1. Introduction
"'We've made independent women, much to the horror of the independent man!'" (B. Campbell, 1986: 282) said Ann Suddick about the effect the Miners' Strike 1984/85 had on the women in mining-communities. In the socialist or in the feminist press many similar statements can be found about the women.
Did the women really change? If they did - how and why did they change and were these changes lasting? The aim of this study is to examine the extent and the quality of change in roles of women in mining-communities during and after the strike and what effect this had on the way women see themselves.
The term role is used here meaning people's observable behaviour in certain functions (e. g. as mother or wife or member of a community) and in certain situations (e. g. at home, on a picket line, in a soup kitchen or in a pub) taking into account other people's expectations concerning this behaviour (e. g. what do men or what does the state expect of the women?) as well as their own demands and moral concepts (e. g. women's ideas of self-realization, of a meaningful life or marriage) (c. f. H. Drechsler / et. al. :464-466).
People's reflections on their roles determine the way they see themselves and there may be - as will be seen - considerable deviations between what is visible on the outside and how the women see themselves.
It will be necessary to look at the factors which in the past shaped women's roles and how both changed in the course of time, the factors mainly being the collieries and the mining communities. In order to evaluate women's roles in the 1984/85 miners' strike their roles in former disputes need to be looked at, also the strike itself - its background, the course it took - and women's activities during as well as after the strike.
This study will mainly concentrate on the North-East of England or what was Northumberland and Durham before local government reorganisation. Most of the primary sources used for this study are from that area and a great part of the secondary material is about the North East. Where material was not available - often historical studies - material on other coalfields in Great Britain have been consulted which is legitimate insofar as the coalfields developed similarly in their essential characteristics.
As far as possible people from the coalfield(s) will be quoted to obtain a vivid and authentic image of their situations and thoughts. In addition to this there will be more primary material printed in the appendix, e. g. poems, a letter, part of a diary and more.
Many books and articles were written about the miners' strike. Those books written or published by women from the coalfields are often available only locally, usually through the authors, and are rarely to be found in libraries and hardly ever in bookshops. This does not make it easy to obtain a complete picture of what was written by these women during or after the strike. Most of the other books or articles mention women's activities or women's roles in the strike but only a small number - preferably those by feminist authors - deal explicitly with this topic (e. g. Jean Stead: Never The Same Again). There are also no long-term studies of women's roles for the time after the strike. Such a study should be desirable for the established feminist movement which had always tried to put up a working-class women's movement but never succeeded. The feminist movement could learn for the future from the experiences of the Miners' Strike 1984/85.
