The General Strike and Miners’ Lockout of 1926 remain symbolic events in the history of the British labor movement. The historiography to date has largely concentrated on the high politics of the dispute. This book examines industrial conflict through the gender identities that permeated coalfield society. In order to reconstruct the public and private world of men and women in coal communities, Bruley draws on an impressive array of primary sources, including trade union records, local government papers, newspapers, and oral testimony. The most impressive aspect of the book is the way in which personal narratives are woven into the drama of social distress. The experiences of miners’ wives and children are drawn primarily from twenty-three interviews that were conducted by the author. The lockout is “studied in the context of families, neighbourhoods and communities, without privileging the organised labour movement and its internal politics” (15). Yet this is more than just compensatory history in which women and children appear from the margins of domesticity to take their place at the forefront of the struggle. The author also seeks to assess whether existing notions of masculinity and femininity were transformed during the course of the dispute.

The first chapter provides a tour of the south Wales coalfield and illustrates the way in which the mining industry impacted on almost all aspects of working-class life. The subsequent chapters examine the lives of miners through their roles as husbands and fathers as opposed to some of the more one-dimensional characterizations that underpin earlier heroic depictions. This was a “deeply patriarchal society,” with women servicing miners by taking on the responsibility of housekeeping, child care, and family budgeting. Yet this reading of male-female domestic relations appears more complex when the author contrasts such imagery with oral testimony to show that “away from the public gaze, gender roles could be a good deal less rigid than many imagined” (26). Yet in south Wales the notion of the miner’s wife as a domestic drudge has some currency. Fewer women were economically active in places like the Rhondda district than in other parts of Britain. Strong matriarchal figures might have been a feature of coalfield society, but their “sphere of influence was entirely domestic” (31).

The lockout stretched personal, community, and political resources to the limit, creating conditions that posed a challenge to existing gender relations. Women emerged from the confines of the home in order to support their families. Bruley explores the minutiae of male-female relationships in great detail, giving voice to individual women and their experiences. The soup kitchens that were established to provide mass feeding formed one component of a support network in which women played a crucial role in ensuring the maintenance of solidarity. Throughout the seven months of the dispute, women took their place alongside husbands, brothers, and sons. Women joined picket lines, left-wing organizations, and fund-raising delegations, and they enforced support for locked-out miners through violence and intimidation. The chapter on “Women, Politics and Pickets” provides numerous examples of such activity through the lives of women such as Elizabeth Andrews and Rose Davies. The practice of whiteshirting the miners who returned to work provides an interesting insight into the way women would “feminize” the blackleg and undermine the masculinity of the community transgressor. The violent tactics of women in 1926 “represented not just a moral stance but were in effect contesting the masculinist basis of political power in the coalfield” (111). Yet to Bruley, the lockout provided only a temporary space in which gender roles were challenged. The conclusion draws some parallels with the miners’ strike of 1984–85, when once again women became crucial in maintaining solidarity in a dispute that ultimately ended in catastrophic defeat.

The most fascinating section of the book, “Having Fun, Getting By and Outside Help,” explores the popular culture of the coalfield and lays down a marker for labor historians to pursue further. Jazz music was an important element of the soundscape of the lockout with some women referring to the “the jazz band strike.” Each village had its own jazz band although the author claims that the music was “more jazz influenced than jazz” (63). The many community parades that continued throughout the dispute drew on popular racist imagery and discourses that could be found in groups such “the ‘Chinks’ of Dover Street (dressed as Chinese Mandarins), the ‘Coons’ of Victoria Street (dressed as black and white minstrels) … [and the] ‘Nigger Nogger Coon Troupe’” (65). Bruley shows that “Religious leaders … lashed out against jazz bands for being ‘immoral and blasphemous,’ and encouraging drunkenness and gambling.” The rector of Dowlais also claimed that women “thought more of jazz bands, jazzing and dancing than they did of their domestic duties” (66). The notion that popular culture was playing a role in subverting community norms is illuminating and could have been more fruitfully developed.

As with many other feminist histories of coal communities, the author does not fully resolve the problematic relationship between gender and class. In both 1926 and 1984–85 women were acting in defense of their husbands, their community, and their class. This may have taken gendered forms, but the politics that it represented was underpinned by class identity. According to Bruley, women’s actions in 1926 “bolstered patriarchal practices which undermined women and maintained the notorious inequality of coalfield society” (145). Yet the oral testimony that informs the study suggests that the author’s notion of “notorious inequality” is problematic when imposed from a contemporary perspective. For the rest of the twentieth century, women in mining communities would negotiate conceptions of class and gender in their own way, much to the distress of some feminist activists.

Bruley has written a significant work that builds on a “new mining history” that seeks to move beyond the parameters of leaders, organizations, and national perspectives. Overall, the book is a moving and impressive analytical study of coalfield society in a period of intense industrial conflict.