The Women's Movement and ‘Class Struggle’: gender,class formation and political identity in women's strikes, 1968–78.

ABSTRACT

Women workers’ industrial disputes were of fundamental importance to the WLM, reflected in the deeds of activists and early participant-histories. These disputes were sites of worker-employer conflict and conflict between feminists and the wider Labour Movement. This article considers how these differing interpretations related to the striking women themselves. It focuses on four key disputes and analyses contemporary reports and the accounts of those involved. It argues women strikers' particular experiences of trade unionism, class politics and feminism resulted in gendered, but still fundamentally class-based, identities, and concludes by considering the position of women workers' industrial actions in feminist histories.     

Negro labor in the western cattle industry, 1866–1900

The trade union movement in sub-Saharan Africa during the struggle against colonial rule in the 1950s has long commanded the attention of historians. Numerous books and articles have detailed the growing strength and critical role of trade unions in France's vast West African colonial federation, l'Afrique occidentale française (AOF). Far less is known about the fate of these trade unions in the nine newly independent countries that emerged from the demise of AOF. In the 15 years following independence, most autonomous trade unions in French-speaking West Africa were either marginalised or integrated into the political structures of ruling parties. With the exception of Burkina Faso, single national trade union federations controlled by ruling political parties existed everywhere in francophone West Africa by 1975. Whether capitalist, military or socialist, all political elites sought to create a trade unionism that would serve as a transmission belt for party control over the workforce, a type of unionism that was referred to as ‘participation responsable’. This article details the experience of Dahomey (now Benin), where independent trade unions struggled against responsible participation and continued to play a pivotal political role until 1975, when the state socialist regime of Mathieu Kérékou finally succeeded in imposing state-controlled trade unionism.     

‘The Women's Movement Took the Wrong Turning’: British feminists,pacifism and the politics of appeasement

The history of foreign policy and especially the Munich Crisis of 1938–1939 have been viewed from various angles but never from the points of view of gender and feminism. This has been a significant oversight in the scholarship, especially as there were many prominent women politicians who were heavily invested in the appeasement debate, and because the majority of feminist organisations became increasingly preoccupied with foreign affairs and the specific effect of dictatorship on women. This article explores how British feminists responded to the policy and the fallout of appeasement in the late 1930s; how the British branch of the most prominent transnational feminist pacifist organisation, the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) made the transition from peace, to Crisis, to war; before focusing on two intertwined biographical case studies of Kathleen Courtney and Maude Royden. There were various responses and dramatic fluctuations in positioning in the years leading to the world war, with many feminists struggling to come to terms with the intellectual, emotional and psychological shift from feminist-informed internationalism and pacifism to a rejection of appeasement and support for the war effort. Both Courtney and Royden had spent the two preceding decades in the forefront of the feminist pacifist movement, and the rise of Nazi Germany, the international crisis and then the Second World War itself forced each to resituate herself and make psychologically and ideologically wrenching decisions.     

Partisan players: sport,working-class culture,and the labour movement in South Wales 1920–1939

This article argues against the prevalent notion that sport was insignificant to inter-war Welsh labour by showing that it was in fact a ‘vital area of interest’ for local activists associated with leftist organisations. In South Wales, numerous sporting opportunities provided by the local labour movement were taken up with notable enthusiasm by local workers. It is demonstrated that this represented a ‘vibrant attempt to forge a coherent alternative to mainstream sporting activity by fusing it with political allegiance’ and that sport became ‘an articulation of working class self-awareness … [and] a mechanism through which working class desires and visions could be expressed’.     

Women's studies and the women's movement in Britain: origins and evolution, 1970–2000

The article is based on research carried out in 1998-99 which involved interviewing United Kingdom based women who had been responsible for introducing degree courses in women's studies into British universities and polytechnics. The interviews are records of the memories of those women as they look back on a political moment when they were engaged in collective attempts to transform the academic curriculum. Personal memories are placed alongside accounts and debates which appeared in printed sources, such as books and newsletters from the British Women's liberation movement from 1970 onwards. The article also reflects on the process in which past events and personal memoirs move from stories to histories, enter the archive, and begin to acquire the status of history.     

Class relations and capitalist development: Subsumption in the Colombian coffee industry, 1928–92

The concept of subsumption had a short life within Marxist analysis of family farming because analysts using the concept failed to appreciate the centrality of class relations in Marx's analysis of capitalist development. I argue that the concept of subsumption is best understood as a theorisation of the subtle cultural and historical processes through which labour is incorporated into capitalist development projects. I reinforce this theoretical discussion with an analysis of capitalist development in the Colombian coffee industry. This case demonstrates that capitalist development is as much project as process, as much the reformation of cultural identity as the restructuring of relations of production.     

The Women's Party of Great Britain (1917–1919): a forgotten episode in British women's political history

ABSTRACT

This article discusses the Women's Party, founded by Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst in November 1917 at a time when Britain was still fighting in World War One. It examines the origins and aims of the Women's Party which, with the slogan ‘Victory, National Security and Progress’, conflated the winning of the war with the women's cause. It is contended that global politics on the world stage as well as local politics at home shaped the agenda of the Women's Party in many differing ways.     

‘for Wales,see England?’ suffrage and the new woman in Wales [1]

With a few notable exceptions, Wales has generally been portrayed as an overtly patriarchal nation, the haven of anti-suffragists. The first part of this article reassesses this reputation. It is argued that national as well as local historical specificities must be taken into account in order to achieve a more accurate representation of suffrage history in Wales and Britain. The second part examines Welsh suffragism in the context of the nationalist Cymru Fydd movement of the 1890s as it appeared in the English language nationalist periodicals Young Wales, The Welsh Review and (the bilingual) Cymru Fydd.