WOMEN AND THE BLACKBALL MUSEUM OF WORKING CLASS HISTORY

Sue Green and I thought it would be a good idea to call an open meeting of Blackball women and anyone else interested in women’s role in the political history of the working class at the Blackball Working Men’s Club. We got a good turnout. The room was talkative, questioning and lively.
      I did a presentation arguing that active involvement by women was crucial to the history of unions, the Labour Party and the Communist Party. I also argued that the political history of the working class was more than just the history of those unions and parliamentary political parties. Working class women – and men – organised a powerful Prohibition movement which was in many ways in open conflict with unions and the left political parties. Working class women also set up or were important to other community organisations. Although we think of the mothers, wives and daughters of coal miners as toiling away all day and night in their kitchens, most of them were also busy in the streets, the shops, the halls, the pubs, the churches, the school and other centres of working class political life.
      I ended by suggesting that perhaps instead of eight huts a better plan might be for the Blackball Museum of Working Class History to build four huts telling the story of the men, and four lean-to kitchens telling the story of the women. Others in the room had a lot of other good ideas and it was clear that everybody thought equality for women goes without saying.
      The Museum of Working Class History committee when it meets again will tackle how to follow up.
 
pic: the leaders at the front of a Miners Union protest march, Blackball, 1931