Episode #11: Women, organise!

Image credits: Jayaben Desai, leader of the Grunwick strike // Logo by @3Dperson // Women picketing Treeton Colliery in 1984 // Margaret Bondfield // UCU strike // Eight Hours by Ricardo Levins Morales

WOMEN, ORGANISE! We discuss labour and Labour history: what happens to the history of trade unions when we focus on the women who were involved in them? Why does the precariat need to be unionised? And why are we all workers?

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• Here's that tweet we both saw the other day:

• Read more about the Independent Workers’ Union of Great Britain’s support for outsourced workers here;
• Here’s more on the LSE cleaners’ successful campaign to return to in-house status at the university;
• You know who Ellen Wilkinson was by now, no? If not, have a look at the footnotes for episode #2;
• Here is all the information you might need about the recent/current strike organised by University and College Union, UCU;
• Here’s an article by Kate Kellaway in The Observer about the Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners, the organisation portrayed in the 2014 film Pride;
• A clip from Brassed Off (from 1996):

• …and this is the miners’ strike scene from Billy Elliott (2000):

• Gillian Shephard (now the Baroness Shephard of Northwold) was secretary of state for education 1994-1995, and secretary of state for education and employment 1995-1997. She was preceded in her post by John Patten (1992-1994). Here’s The Guardian’s review of Shephard’s Thatcher biography;
• Here’s Dr Silke Neunsinger’s ReaserchGate profile – Emma recommends Gendered Money: Financial Organization in Women's Movements, 1880-1933, which Silke co-wrote with Dr Pernilla Jonsson (Oxford: Berghahn, 2011). Follow Dr Neunsinger on Twitter @sneunsinger;
• We talked about separate spheres in episode #10 – listen here;
• Here’s a Striking Women article about women’s strikes during the First World War;
• Have you read E.P. Thompson’s ‘The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the 18th Century’ from Past & Present, No. 50 (Feb., 1971), pp. 76-136? If not, do so here;
• Here is an interview with the women behind the Ford Dagenham strike in 1968;
• ...and here is all you need to know about the Grunwick Strike (also from Striking Women);
• Read more about Dr Jack Saunders’ PhD thesis – ‘The British motor industry, 1945-77: How workplace cultures shaped labour militancy’ – here, and follow him on Twitter @jack_saundrs;
• Here’s the Bread and Roses clip from Pride (the whole song can be found here):

•  Charlotte was quoting Marge Piercy’s The Low Road – the whole poem can be read here:

“It goes one at a time.
It starts when you care to act.
It starts when you do it again
after they say no.
It starts when you say we
and know who you mean;
and each day you mean
one more.”

OUR RECOMMENDATIONS

• Emma recommends Cynthia Enloe’s Bananas, Beaches & Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics (Oakland: Unversity of California Press, 2014);
• Charlotte recommends Cynthia Enloe’s The Curious Feminist: Searching for Women in a New Age of Empire (Oakland: Unversity of California Press, 2004). Read more about Professor Enloe here.

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