Welsh Journals

A Miner Struggle? Women's Protests in Welsh Mining History. Angela V. John. The following article was written before the 1984 miners' strike began. This dispute adds a new and important element to the story of women's protests in mining communities in Britain with women playing a crucial and committed part in a struggle in which they see themselves providing vital support for the preservation of miners' jobs but also defending their own futures and the futures of all their families against the threatened decimation of whole communities. Though, as the article shows, women have previously been active during mining disputes, it has never been on such a large scale of involvement or organisation nor have the stakes been so high. In South Wales miners' wives support groups have advised on food distribution as well as collecting and distributing thousands of food parcels-1,000 parcels being distributed weekly from 9 distribution points in the Dulais valley alone-and they have devised a host of fund-raising schemes. In practice they have become action groups, joining the picket lines and addressing meetings all over the country. On one momentous occasion on May 12th the Welsh women helped form a 10,000 strong rally in Barnsley, composed of women from the coalfields. The mining communities of nineteenth and early twentieth century Wales are a popular subject for historians. Indeed the recent acceleration of pit closures brings even closer the association of mining with history books, museums and the past with the attendant dangers of celebration or dehumanised representation. Yet this history is already partial in the sense that it has only paid serious attention to some of its people. The development of a powerful and militant Labour tradition in Wales, combined with the lack of a strong female presence in the labour market (until recently) has helped ensure that the spotlight has been focussed on the workplace and struggle and conflict in institutional terms. Inevitably a spotlight, by lighting up its subject, succeeds in darkening the areas around it. Not only has there developed a rigid distinction between the historical representation of wage labour and domestic labour but the latter has been badly neglected. Women's history in Wales can be said to be a history of omission. There are however indications that changes are taking place.1 Yet it is not just the apparent absence of women from the activities of the past which requires explanation. The androcentricity of much historical writing needs locating more specifically as does the failure to confront basic questions about the social construction of gender. Whilst some historians have continued to write in terms of a past shaped only by men's aspirations, frustrations and rebellions, the more common response of recent years has been an insidious tokenism which purports to recognise women's past experiences (if not feminist history) but actually succeeds in so encompassing and incorporating the subject that it thereby reinforces the older boundaries of a male-dominated approach. In place of slotting half the