“A Strike of Girls”: Gender and Class in the British Metal Trades, 1913

Abstract

Our intent is to investigate the nature of capitalist patriarchy by writing women workers back into the story of the Black Country Strike. Conventional accounts of this important conflict in the British midlands have depicted the outcome as a “victory for the workpeople,” but such claims have failed to capture how gender hierarchies and cross‐class allegiances produced this “victory.” Specifically, we argue that unquestioned assumptions about the subordinate status of women provided the point of agreement around which working‐class men, their union, and their employers worked out their (class) differences, resulting in both the preservation of capitalism and the reassertion of male superiority and authority.