Understanding unemployment

Sam Wetherall has recently argued for “histories of worklessness, rather than labour.”Footnote ⁴ Who, though, gets to be recognized as workless? To be workless, one after all has to have been recognized as a worker in the first place, and women’s work has historically been underrecognized. Women’s unemployment has a history as old as the idea of unemployment (itself a conceptual innovation of the late nineteenth century, the product of an increasingly formalized labor market and new ideas about “the economy”), but it has only been patchily recognized by policymakers, social scientists, and historians.Footnote ⁵ Historians such as Keith Laybourn and Pat Thane have established that there was some official recognition of women’s unemployment as a problem to be solved during the interwar depression when the government established the Central Committee on Women’s Training and Employment, which focused on the provision of domestic training centers.Footnote ⁶ Marjorie Levine-Clark has also written about women’s applications for unemployment benefit in the 1920s.Footnote ⁷ But for many in the interwar era, the perception remained that it was women’s employment rather than unemployment that was the problem.Footnote ⁸

Other historians’ acknowledgment of these issues has been partial. Indeed, large swathes of scholarship on the economic restructuring seen in Britain (and across the West) in the last thirty years of the twentieth century has focused on the figure of the white male worker. As one recent historiographical review suggested, “the figure who tends to embody the experience of deindustrialization in popular cultural narratives is the male worker stripped of his job—often a miner or steelworker, sometimes a shipbuilder or (especially in the US context) an autoworker.”Footnote ⁹ In his work Idle Hands, examining two hundred years of the experience of unemployment in Britain, John Burnett’s focus was largely on men, reflecting the preoccupations of most of the source material he chose to utilize. While he recognizes that women were unemployed and suffered in the downturn of the 1970s and 1980s, he focuses relatively little attention on their plight.Footnote ¹⁰ We can also see these absences in Bernhard Rieger’s otherwise excellent 2018 article on Thatcher’s unemployment policy, in which Rieger argues that “the former industrial workers on the dole,” were “overwhelmingly male,” which has the effect of suggesting that unemployment was simply a male phenomenon, given that the experiences of women are not considered in the article.Footnote ¹¹ Such a statement makes invisible the large number of female workers in industry at this point (a third of jobs lost in manufacturing during the 1970s were lost by women), and fails to understand the ways in which social security rules made it harder for them to claim unemployment benefit and thus be included in the unemployment count.Footnote ¹² Furthermore, by eliding unemployment with deindustrialization, those who lost jobs in the service sector through economic recession have also been squeezed out of the historical picture, although some estimates suggests that nearly half of women who were unemployed in 1980 had lost service-sector jobs.Footnote ¹³ Ultimately, it is hard to disagree with Andy Clark’s recent assessment that “The experiences of female manufacturing workers facing closure during the 1970s and 1980s are largely absent in deindustrialisation scholarship.”Footnote ¹⁴ Those who lost their jobs in other sectors are also barely mentioned.

The huge growth in the participation of women in the labor market in the second half of the twentieth century in Britain has also worked to obscure the existence of significant numbers of unemployed women, both at the time and in historical memory. It is certainly true to say that, seen over the longue durée, the shift in Britain’s economic base away from industry and toward the service sector has enabled women to participate in the labor market much more fully, due to cultural assumptions about what women’s work should be. The purpose of this article is not to dispute this; indeed, women’s participation in the labor force continued to grow, as demonstrated in Table 1.

Table 1.

UK female labour force participation rates, 1931–91

Source: Adapted from table “Women’s Labour Market Activity Rates,” in Alex Bryson, Heather Joshi, Bozena Wielgoszewska, and David Wilkinson, A Short History of the Gender Wage Gap in Britain (Bonn, 2020), 4 .

The increasing availability of part-time work and greater access to education meant that women of all social backgrounds were able to undertake paid work—from the menial to the professional—as never before, a development upon which many historians have commented.Footnote ¹⁵ Yet despite women’s increasing workforce participation rates, like men, they too were vulnerable to the vicissitudes of the labor market. Indeed, increasing numbers of women in the labor market also meant that there were growing numbers of women who were vulnerable to unemployment.

Women’s unemployment during this period was due to two major factors. First, the deindustrialization that occurred in Britain (and indeed the West) led to the rapid loss of manufacturing jobs for women, as well as for men, in the 1970s and 1980s. Rapid deindustrialization led to classic structural unemployment in Britain during this period; that is, unemployment that resulted from a mismatch between the skills of a local population and the jobs actually available. Simply put, there were not enough suitable jobs available for those made redundant from industrial employment; this was true for women and men, young and old, across Britain during this period, and the problem was particularly acute in regions of heavy industry.Footnote ¹⁶ Secondly, a difficult economic context both domestically and internationally led to several severe economic recessions, most notably between 1979 and 1982.Footnote ¹⁷ In severe recessions, many sectors are affected, and cyclical unemployment from economic cycle downturns is the result. In such periods, the service sector, —a key employer of women — was thus also heavily affected due to the far-reaching nature of the recession.

More conservative or traditional understandings of women’s domestic role also precluded them from being understood as truly unemployed. This vision of womanhood saw women’s domestic role as generally constituting their “true work”: men were breadwinners with women working for pin money. Therefore, the logic went, women’s job losses could not possibly entail the same psychological or economic effects as they did for men.Footnote ¹⁸ Such views were held by a range of actors. Sociologists Ashton and Field argued in 1976, for example, that “prolonged unemployment is likely to pose less of a problem for the young woman. In the first place … work is not usually as important to them as it is for the young man.”Footnote ¹⁹ Revealingly, in 1978 the Department for Health and Social Security began a large long-term cohort study into the experiences of the unemployed, but limited their sample to men only.Footnote ²⁰ This was revealing of implicit official understandings about who the unemployed actually were: women’s problems were not seen to be significant, and it is clear from an examination of Employment Gazette (the Department of Employment’s official publication) that Whitehall only slowly began to understand the extent of female joblessness. This official obliviousness began to change by the 1980s, as the Department of Employment commissioned a program of research that examined the experiences of women in the labor market, conscious of both the increasingly integral position of employed women, and their lack of understanding of both women’s labor behavior during recession and their experiences of unemployment.Footnote ²¹ The results of this research, however, were not published until the mid-1980s, well after the feminist groups I examine in this article began.Footnote ²²

Contributing to the invisibility of women’s joblessness was the fact that women were sometimes not made officially redundant due to their tendency to be working on temporary contracts in the first place. In the early 1980s, PhD researcher Frances Evans’s attempt to examine the experiences of women made redundant on the Isle of Sheppey foundered when she discovered that no woman had, in fact, been made officially redundant on the island in recent times, despite significant local economic distress. As she explained, “Employing outworkers; recruiting staff on temporary contracts; and freezing new appointments” all allowed for local employers to effectively reduce the number of female workers while avoiding costly redundancy processes.Footnote ²³ Others found unions unwilling to take up their cause.Footnote ²⁴ Furthermore, the poor provision of state childcare facilities made it difficult for women with children under five to undertake paid work. As such women were not technically “available for work” (a requirement of receiving unemployment benefit), they too were not counted in statistics, despite the fact that there is significant evidence that many would have liked to re-enter the labor force at a much earlier point. This raises fundamental questions about how unemployment was (and is) understood. Should a woman with a two-year-old child who wished to work, but did not engage in job-seeking activity because she knew there would be no childcare available to facilitate her, be understood as “unemployed”? Officialdom’s answer to this was “no,” and it was such narrow conceptualizations of unemployment that in part led to rates of female joblessness being significantly underestimated.

Even given these issues, official statistics did reveal a significant level of female unemployment. In some areas in the 1970s, women’s unemployment rates actually grew faster than men’s.Footnote ²⁵ In 1976, for example, the Department of Employment’s official publication, Employment Gazette, noted that registered female unemployment had increased from 90,000 to 484,000 between 1973 and August/September 1975, and that male unemployment had risen from 490,000 to 760,000, although there was evidence to suggest that women found new jobs more quickly.Footnote ²⁶ In the mid-1980s, Sylvia Walby found that while women worked in sectors where they were less likely to be at risk of redundancy, when they were in workplaces that did undergo closure or contraction, they were more likely to be made redundant than men were; Chris Lawson has also argued the same to be true of Coventry in the late 1970s.Footnote ²⁷ In some places, this was particularly pronounced: in Deptford, between 1976 and 1981, women’s unemployment increased by 144 percent, while men’s increased by only 37 percent.Footnote ²⁸ A study led by Fernando Aragon on the gendered effects of the collapse of the UK coal industry found that when men were made redundant, they often moved into jobs that would have previously been taken up by women.Footnote ²⁹ We also know that, nationally, Black and ethnic minority women—who were more likely to be working in manufacturing employment—were also disproportionately affected by these changes.Footnote ³⁰ Particularly striking is the finding that the increase in unemployment among female minority group workers in 1975 had been three times greater than among white female workers.Footnote ³¹ This statistic speaks to both the concentration of ethnic minority women in the poorly paid industrial sectors that were hemorrhaging jobs, and to their poor treatment by employers and trade unions, as Jessica White has recently argued.Footnote ³²

But as ever, statistics only tell part of the story. Felix Romer has recently argued that, “Statistical knowledge […] produces descriptions of reality that can be taken for the thing itself; it generates images of society and can render social phenomena or groups visible or invisible in very peculiar ways depending on when, where, how, and by who it is produced.”Footnote ³³ The feminists that this article considers were particularly alive to the politics of knowledge involved in the production of statistics about the unemployed, and how these worked to conceal very substantial female joblessness. The decision about who got to be included in the category of “unemployed” was ultimately a political one. To count as jobless, how long must someone be without work, must they register for benefits, need they take any work offered, are they otherwise occupied with domestic duties? The answers to these questions were clearly deeply subjective.

Unemployment statistics—particularly ones created by the government—were notoriously unreliable and particularly vulnerable to political manipulation. The way in which they were created changed with disconcerting regularity—eighteen times between 1979 and 1986, with each change having the miraculous effect of reducing the unemployment count.Footnote ³⁴ However, the creation of official statistics had the effect of minimizing female unemployment in particular. (There was also, of course, an under-counting of men, most notoriously in the payment of long-term sickness benefit to males who had lost industrial jobs, rather than having them registered as unemployed.Footnote ³⁵) The so-called “married women’s benefit”—in which married women could opt to pay lower National Insurance rates—meant that many married women were not entitled to claim unemployment benefit. In 1978, for example, about 60 percent of married women in Britain opted out of paying full contributions.Footnote ³⁶ Such women rarely bothered to register themselves as unemployed at local labor exchanges: there was little advantage to doing so, because they were unlikely to have the National Insurance needed to claim unemployment benefit, the primary advantage of registration. Unemployment statistics were derived from this registration before 1982 (after this point, they were drawn from the claimant count), so this practice also underestimated women’s unemployment for the same reason (i.e., that many women had not paid enough National Insurance to claim unemployment benefit).Footnote ³⁷ The General Household Survey of 1980, for example, discovered that almost half of all married women who were unemployed and looking for work were not actually registered as unemployed.Footnote ³⁸ Ian Gazeley and Andrew Newell have suggested that female unemployment rates were underestimated by about 20 percent, but many feminist social scientists have argued for more.Footnote ³⁹ In the 1990s, Shirley Dex found that the claimant count always recorded far fewer women unemployed than the International Labor Organization’s definition of unemployment, sometimes only picking up a third of the women included in the latter definition. Even then, Dex argued, the government still tended to underestimate female joblessness because of its inability to recognize the structural barriers to women’s entrance into the labor market.Footnote ⁴⁰

The discrepancies in the numbers of female jobless that different methods of measuring unemployment could give is clearly visible when comparing the results of just the claimant count with newer figures from the Office for National Statistics. Tables 2 and 3 illustrate these phenomena.

Table 2.

Claimant count, UK, 1971–98

Table 2 Long description

The table is intended to report the UK claimant count over time, covering years from 1971 through 1998. Claimant count typically refers to the number of people claiming unemployment related benefits, but the table’s definition and units are not provided here. No numerical entries or year by year values were included in the supplied table data, so specific levels, peaks, lows, or changes over time cannot be described. Because the underlying figures are missing, it is not possible to compare early and late years, identify trends, or summarize notable periods. Provide the table values and any column headings or units to enable an accurate, WCAG compliant summary of key patterns and comparisons.

Source: Phil Evans, “Why has the female unemployment rate in Britain fallen?,” Bank of England Quarterly Bulletin (August 1998), 248–55, at 248.

Table 3.

UK unemployment rates by gender, 1971–91

Source: Adapted from Office for National Statistics, Female unemployment rate (aged 16 and over, seasonally adjusted): % and Male unemployment rate (aged 16 and over, seasonally adjusted): % .

These tables tell a very different story to the claimant count, one that astonishingly suggests that on some measures, the female unemployment rate was actually higher than men’s throughout the 1970s. As Tables 2 and 3 demonstrate, government figures for the registered unemployed (which was very similar to the claimant count, for it was through registering as unemployed that one accessed the social security benefits associated with it) give us different numbers. In 1971, 1.2 percent of women and 4.2 percent of men were registered as unemployed, with numbers increasing by 1980 to 5.2 percent and 7.8 percent respectively.Footnote ⁴¹ But these alternative statistics from the Office for National Statistics tell us that in 1971, the female unemployment rate, at 5.1 percent, was already outpacing the male unemployment rate at 3.6 percent. In 1980, 7.1 percent of women and 6.6 percent of men were jobless, with the male unemployment rate only overtaking female unemployment by 1981, the result of the rapid collapse of heavy industry.Footnote ⁴²

These figures, I suggest, should be read with caution. Not only is it not clear which datasets the ONS were drawing on to produce these statistics, they do not appear to have been available to contemporaries. None of the scholars working at the time that I have cited in this article used them.Footnote ⁴³ Indeed, in their 1984 study of women in the labor force, Jean Martin and Ceridwen Roberts lamented “the absence of a single measure of unemployment for women” and the lack of exploration of the category of the “unregistered unemployed”—defects in the data that their study was partly commissioned to remedy.Footnote ⁴⁴ But the fact that such different statistical estimates of female unemployment have been produced by official bodies is in itself indicative of the profound difficulties faced by social scientists in attempting to measure unemployment, and the subsequent difficulties faced by historians latterly trying to reconstruct unemployment rates. No perfect measure can exist to capture unemployment, either male and female, and I am not suggesting in this article that a single “true” figure can ever be precisely calculated. Nevertheless, the different estimates we have for female joblessness should give us pause, both for how we think about the gendered experience of unemployment and, more broadly, our own reliance as historians on statistics. Ironically, the more we understand about the processes through which these statistics were created, the clearer it becomes just how partial these figures were, shaped by the biases of the all-too-human creators of the categories through which the woman (or, indeed, man) without work was made legible to state bureaucracies.

Feminist approaches to unemployment

Feminists in the women’s liberation movement in Britain did discuss unemployment in the 1970s, particularly toward the end of the decade when the dimensions of the economic crisis that the UK was entering became apparent.Footnote ⁴⁵ Yet the debate was couched in very different terms to the way it would be framed in the 1980s. Some socialist feminists were deeply ambivalent about demanding the right for women to work in a capitalist society in which, for most women, work meant exploitation. As Maureen Mackintosh, Sue Himmelweit, and Barbara Taylor argued in a 1977 paper:

They concluded that “if the struggle around unemployment and women’s work is to be a feminist and socialist one it must challenge not only the use of women as vulnerable and cheap labor, but the patriarchal social relations which turn women into this sort of worker in the first place.”Footnote ⁴⁷ Other academics, such as Irene Bruegel and Veronica Beechey, focused their intellectual energies on questions about a long-running Marxist debate about whether or not women could be said to constitute a reserve army of labor and were thus more vulnerable to being made redundant.Footnote ⁴⁸ The conclusions about female unemployment these various activists and scholars reached may have been theoretically sound, but they remained abstract. It is difficult to see how they could have led to concrete campaigns against the increasing number of redundancies faced by women.

A nascent feminist scholarship also aimed to make clear that women experienced unemployment in many of the same ways that men did. In some respects, the findings of such studies were unsurprising, but were important in a context where many people simply could not really recognize women as truly “unemployed” or as experiencing the same financial and psychological distress that men did. Pioneering feminist sociologists such as Angela Coyle and Claire Wallace argued that, as for men, work provided women with financial independence, social connections, and a sense of identity.Footnote ⁴⁹ Such arguments were also backed up by the findings of government studies that had been commissioned in the early 1980s into women’s position in the labor market. In Judith Wallace and Roderick Martin’s work, they found that the women they interviewed who had been made redundant “preferred going out to work, finding work rewarding both financially and personally […] Stopping going out to work was not a return to a ‘natural’ way of life, but a change to a new, more restricted, and less rewarding way of life.”Footnote ⁵⁰ Jean Martin and Ceridwen Roberts found that unemployed women “react to being without paid employment in much the same way as studies show that unemployed men do.”Footnote ⁵¹ And Tim Cragg and Arnold Dawson found much the same, although they did caution that women’s unemployment should be seen as being on a “continuum,” with the worst effects (both psychologically and economically) felt by those who were single and had always previously worked.Footnote ⁵²

Alongside this research activity, feminists formed a number of practical local initiatives to assist women in their search for work in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when the crisis was biting at its hardest. This was part of a wider rapprochement between feminism and the state.Footnote ⁵³ The local state was a contradictory entity for socialist feminists during the 1980s—what some have dubbed the “moment of municipal feminism.”Footnote ⁵⁴ Socialist feminist thinking toward the state changed significantly over this period. An ideological position that understood the state—both national and local—as inevitably the servant of capitalist and patriarchal interests, gave way to a more subtle and complex viewpoint that saw the state as a protean formation that, given the right conditions, could be put in the service of both socialism and feminism.Footnote ⁵⁵ Part of this was undoubtedly what Hilary Wainwright and Maureen Mackintosh termed in 1987 the “taste of power” that leftist Labour administrations in a number of metropolitan areas—most notably London, but also Sheffield, Merseyside, Birmingham etc.—enjoyed in the early 1980s.Footnote ⁵⁶ It was more difficult to designate “the state” as unabashedly capitalist when socialists themselves became part of its apparatus at a local level.

Nevertheless, suspicion of the state’s vested patriarchal and capitalist interests remained a significant feature of the praxis of leftists during this period, with many, such as Sheila Rowbotham, viewing the state as “stripy: part good, part bad.”Footnote ⁵⁷ Furthermore, feminism’s contradictory relationship with the state became increasingly recognized; just how profoundly the gains of the welfare state benefited women in terms of child benefit, healthcare, and education became more obvious as the Thatcher government attempted to reduce spending on these areas.Footnote ⁵⁸ Whether they sat within or outside the state was a subject of some vexation for women’s employment projects: Ursula Murray, a member of the Haringey Women’s Employment Project (HWEP) remembered that:

Ultimately, the promise of money lured activists into an ever-closer relationship with the local state: a pragmatic accommodation with left-wing local governments was a key way through which radical projects of all stripes could gain funding during the 1980s, enabling a thriving world of state-sponsored leftist activism.Footnote ⁶⁰

Employment projects were particularly popular for funders and activists alike. As Vicki Randall and Joni Lovenduski noted, “equal employment policy is an area in which women’s movement politics have influenced practices, transformed the agenda, and populated the policy community.”Footnote ⁶¹ Many of these initiatives to help women find jobs, access training, and become more aware of their employment rights came together under the umbrella of the Women’s Employment Projects Group (WEPG), formed in 1980 under the auspices of the National Council for Voluntary Organisations, with which they had a tricky relationship due to its perceived lack of feminist sympathies.Footnote ⁶² The WEPG described themselves thus:

Groups were to be found all over the country, in many London boroughs, in Sheffield, Leeds, Liverpool, Wolverhampton, and Swansea; there were quite literally dozens of organizations that were affiliated with the WEPG in the early 1980s, pointing to the perceived need for this sort of work among feminist activists.Footnote ⁶⁴ The umbrella group met every couple of months and eventually found funding for a paid worker based in Liverpool to help coordinate activities, which had the effect of making the group less London-centric than it had been.Footnote ⁶⁵ For a short while, they even published a national newsletter, The Women’s Employment Projects’ Group Newsletter, featuring information about campaigns and activities sent in by groups from across the country.Footnote ⁶⁶ While the available archival material tells us frustratingly little about the activists involved, from what we know of the women of the HWEP (the best documented group), the women who took part were often well educated, though not well-off, and tended to be from activist backgrounds with an explicitly socialist feminist perspective.Footnote ⁶⁷ As we have seen, an increasing engagement with the state was a hallmark of socialist feminist praxis in the UK at this point, particularly in response to the attacks on the welfare state that were a hallmark of the Thatcher government. By contrast, radical feminists tended to be more separatist in orientation.Footnote ⁶⁸ In London, at least, the groups were racially diverse, although it is unclear whether this was the case elsewhere.Footnote ⁶⁹

The project archive and newsletters provide a clear picture of an active voluntary and grant-aided feminist sector for promoting women’s employment in towns and cities across the country. Not all of this activity was focused on women without work, but much of it was informed by the context of mass unemployment. “Silver Needles,” for example, was a women’s clothing cooperative set up in the underprivileged district of The Manor in Sheffield, partly because, as the project workers explained, “we knew that women’s unemployment was somehow seen as less important than the alarming rise in male unemployment.”Footnote ⁷⁰ In Swansea, the Equal Opportunities Commission funded the Swansea Women’s Equality and Employment Project, where a worker was employed to see how discrimination and inequality affected young women, triggered by the realization that very few young women were using local youth unemployment services and that “very little is known about female unemployment.”Footnote ⁷¹ In Calne in Wiltshire, over a hundred women who had been made redundant from a local meat-processing factory were retrained on machine knitters.Footnote ⁷² Training centers for women were set up by feminists across the country, in locations as diverse as South Glamorgan, Bristol, Leeds, Lambeth, and (as we shall explore in further detail) Haringey and Deptford.Footnote ⁷³

Such groups were funded by a range of bodies that were ultimately part of both the national and local state, including local councils, the Manpower Services Commission, and the Equal Opportunities Commission. Unsurprisingly, given its reputation as a supporter of progressive causes, the Greater London Council (GLC) was a particular supporter of such initiatives. In 1982, for example, it funded the printing of three hundred thousand leaflets to publicize the issue of women’s unemployment. These “told women of their rights to sign on and claim unemployment benefit and to secure their future rights to maternity, sick and pension payments.”Footnote ⁷⁴ The GLC consistently supported and funded women’s employment, training projects, and signing-on campaigns; it had its own Women’s Employment Project Team to facilitate such activities.Footnote ⁷⁵ Not all councils were as overtly supportive, but Merseyside County Council and Sheffield City Council both gave money to women’s employment projects in their respective areas.Footnote ⁷⁶ As such, these groups tell us much about the ways in which feminist activists—who often came from a very leftist, anti-state ideological position in the 1970s—came to be more willing to take state money. This accommodation with the state could be uncomfortable and was not without its ironies and contradictions. I trace here particularly the activities of the Liverpool, Lewisham, and Haringey groups for two reasons. First, they left behind far more significant publications and archives than most groups that were part of the WEPG; second, the local contexts in which they were operating meant that they were particularly concerned with issues of women’s unemployment.

Local contexts: London and Liverpool

The thriving service sectors of the late 1980s in the capital can obscure just how badly London was affected by deindustrialization.Footnote ⁷⁷ Alongside the decline of the docks, the collapse of the city’s light industrial base over course of the 1970s caused considerable economic distress and dislocation for the city’s working-class residents. The recession of the late 1970s and early 1980s spread that misery further into the service sector. Lewisham, a borough in South-East London, and Haringey, a borough in North London, both felt these effects acutely. As inner London boroughs, they were characterized by extremes of poverty and wealth, population flux, and significant migration from Britain’s former Commonwealth possessions.Footnote ⁷⁸ They were both hit by the deindustrialization of London in the 1970s, and saw a significant shift in their economic base toward service industries over the course of the 1970s and 1980s.Footnote ⁷⁹ By 1981, the official overall unemployment rate for Haringey was 10.7 percent—9.4 percent for women and 15.6 percent for men—though the Haringey Women’s Employment Project believed that women’s unemployment was under-registered by about a third.Footnote ⁸⁰ In Lewisham, unemployment rates in 1981 were running at 10.2 percent,Footnote ⁸¹ with a third of the borough’s 12,000 registered unemployed residents being women.Footnote ⁸²

Liverpool was particularly badly hit by the unemployment crisis of the later 1970s and 1980s. It frequently had the highest unemployment rates in the country and became something of a byword for the social dislocation that was attendant upon deindustrialization and economic restructuring. Even using government statistics—which, as we have seen, worked to substantially understate joblessness—the city’s unemployment figures were astonishing, with the official rate hovering around 20 percent for much of the 1980s.Footnote ⁸³ David Alton, the Liberal MP for the Mossley Hill constituency, told the House of Commons in July 1983:

As he noted earlier in his speech, in the Liverpool area at that time, about 88,000 people were registered as unemployed and only 2,025 jobs were advertised as available.Footnote ⁸⁵ Yet there was worry among the city’s feminist activists that, among all the concern about the collapse of Liverpool’s economic base, the plight of the city’s women had been forgotten. Initiatives around female unemployment in Liverpool began in the early 1980s, when a succession of projects were set up by feminists in the city to try and address the problems facing women, partly sparked by a conference held by the Equal Opportunities Commission in the city in October 1981.Footnote ⁸⁶ In November of that year, a Women’s Employment Research Group (WERG) was founded, funded by local philanthropist John Moores. The aim of the project, the women wrote, “was to try to discover any areas of job opportunity that local women could be trained [sic] to fill,” but opportunities were thin on the ground in Liverpool at this point; they noted that “seven firms contacted in the first stage of the project had closed down before the project ended: others have closed down since.” Footnote ⁸⁷ The project thus began to investigate what training was available for women who wished to re-enter the labor market.

Attempting to bring together these various initiatives in March 1982, organizers convened the inaugural meeting of the Liverpool Women’s Employment Group for women who were interested in “trying to get something off the ground” as regards employment in the city.Footnote ⁸⁸ During 1982, this group gained funding from the Equal Opportunities Commission and Merseyside County Council to start the Merseyside Equal Opportunities Project (MEOP), which it then ran concurrently. A document titled “The Project: It’s [sic] background,” maintained that the impetus to apply for money stemmed from a concern for women’s unemployment:

The MEOP project began in January 1983, with one, and later two, funded workers, and was based at the city’s Trade Union, Community and Unemployed Resource Centre in Hardman Street.Footnote ⁹⁰ Rather than undertaking practical action in the form of giving advice to unemployed women, MEOP became extremely focused on research, undertaking a study on gendered workplace discrimination in Liverpool City Council.Footnote ⁹¹ Worth noting, too, is the admission that women’s jobs were not just being lost in industry, but in the service sector too; and there were long-running feminist concerns about the impact of the introduction of computers on the clerical sectors that were largely pink collar employers.Footnote ⁹² These issues shaped the training that feminist groups sought to offer women, with computer courses being a common option alongside the training in manual trades that such activists felt women were prevented from accessing.

For the London projects too, concern that women’s specific issues in relation to unemployment were being forgotten sparked their initial beginnings. The Haringey Employment Project was formed by local activists in 1979, and funded by the Manpower Services Commission, and then re-founded in 1981 as Haringey Women’s Employment Project, funded by an eclectic mixture of the Equal Opportunities Commission, Haringey Council, and the European Economic Community Social fund.Footnote ⁹³ Across the city at a similar time, the Lewisham Women’s Employment Project also began, funded by the Equal Opportunities Commission “to increase and improve job and training opportunities for women living in the borough.”Footnote ⁹⁴ Both aimed to address the problems facing women and employment at a time when London’s economy—like that of the UK as a whole—was facing industrial contraction and restructuring.

The two projects joined forces in the early 1980s to produce the joint booklet Women, Where Are Your Jobs Going? In the introduction, tellingly titled “Unemployed women: not seen and not heard,” they argued that there had been a sharp rise in women’s unemployment. Yet they feared that women’s unemployment had not been taken as seriously as men’s “because it is not visible either in statistics, on the dole queue, or generally in people’s understanding of unemployment.” Men, they argued, were still commonly regarded as “the prime breadwinners” and thus the problems of unemployed women were rarely considered “drastic.”Footnote ⁹⁵ The Haringey Women’s Employment Project undertook several surveys on the problems of women and unemployment in the borough over the 1980s, and developed a significant infrastructure, as evidenced by its extensive archive. By the mid-1980s, over 50 percent of the project team were Black women.Footnote ⁹⁶ Unsurprisingly, they were particularly alive to the racial stratification of unemployment, undertaking in 1984 a survey that compared the position of Black and white women in the borough: this found that Black women tended to be unemployed for longer.Footnote ⁹⁷ The group in Lewisham published its own survey of female unemployment in 1980, titled Lewisham’s Wageless Women: The Invisible Unemployed. In another publication focused on training opportunities, the Lewisham group demonstrated a similar concern with the lack of recognition of women’s unemployment, writing that “Historically the accepted definition of ‘full employment’ has never assumed this right for women.”Footnote ⁹⁸

In seeking to expose the problem of women without work, however, the activists in these groups did not just want to suggest that unemployment was simply a matter of women losing jobs. As the Lewisham Women’s Employment Project argued, “the concept of unemployment needs radical re-definition if campaigns with the women’s movement, community groups and the trade union movement are to even begin to deal with the problem of unemployment among women.”Footnote ⁹⁹ Such groups thus sought to reframe unemployment in broader terms as an issue of women’s access to the labor market. In this reading of unemployment, the issue was not simply losing one’s job. Rather, the focus was on what terms women could enter the labor market in the first place, and the jobs for which they were able to compete. This more holistic understanding of unemployment had profound implications for the way in which these groups campaigned. As well as drawing attention to women’s job losses, women’s employment groups began to campaign on issues of women’s access to training to be able to access a wider range of jobs, including jobs traditionally coded as “male,” and on the poor provision of childcare that prevented women from going out to work in the first place.

Lewisham, Haringey, and Liverpool women’s employment projects

The Lewisham, Haringey, and Liverpool groups sought to address these issues in numerous ways, with new training schemes for women first among them. Born from a long-standing feminist desire to desegregate the labor market, these groups sought to develop different models of training that would equip women with new skills, allowing them to compete for a wider range of jobs. Many of these schemes originated in fears that women were being prevented from accessing government training schemes. There were significant concerns about the ways in which Job Centres—as labor exchanges had by this point been renamed—actively prevented women from applying for jobs or training in occupations that were seen as male. Both the Haringey and Liverpool groups were concerned about women’s treatment in these spaces. One woman claimed in a conference held in Haringey to discuss women’s employment issues that local Job Centres were unsupportive of women wishing to work in jobs traditionally deemed as “male.” “The hidden assumptions and stereotypes about the future roles of girls as primarily ‘wife and mother’,” she argued, “influences the careers and training advice,” as staff often steered women away from training programs offered in the manual trades.Footnote ¹⁰⁰

The Women’s Employment Group in Liverpool also decided to campaign on the subject of women’s poor treatment in Job Centres.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Again, the focus here was on the tendency of Job Centre staff to not consider women for jobs or training usually culturally coded as male, with one activist suggesting that “judgements were made by the Job Centre staff … on a very arbitrary and judgemental basis.”Footnote ¹⁰² One young woman particularly criticized the Careers Office (a service for school-leavers), suggesting that:

As a follow-up to these experiences, members of the group were urged to go into Job Centres and “ask about some kind of non-traditional training they can offer and how helpful/not they are.” The group also resolved to write to the Liverpool Echo to solicit the experiences of women from across the city so that they had a bank of tales to draw on.Footnote ¹⁰⁴

Access to training for women was seen as fundamentally important by many of these groups. Lewisham Women and Employment Project in their pamphlet, Women and Work? Who Said Opportunities? argued that for women, being in paid employment was “the most viable means of asserting their independence,” and therefore it was imperative that training in non-traditional skills that allowed for higher-paid employment should be opened up to them.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ For these groups, rooted in the anti-capitalist critiques that were the lifeblood of socialist feminist theorizing, employment training in the form that it was provided by the state could only be seen as servicing the needs of both capital and patriarchy; it could never truly assist women. One report produced on “Training for Skills” by the Haringey project argued that such courses gave “little scope for learning transferable skills and for personal development.”Footnote ¹⁰⁶ The Merseyside Equal Opportunities Programme critiqued the Youth Training Scheme (YTS) on similar grounds, complaining that it was geared exclusively to “the needs of the labour market and the labour market of a capitalist production system.”Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Training could only be seen as legitimate if it served to develop the individual, rather than the economy; there was also a more widespread skepticism on the left that the essential purpose of government training schemes was to massage unemployment figures.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ In such respects, these activists were alive to a similar set of worries around the frequently exploitative nature of the work that was open to women that had so concerned socialist feminists such as Mackintosh, Himmelweit, and Taylor in the 1970s. By providing training that opened up the sort of work that women could access in the first place, they could feel that they were not simply campaigning for the right for women to be in low-paid, exploitative jobs.

Reading the material that was produced by these projects, it can be difficult to remember that they were often funded by some of the very same state organizations they sometimes sought to critique. Ursula Murray described the HWEP’s work as “provocative action research that ‘bit the hand that fed it’.”Footnote ¹⁰⁹ How the need to keep funding bodies onside came to shape the policy papers and documents that these organizations wrote is difficult to assess, but it seems significant that this sort of political invective was less present by the mid-1980s. Feminists themselves often felt deeply ambivalent about taking taxpayers’ money, recognizing that it both enabled feminist projects to take place, but professionalized feminism and placed a limitation on how radical activists could be.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Feminist activists Irene Bruegel and Hilda Kean noted that, “[t]hose who had previously criticised the state from outside its parameters were ‘incorporated’ in different ways, suggesting that there were ‘few’ feminists ‘who were untouched by the GLC and other local councils’.”Footnote ¹¹¹ Some were left uneasy by this process: most were open-eyed about the compromises that greater state involvement with feminism brought. Greater London Council worker Lynne Harne remembered that there seemed to be “a watering down of autonomous and radical women’s liberation politics in order to meet the grant conditions set by a male dominated bureaucracy”; yet local government funding also gave groups “a stability they could not have had while they depended solely on the political commitment of volunteer women who would get burnt out.”Footnote ¹¹² The provision of state money thus compelled these projects to act in imperfect ways that were necessarily constrained by the (capitalist, sexist, racist) context in which they found themselves.

Such dynamics were to fundamentally shape the work of these employment projects. As Adam Lent has argued, the receipt of funding in the 1980s curtailed the radicalism of such activists, with “activities emphasising voluntary sector-type support services” becoming the favored approach.Footnote ¹¹³ A structural ambivalence was at play here, with the constraints of funding resulting in such groups replicating as well as resisting the logics they were contesting, a dynamic that sociologists have recently argued characterizes social action under neoliberal forms of government.Footnote ¹¹⁴ We have seen some of the skepticism that these groups had toward the ends to which training could be put; yet, with the small amounts of money available, and in the political context of the time, they were caught in a bind: there was little else they could do but provide training, of a form they hoped was different to that currently on offer. It was the provision of this money that allowed project workers to create the schemes, courses, and plans that necessarily adapted themselves to context, and that—as we shall see—could align surprisingly well with the Thatcherite emphasis on the need for the individual to become more fit for work.

The “Training and Education for Women and Girls” conference held by the Haringey project in July 1982 demonstrated well the direction that these groups increasingly began to take.Footnote ¹¹⁵ The rationale for the link they saw between women’s unemployment and greater training was explained in the program in an abstract for the session on “women’s unemployment and the need for re-training opportunities”:

Training became central to the mission of Haringey Women’s Employment Project by the mid-1980s—in this, it mirrored the trajectories and preoccupations of other groups. In 1983, the Haringey Women’s Training and Education Centre was set up; by 1984, it had already provided training for 400 women, with courses on plumbing, electrics, carpentry, computing, and “science and technician” skills.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Eventually, there was even a newsletter for the Training and Education Centre, The Haringey Lynx.

Despite their skepticism about the political and economic uses to which training could be put, the HWEP was nevertheless determined to provide alternative and improved training that better suited women’s needs, which would also help desegregate the labor market. In a 1985 report, the HWEP explained that women’s workshops were being set up to provide training in “non-traditional” skill sets. Here, the report claimed, women could train in a “supportive environment without having to cope with male prejudice, or subtle ways of undermining by the ‘strong’ and ‘confident’ sex.” The “co-operative atmosphere” of these workshops, the report asserted, “provides supportive surroundings for women to gain skills in those trades that were previously controlled by men.”Footnote ¹¹⁸ In Lewisham, training was also to become central to the project’s raison d’etre. By 1982, the group was putting their energies into setting up women’s only courses in the Manpower-run Skills Centre in Deptford to retrain women in a variety of “craft training”—“heating and ventilating, plumbing, carpentry, fast food service, domestic appliance servicing, radio and television, motor mechanics, etc.”Footnote ¹¹⁹ Aided by a £24,500 grant by the GLC, they were ultimately successful in setting up these courses, though only after several battles.Footnote ¹²⁰

Similarly, in Liverpool, in 1982, a small group of women led by local activist Dee Coombes was trying to use the Community Enterprise Project (a government job creation scheme) to finance a Women’s Building Project, in which it was envisaged that women would be provided with paid on-the-job training in construction skills such as draft insulation.Footnote ¹²¹ As well as wanting to alleviate unemployment, there was a clear desire here to provide women with the sort of skills that were traditionally male. Significantly, they envisioned the project being located in Liverpool 8—the racially diverse district of Toxteth, which was known particularly for its high levels of deprivation.Footnote ¹²² While the Liverpool project rarely commented overtly on matters of race (and seems, as far as it is possible to tell, to have been a project run by white women), this positioning suggests that the Liverpool group, like the Haringey and Lewisham groups, was alive to the particular problems faced by Black women.

There was significant scoping done on the viability of this project, and a small grant was received from Manpower to try and get the scheme off the ground.Footnote ¹²³ As a condition of eligibility for the Community Enterprise Programme, applicants had to demonstrate that they had been seriously looking for work beforehand—something that was only possible to do if the applicant had signed on at a Job Centre. But, as we have already seen, women were less likely to sign on than men, as the group was well aware. They discussed this issue at length in their report.Footnote ¹²⁴ The group was further aware that many women had abandoned the search for a job because of the “scarcity and high cost of childcare, and the low wages for the work available to women in the area,” understanding that it was not economically viable to work if wages did not cover the expense of childcare.Footnote ¹²⁵ Here again we see the issues at stake were not simply a lack of jobs per se, but also the structural barriers preventing women accessing the labor market on the same terms as men. Similar concerns about childcare also featured in campaigns of the Haringey group, with a conference on “Childcare and Work” held in April 1980, and a leaflet published in the same year. “We want to work …but who’ll look after the kids?”Footnote ¹²⁶ Two thousand copies of this leaflet were distributed locally, with the pamphlet emphasizing “the high proportion of women who in addition would seek employment if good childcare facilities were available, and by implication the unregistered and unrecognised levels of female unemployment.” Footnote ¹²⁷

Ultimately, the Liverpool project foundered on the lack of money that the Manpower Services Commission (MSC) had to invest in more Community Enterprise schemes, and (perhaps) its lack of interest, indicative of the difficulties that feminists faced when trying to formulate schemes that suited the needs of women.Footnote ¹²⁸ More successful in bending Manpower to their will were the Lewisham group, who had a long battle with their local MSC about the need to provide a creche (childcare facility) for the women undertaking courses at the Deptford Skills Centre. This they eventually won, though not before Conservative ministers themselves had intervened to try and prevent the provision of childcare during the training period.Footnote ¹²⁹ The argument of Manpower—and by extension, the government—against creches was that providing them would not replicate the actual conditions of the workplaces, and that it was pointless to train women who would not be able to join the labor market because of a lack of childcare.Footnote ¹³⁰ This further indicates the barriers women faced in retraining, even from government bodies who had identified training women for the workforce as a key objective.

Despite these difficulties with official bodies, one of the ironies of this activism was how the enthusiasm of various women’s employment projects for training was mirrored by government policy. Political scientist William Walters has argued that in late twentieth- century Britain, unemployment was conceptualized “as a question of individuals and communities which lack the skills and the capacity to adapt to the ‘information-economies’ of the coming century.”Footnote ¹³¹ Both the women’s employment projects and the Thatcher government drew on these logics, which conceptualized unemployment as a problem of a lack of adequate skills for the job market. In 1980, for example, a briefing for then Minister of State for Employment Lord Gowrie to a meeting of the Advisory Committee on Women’s Employment stated that particularly in the manufacturing industries, it was “people with no or few skills to offer” who were the most vulnerable. “There are large numbers of women in this category,” it was insisted, “and it is important for them to take opportunities to acquire higher skills, particularly in those areas where the economy is likely to expand.”Footnote ¹³² Notwithstanding the ideological gulf between the Thatcher administration and the socialist feminists this article has examined, the 1980s were characterized by a veritable mania for training women for the labor market from both governmental and non-governmental bodies across the political spectrum. This is doubtless one of the reasons why feminist projects found funding from the state in the first place. As we have seen from the issues that faced the Deptford Skills Centre, there were good reasons why feminists often felt that the delivery of government training projects failed women; but government interest was nevertheless there. Indeed, in October 1979, the Women and Training Unit was set up by the Manpower Services Commission, producing from 1980 onwards its own newsletter, Women and Training News.Footnote ¹³³ Training, of course, was easily as amenable to capitalist economic models as socialist ones, and training up women could also be seen as a way of fully exploiting the human resources at the disposal of the national economy.

Perhaps most exemplifying the surprising ways in which government and feminist agendas could come together, in 1989, on the tenth anniversary of the launch of the Women and Training Unit, Employment Minister Patrick Nicholls argued that it was still the case that “women’s occupational choices are limited by a stereotypical view of the opportunities available to them.” “I believe the main issue is expectations,” he continued, “employers’ expectations of the work that women can and can’t do; teachers’ and trainers’ expectations; and, perhaps most important, women’s expectations of themselves.”Footnote ¹³⁴ That these words could have been as easily spoken by an employment project activist as by a Conservative politician suggests how easy it was for the discourse of feminist employment activists to be politically co-opted into the service of a range of ideologies. “Training” became the dominant mode through which a solution to the question of female unemployment was envisioned because it fitted two apparently contradictory ideological agendas. First, that of the Conservative government, in which—as Bernhard Rieger has shown—unemployment was frequently characterized as a result of individual shortcomings, and second, the feminist desire to desegregate the labor market and facilitate women’s entrance into the workplace.Footnote ¹³⁵

What, then, were the longer-term trajectories of these projects? The National Women’s Employment Projects Group only had a funded worker until the end of January 1984, when its newsletter also came to an end; no records of the group exist after this point.Footnote ¹³⁶ The Merseyside Equal Opportunities Project ultimately wound up in 1986, after funding from the Equal Opportunities Commission came to an end (the project had only been given a two-year term) and the alternative funder, Merseyside County Council, was dissolved in the local government reforms that abolished the metropolitan county councils, long seen as a left-wing thorn in Thatcher’s side. Other attempts at finding alternative funding sources came to naught.Footnote ¹³⁷ It is not possible to trace exactly when the Lewisham groups ended, but the women’s courses in Deptford Skills Centre were finished in December 1986, though not before considerable acrimony between the feminists running the courses and the MSC eventually resulted in an inquiry into sexism and racism at the Centre.Footnote ¹³⁸ The Haringey group was the longest lasting of all women’s employment project groups of this era, thanks largely to a supportive local council. As the 1980s went on, it became ever more focused on providing training of all sorts for women, until the project finally came to an end in 1990.Footnote ¹³⁹

It is difficult to assess the achievements of these initiatives. The MEOP themselves admitted that “as with most information/promotion/support type projects, success is hard to measure.”Footnote ¹⁴⁰ We have no statistics about the eventual employment outcomes of women who attended the courses of the Haringey and Deptford training centers; as we have seen, the proposed training project at Liverpool failed to get off the ground. The very existence of a Training and Education Centre in Haringey for nearly a decade was a huge achievement for a small feminist group, and doubtless the local women who used their services were equipped with useful skills. Members of the Haringey group also suggested that many of the project’s gains were intangibles that could not be measured, such as increasing women’s confidence, and shifting wider cultural attitudes about the ability of women to take on work traditionally coded as male.Footnote ¹⁴¹ Fundamentally, though, training was an individual answer to an economic crisis that required larger solutions. In and of itself, training might have allowed a few women to compete on more equal terms with men for jobs, but it could not create jobs where there were none. It seems that the immediate focus on providing women with skills for the workforce functioned in some ways to neuter the socialist feminist project of reimagining work itself; it is striking how these projects moved away from a thorough-going critique of women’s relationship to the labor market toward a more streamlined focus on training (certainly in the case of the Haringey and Lewisham projects). Rather than fundamentally changing economic models, these projects turned to the aim of equipping women with the skills they needed to negotiate the existing labor market as best they could.