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During the 1984–1985 British miners' strike and in its immediate aftermath, women activists produced a series of publications involving creative writing, which sought to communicate the strike from their own perspective. The production and sale of publications were a practical activity in support of the strike and in defence of community. We argue that insofar as writing was also a means whereby the women who worked to make sense of themselves in an emergent situation for which there was no precedent, an analysis of such writing offers opportunities for a broader understanding of the strike. Writing enabled the women to affirm their class-based political loyalties while expressing the complexities and contradictions of gender relationships and roles. Writing as a reflexive act contributed to a clarification of those aspects of female lives which they valued, facilitated an expression of their emotional response to their experience of activism and enabled them to articulate a moral-political position within which they worked with ambiguity and contradiction. This article suggests that cultural texts of this type in themselves can only be properly understood in the context of structural and historical relations of power and that the context and conditions of production of writing are particularly pertinent to this process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A distinctively feminist youth work movement which flourished between the mid 1970s and the late 1980s has been submerged by organisational change. The feminist political critique which encouraged young women's agency has been replaced by equal opportunities policies and problem-based interventions. Documentary evidence of feminist youth work is now scattered, in danger of being lost like the history of the pre-war Girls' Club Movement which succumbed to 'mixed sex' approaches. This article is informed by the evidence in a small private archive, by empirical research with women youth workers undertaken in North-East England in 1988 and 1993 and by the author's personal recollections. It discusses how feminist efforts to enhance the agency and autonomy of working-class young women and of female youth workers were fractured in the drive towards centralised managerial control characteristic of public sector conditions after the election of the Conservative Government in 1979. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the legacy of continuing activism of women in the North East of England who organized in support of the 1984-85 miners' strike. It refers to the traditional responsibility of women in mining localities for the maintenance of neighbourhood and kin relations and using the example of a key activist in one ex-mining village, it argues that the values associated with 'mining community' remain relevant as a reference point for a self-conscious, politicized reshaping of local relationships in post-industrial conditions. The material basis for this self-conscious approach has shifted from the masculine sphere of mining work and its associated community institutions to the feminized sphere of location and neighbourhood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]