‘Working-class women’s history isn’t reported. It’s not important.” So says one of the “iron ladies”, the name given by this documentary to the women who supported the miners’ strike of 1984-85. Local groups came together under the banner Women Against Pit Closures (WAPC); many were miners’ wives, like Betty Cook, now in her 80s, who promised herself at the start of the strike she wasn’t going to sit at home and cry. “I’m going to do something,” she says. The women picketed, raised money, organised rallies and peeled spuds by the thousands. One group chained themselves to defence secretary Michael Heseltine’s offices in London.
At this distance, when you think of the miners’ strike picket line, you think of broad-shouldered mining men nose-to-nose with police in high helmets. But the women picketed, too (one jokes that she used to argue with her husband over who went to the picket line and who stayed at home with the kids). One or two describe being judged for their activism (“my mum told me I wasn’t fit to be a wife or a mother”), and journalists from London would ask about feminism. But they weren’t interested in labels, say the women interviewed here. “We were just women who wanted to know how to feed their kids.” As they speak, the thrill is still palpable.
The miners’ strike is a story of loss; it took away everything from people. But for the many of the women of WAPC, it was their first taste of activism. It made them political; one says it gave her freedom. Afterwards, many went back to education, joined local politics to work for their local communities, became councillors and mayors. Forty years on, the hatred for Margaret Thatcher, the Iron Lady and the woman whose government defeated the strike, is still raw: “She was one iron lady, we were hundreds.”
Iron Ladies is in UK and Irish cinemas from 10 October.
