Mining and Community

The idea of community in relation to mining seems self-evident. Interdependence among work, family, and locality in the nineteenth and early twentieth century created conditions for tight networks, affective ties, and reciprocal relationships in local settlements. Families migrated in community groups following new pits or better conditions. Group solidarity was an important protection against hostile physical conditions and conflictual employment relations.Footnote ¹³ Because “mining community” does not generally seem problematic, the notion of community has often been explained simply with reference to the centrality of the pit and the nature of male work:

Most accounts of British mining lifeFootnote ¹⁵ emphasize the strength and importance of community as a self-contained way of life deriving from particular industrial conditions. These accounts demonstrate relationships of work, family, and neighborhood radiating from the mine, sustaining a local culture in which “community” turns back toward the mine in a symbiotic, sustaining duality. The male world of the mine was the beating, economic heart of local community upon which female life was dependent. Female “community work” was deployed to sustain the affective, fluid relationships between work, local neighborhood, and family, while male “community work” focused upon the formality of systems and the management of welfare organizations, institutes, and clubs often linked to the NUM and thence to the national and international labor movement. The rhythms, structures, and processes of mining defined the everyday worlds and the personal and political identities of miners and their families. High levels of loyalty and support from kith and kin were needed to sustain the mining economy in which male workers were preeminent. As coal mining became more settled, these conditions encouraged a strong commitment to local place focused upon a particular pit.Footnote ¹⁶ This was intensified by the physical isolation of many mining villages developed exclusively in response to the sinking of a pit. Commitment to a particular community of place was symbolized in the lodge banner, which expressed the values and politics of the men and families through the union.Footnote ¹⁷

The strong relationship between community and place has attracted a particular “community studies” type of approach to understanding mining life and relationships.Footnote ¹⁸ Historical and sociological analyses that adopt this perspective, typified in Dennis, et al.'s classic study of a Yorkshire mining village, draw attention to the self-contained relationship between locality, community, and identity.Footnote ¹⁹ Traditional gender relationships inscribed within a work-place-family triad are explained in this model, but the gendered meaning of community itself is not interrogated. Female agency is simply assumed to remain mechanistically subject to men and their work.

Women have not been ignored; indeed there has been deep respect for the level of responsibility that they have taken in family and community life. Nevertheless, an overwhelmingly one-sided male perspective has been presented in which the active female voice has been largely silent.Footnote ²²

Such interpretations rely upon classical sociological conceptions of historical change which equate “community” with the solidaristic relationships of preindustrial economies, characterized by small-scale, isolated settlements, low levels of social mobility, a clear sexual division of labor, fixed social roles and status, and religiosity.Footnote ²³ Yet from this perspective, mining villages were paradoxical. On the one hand, the conditions of separateness, the self-sufficiency, and the interdependent relationships characteristic of single-industry mining settlements suggested pre-modern conditions, conservatism, and social rigidity. On the other hand, because the social relations of mining were forged in industrial and class conflict, they represented the possibilities of class cooperation and solidarity, which might be an example for a socialist future. There is therefore a significant tension within the idea of mining community: the conservatism of Tönnies’ notion of gemeinschaft is ever present within the progressive ideas about communism established within the Marxist tradition.Footnote ²⁴ In the “red” mining villages of County Durham, bearing nicknames like “Little Moscow,” the solidaristic class relationships were prized as ideal communities upon which a progressive industrial future might be modelled.Footnote ²⁵ But such solidarities of class retained inequalities and exclusions. Gender inequality was subsumed within and subject to the class dimensions of mining community. Moreover, insofar as women were responsible for sustaining the local, affective bonds of place, they came to embody the political ambiguities: conservative qualities of mining community were located in the social space that they inhabited, while socialist or communist associations were found in male organization.

The defeat of the 1984 strike, and the demise of mining following the decision to close thirty-one of the remaining fifty-one collieries in 1992, inevitably resulted in social upheaval in ex-mining areas, as “local pride notwithstanding, traditional bonds of family and community life [were] stretched to breaking point.”Footnote ²⁶ Class and gender assumptions were disturbed in the process, but the ideal of community remained intact in national policy to deal with the consequences. Communitarian principles especially informed the approach of the Labour Government elected in 1997. In 1999, the Coalfields Regeneration Trust declared its aim to be “changing the face of coalfield communities.”Footnote ²⁷ In this context, a more critical understanding of “community” and mining settlement has emerged. Significantly, the work of sociologists with reference to regeneration includes a more nuanced awareness of different gender perspectives and relationships, suggesting that the community activism of women contains its own dynamic, which is important in efforts toward rebuilding community cohesion.Footnote ²⁸

Before 1984, the threat to mining intrinsically implied a threat to community in an undifferentiated sense. Yet there were always aspects of women's participation in social life that were not in themselves dependent upon mining. For example, women built their own organizations, such as the Women's Co-operative Guild, and created social networks related to their own unpaid economic activity, such as mat-making, which were collective and home-based but redolent of community nevertheless. Moreover, women participated and took formal roles in religious and political organizations.Footnote ²⁹ Despite male domination in such organizations, some women learned formal skills through participation in committee structures and the management of local resources. In relation to local place, “community” for women, just as much as for men, had dimensions and relationships in which the private and the public were interwoven and in which women exercised agency.

In abstract terms, the meaning of community is notoriously “slippery.” As Bauman suggests, while community always seems to be “a good thing,” its inclusivity is only meaningful with reference to what it excludes.Footnote ³⁰ A place of security for those who “belong” and are “recognized” can be alien and unfriendly for those who do not conform to or identify with dominant social mores. Community is often closed to outside influence and possibilities for change. Even for those who belong, the material realities of social change and power relations mean that the “feel good” promise of community is elusive in practice and uneven in distribution.

“Community as place” is particularly prone to generalizations and to undifferentiated and masculinist versions of mining life. Other notions of community question this dominant understanding.Footnote ³¹ For example, the ideas developed by Anderson relating to nationhood suggest that community is constructed through cultural processes by the imagination. Bauman takes the argument further, arguing that community does not exist at all in any material sense while Plant suggests that community can be fruitfully mobilized as a process, a set of relationships and values that people self-consciously attempt to establish.Footnote ³² Williams argued that the construction of community draws upon an idealization of the past, a place that always “has been” and for which no negative connotations exist.Footnote ³³

These complications in meaning were all evident in references to mining community in the 1984–1985 strike. Mining as community of place was associated with the mining villages that “had been” during the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Meanwhile, engagement in strike activism drew upon political and historical imaginations to construct community with reference to the political ideals associated with socialism and working-class cooperation, which were pitted against the political and historical imaginations of nationhood promoted by Thatcherism. Cooperative principles were made material to some extent in the process of collective organization in support of the strike. However, complex considerations of insider-outsider status between miners, miners’ families, and “others” (friend or foe), meant that the promise of community could never be fully achieved; the very dynamism of the strike generated awareness of difference as much as commonality between those directly affected and supporters from “outside.”Footnote ³⁴ The conflict associated with strike breakers, branded as traitors to community as much as to worker solidarity, particularly destabilized the assumption that community cohesion necessarily followed from the local conditions of work in the mine. Meanwhile, political alliances with groups not normally associated with mining suggested dimensions to community that might be derived from values rather than lived experiences. Different subject positions occupied by men and women in this process raised serious questions about gender inequalities and assumptions associated with traditional mining communities of place.

Women, Mining Community, and the Strike

The collaborative relationships established between men in the hostile conditions of the pit undoubtedly had their counterpart in solidaristic relationships associated with home and place. Such community relationships were not only derivative but had a material foundation. Mine owners were also landlords: employer-owned housing for mining families was typically substandard. Conflicts with mine owners as employers were mirrored in landlord-tenant disputes.Footnote ³⁵ Mass eviction often followed nineteenth-century strikes, and, well into the twentieth century, landlord power was being used against union leaders.Footnote ³⁶ The immediate interests of women and children were therefore interwoven with labor relations while the provision of decent housing was a central concern of the miners’ union. The mutual gender struggle was particularly evident in the campaign for pithead baths which, when established, allowed men to wash at work when they finished their shift, rather than after they returned to homes without running water or bathroom facilities. This took a massive burden off the women, who were responsible for preparing water and filling the tin baths, helping the men to wash the grime from their bodies, and washing their male relatives’ filthy work clothes. Standing “side by side with their men” in class struggle was directly grounded in the conditions of female existence although the emphasis in the benefits to be gained was different for men and women.

The centrality of class in mining campaigns has had particular implications for the gendered understanding of community. Excluded from underground mining since the Coal Mines Act of 1842, in many regions women were entirely outside the labor market and therefore perceived as secondary to the class struggle as conceptualized within labor politics. Women's role could only be understood with reference to the conditions of labor in the mines. The interdependent structural and material basis of the political struggles of women was obscured by the fact of their personal dependence upon the men. Consequently their independent voices have not been heard, and they have been caricatured as the most oppressed of creatures. “Every reference to miners’ wives in regional writings on coal communities … comments on the hard labour of these ‘semi-imprisoned’ women.”Footnote ³⁷

Yet female community activism had historically independent dimensions:

That there was always an independent aspect to the community orientation of women in mining life is obscured by the dominant narrative of the transformative quality of the strike for women. This narrative suggests that the typical strike activist was a miner's wife who, in solidarity with her man, left the domestic sphere to defend her family, community, and inherited “way of life.” Through her actions, she underwent a metamorphosis from housewife to political activist, transformed by collective engagement with the men's struggle into a new female working-class vanguard.Footnote ³⁹

The iconography of the strike supports this interpretation. As the strike progressed, images of domesticated women serving in kitchens and observing male actions were supplemented by pictures of women participating in mass rallies, conferences, and marches, carrying banners articulating their views; shouting at strike-breakers; speaking on public platforms; and supporting other struggles.Footnote ⁴⁰

Yet this narrative of “transformation” relies on a partial understanding that privileges a conservative view of the inherited gender relations of the mining community. The extent to which the women responded to their own perceptions of the problems associated with mine closure, the extent to which they used already existing political skill and knowledge, and the extent to which changes in gender roles and responsibilities prevalent in “the outside world” had already affected those involved in mining went unnoticed, and, instead, “archetypal images came into play, remembered traumas of the bad old days.”Footnote ⁴¹ The complexity of the relations between gender and community prior to 1984 remained unacknowledged and unexplored.

In the absence of employment and child-care options, in the face of male shift work, it was inevitable that some women continued to occupy traditional roles up to and beyond the strike year. However, disruption to traditional patterns of life had occurred long before 1984. As the mining industry declined during the 1960s, substitute industries offered mainly low-paid employment opportunities to women.Footnote ⁴² Meanwhile, local links between family, neighborhood and work were broken for those displaced and dispersed by previous mine closures.Footnote ⁴³ “Mining community” was becoming both spatially and affectively less cohesive. There was a growing disjuncture between the historical presumptions upon which gender relations were based and the realities of family, place of residence, and working life across different coalfields.

By 1984, mining community and mining village were no longer necessarily synonymous. For example, in the Durham coalfield there had been a serious decline in the small village structure with migration toward the larger mines on the coast. Even in areas where mining continued to dominate, the physical boundaries of place had less relevance in the face of modern communication systems, while expanded educational opportunities enabled some of the younger postwar generation to leave mining altogether. Yet the frequent references to “mining village,” usually in association with female action, in the discourse of the strike suggested the continuing vibrancy of historically discrete, spatially isolated and bounded places in the imagination of the Left.Footnote ⁴⁴ Raphael Samuel reported that, “… housing estates were talked of as though they were villages, places of hereditary settlements where generations of miners had lived.”Footnote ⁴⁵

That loss of mining would mean degradation to the conditions of local community was uncontroversial. Yet, objectively, the quality of local social conditions and relations were not dependent upon mining, per se. Indeed, it could be argued that if adequate economic investment were to follow, the physical quality of localities might improve with the closure of coal mines, and that the relational qualities of locality associated with the female role might be harnessed to good effect in a post-mining world. However, the premises for the dominant arguments of the Left were located in the past rather than in the real conditions of the present or any imagined alternative future. In this sense, they contained their own brand of conservatism.

Predictions of community degradation were important in forging links between the NUM's concern for employment with broader political questions about values and how to live. The imagery of collectivism and cooperation associated with local mining communities of the past offered an alternative, working-class vision to the radical individualism of the new conservative hegemony. However, the appeal to the preservation of mining community legitimated and explained female activism in exclusive terms, invoking traditional roles, reasserting meanings whereby acting “side by side” with the men meant conforming to unequal gender relationships in a predetermined sexual division of labor. This was sometimes communicated directly by the NUM and individual men who attempted to allocate “appropriate” tasks to the women:

Such positioning neither accommodated the complex realities of the lives of women before the strike, nor acknowledged the independent political well-spring of their opposition to Thatcherism. Despite the efforts of women to participate as socialist political actors in the strike, references to their traditional roles in community resituated them continuously in fundamentally conservative positions. Women had to deal with this in order to maintain cooperative relations with the union. At the same time the complex and self-conscious nature of their activism transcended such stereotypes.Footnote ⁴⁸ In a dance of domination and dependence, women activists thus found themselves performing different subject positions for different audiences:

Whether or not they had any relationship with a miner was not the issue, but it was primarily as “us,” as “miners’ wives,” fighting for the virtues of traditional mining community that the women were accommodated by the NUM and applauded by the labor movement. Thus it was in these terms that they performed.Footnote ⁵⁰

Romantic notions about miners’ wives implicitly resituated women in a secondary role as a community ideal for which to struggle. The fact that the transformative qualities of the women's actions during the strike depended significantly upon female skills gained outside the home, was obscured. That many women who lived in mining areas had independent community perspectives and prior histories of political activism was ignored. That the collective female action was not only local, but national and even global, based upon political values as much as place and identity, was not elaborated.

Many women who were miners’ wives did, of course, find in the support groups a means of coping with and contributing to the strike. Strategically, their activism was privileged in order to emphasize the solidarities of family and community and to communicate the strength of the striking miners. However the rhetoric of “the wife” obscured the varied positions adopted by miners’ wives and compounded the silence around the importance of the public responsibilities taken by women:

Moreover, not all miners’ wives were active in the strike:

Some wives had jobs whose work became the only source of family income during the strike. Some women, employed by the NCB in canteens and offices, were on strike on their own account whether or not they were wives. Many involved in support groups were not wives at all. Often it was the mothers of miners who stimulated local female action.Footnote ⁵³ The different women involved drew from a combination of informal and formal networks, deploying skills gained from waged work and from participation in public institutions, including the Labour Party.

The skills used by activist women might be considered a type of “bridging” social capital connecting the traditional female sphere of family/neighborhood with the male sphere of politics and social organization.Footnote ⁵⁴ Only very rarely did the men undertake a “bridging” role into the informal community dimensions of family and neighborhood. The experience of women active in local Labour Party and community politics prior to 1984 was crucial in structuring, informing, and sustaining the women's activities during the strike.Footnote ⁵⁵ It was primarily this which enabled them to link the personal meanings of the strike with the values of community and left-wing politics to such powerful effect. The mobilization of pre-existing skills and knowledge used with reference to the traditional and more stereotyped versions of women's roles contributed to the powerful “bonding” associated with the values of community promoted during the miners’ strike. Myrtle MacPherson, quoted below, did not mention either her paid employment in school kitchens or her role as a parish councillor, but she effectively used both in order to achieve cooperation from a wide constituency of supporters in the neighborhood:

The practical and strategic realities of serving the cause of the strike thus drew upon conceptions of women's traditional role through the rhetorical device of community. This enabled women to assert the value of their domestic and relationship skills in the political sphere giving romantic vigor to the public discourse of the struggle as one of ordinary men and women fighting to save a way of life. However, it simultaneously accommodated conservative views of gender by allowing the possibility of women's activism to be resituated and confined to those traditional roles. Characteristics of loyalty, friendship, sympathy, generosity, and solidarity, and the interdependence of different groups in mining districts were emphasized and reaffirmed by the experience of mutual support. These could be, and were, connected with nostalgic representations of mining community and recollections of past struggles as much as with possibilities for an alternative future.

Changing Perceptions

Throughout the strike, women were allocated responsibility for domestic and emotional labor, while the men assumed primary responsibility for strategic and political labor. Female activism at the beginning was located in the traditional institutions associated with community life (community centers and welfare halls), concentrated upon feeding and nurturing, while male activism was located at the sites of work (the mines) concentrated on picketing, mobilizing political alliances, and negotiating.Footnote ⁵⁷ However, as the strike progressed, so too did the complexity of the activism:

Many women found themselves taking organizing roles which were not expressive of women's traditional place as an apparently accidental consequence of their desire to do something practical to help striking families to survive, but even here they brought into play other skills and allegiances.Footnote ⁵⁹ Female involvement was based on their own personal histories, which were frequently outside the conventionally understood parameters of the lives of women in the community life of mining:

Such women often began by accommodating themselves to the principal work of the early support groups, cooking meals and distributing parcels, but inevitably they increasingly mobilized their political expertise and networks, extending the possibilities for activist development beyond the boundaries imposed by the personal relations of mining community and the political relations of the NUM.Footnote ⁶¹

Some women who participated in the strike came from places where the pit was already closed. Their engagement drew upon networks disassociated from community as place and gaining community from a broader political constituency:

The basis of the strike partnership between men and women was never straightforward. Women's “support” groups signified the secondary and dependent nature of female participation. However, these groups developed their own internal dynamic. Association in the women's groups was not dependent upon mining life, even when the group adopted an “authentic” rule for membership, but upon solidarities between women choosing to support a particular political struggle. Identification did not depend upon “identity” so much as upon a recognition of common interests and values. However the terms of the central struggle remained in the male arena of mining and the NUM. Inevitably in these circumstances, relationships between women and men, between individual members of support groups and between the support groups and the NUM were characterized not only by cooperation, but also conflict and resistance regarding gender and authority, inevitably exacerbated by the experience of an intense and painful year of struggle.Footnote ⁶³

The miners’ strike asserted the importance of class solidarity at a time when class was being displaced by different “issues,” including that of gender, in political organization. With working-class activism in retreat, the supportive role of women for the strike suggested possibilities for uniting class struggle with a range of private and public issues. “Community” was a loose enough concept to emphasize commonality across difference, distinguishing this struggle from the meanings associated with labor disputes of the 1970s, which had been used to discredit the Left. It also effectively elided negative connotations of feminism; female activism performed in service of the larger community had no need of feminism or an independent women's movement.Footnote ⁶⁴

Community cooperation didn't just “happen” as activity derived from traditional female responsibilities for family and neighborhood. Initiative and leadership were required to realize support for the strike in practice. Thus individual women who understood community in terms of politics and values rather than as simply a feature of place or lived identity, often came to the fore:

Ambiguities in the meaning of community were intrinsic to the support of the strike. Women Against Pit Closures (WAPC) demonstrated its concern with legitimacy and the authenticity of community by insisting that 75 percent of its membership be from mining families. Yet although this confirmed acceptance of dependence upon male-dominated community, the conservatism of the position enabled WAPC to use its influence with the NUM to facilitate an extensive campaign in the UK and abroad which extended the normal terrain of female influence and the discourses of trade unionism. WAPC's positioning invited NUM acknowledgement of the value of female political activism, and offered access to male-dominated political territory. New and more extensive networks, combined with increased opportunities to speak on behalf of the miners’ cause created new bridging dimensions to female social capital. Thus WAPC was able ultimately to extend its terms of reference beyond community as place and beyond traditional roles and positions for women:

The tension between conservatism and transformative action within WAPC expressed a central difficulty of the wider movement of women who supported the miners’ strike. By inhabiting their traditional roles in community life and by performing these roles in relation to an undifferentiated view of class, family, and place, women could appeal to the nostalgia of the male-dominated labor movement, which was under serious attack, and could play an important part in helping to reunite factions around the miners’ cause. However, participation in political action went beyond the control of the male-dominated union. Women established their own networks amongst themselves and with other community groups and movements where different, value-led versions of community challenged inherited traditional meanings tied to mining.

Inevitably, organized female action became increasingly problematic for preconceived ideas about women's place in and relationship with mining community. Self-awareness and perhaps an acknowledgement of “performance” was expressed in the decision of one women's support group to choose to call itself “Miners’ Wives” after the strike was over. Although many members were not miners’ wives, this group argued that the term would enable them to be understood by “outsiders” in terms of their class allegiance and would ensure legitimacy and respect for their action in the post-industrial context.Footnote ⁶⁷

Some women took up a different position, claiming the authenticity which they had promoted, attempting to relive and consolidate traditional ideas of a common identity. Authentic position-taking reasserted the uniqueness and separateness of mining community, drawing upon the heritage of political struggle and paying particular homage to the oral history of the experience of the 1926 lockout when, ironically, the miners were also defeated. Community as marshalled by these women raised serious disputes about “belonging,” questioning who was entitled to join support groups, who was “one of us” and “not one of us.”Footnote ⁶⁸ Such a tightly defined view of community was defensive and inward looking, continuous with the historical self-protectionism characteristic of isolated mining villages of the past. It also fed into a nostalgia that remains in the post-mining period. The appeal to authenticity was inextricably connected with a view of class in which the subject positions of women as women were secondary to their support for the class struggle in which, as wives, their interests were held to be inscribed.

It was those women whose activism was prompted by considerations other than any relationship with a miner who were most active in questioning the meaning of authenticity of community and its relevance for the struggle. These women challenged inherited gender positions and conservative views of class associated with mining identity:

The links made between different women associated with the miners’ cause and with supporters outside mining, rather than the claim to authenticity, were responsible for the dynamism of the movement.Footnote ⁷⁰ Such links opened the possibility of informed choices beyond what was normally ascribed to women associated with mining. This was manifest in the common cause made with nontraditional political identity groups such as lesbians and gays and also through the international contact made with the wider labor and trade union movement. Both of these features of the experience of the strike challenged closed ideas about women's role in the work-family-community model of mining, extending the idea of community as commonality of politics and values and opening the possibility of community-building as an activity separate from mining itself in which women could play an independent and active role.