, who had been placed on a demonstrably too-low grade because their Jonathan Moss, Women, Workplace Protest and Political Identity in England, 1968-1985, Manchester University Press, 2019, pp. v-197, £18.94 paperback, ISBN 978-1-5261-6043-0