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“A Strike of Girls”: Gender and Class in the British Metal Trades, 1913
Author(s) -
Staples Clifford L.,
Staples William G.
Publication year - 1999
Publication title -
journal of historical sociology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.186
H-Index - 26
eISSN - 1467-6443
pISSN - 0952-1909
DOI - 10.1111/1467-6443.00086
Subject(s) - victory , patriarchy , capitalism , class (philosophy) , gender studies , working class , sociology , class conflict , political science , law , politics , artificial intelligence , computer science
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.