What about the Women?

Abstract

In 1984 the journalist Bea Campbell, in her book, Wigan Pier Revisited, returned to the area made famous decades earlier by George Orwell. In revisiting working-class life and communities in the 1980s, she laid bare a history of women in the area that had not been told. She argues on the basis of many conversations with women, recorded in the book, that ‘much of the good old values rested on the weary labours of women whose economic, social, sexual, cultural and political interests (we) re yet to be given any political primacy’ (p. 225). What she uncovered was a male domain in which women were largely excluded from work and industrial politics, which was understood as the men’s preserve, and that men spent little time in the house and did no domestic work. Thus, what provided a central sense of continuity for the communities was the unpaid domestic work of women. Moreover, Campbell accuses men of being heavy handed and dictatorial at home – the only place they could be masters, making the women their virtual servants.