Gwen White and Grace Winstanley have been friends for years. Like the non-political housewives of James's and Costa's polemic, White says: "We would never have thought we could have done what we did during the strike."

Before the strike White was a working housewife. She'd never been a "stayer-homer" and had always worked. But a meal was always on the table when her husband returned from the pit.

They started going to WAPC meetings and it gave them a new-found confidence. After a four-day sit-in at Markham colliery Gwen remembers emerging tired but exhilarated to "millions of people, there were flowers sent from all over the world. There's a photograph of us coming out.

"I'd never seen flowers like it."

After the strike Gwen was invited to speak in the US, doing a whistle-stop tour of 14 states in as many days.

"I learned to stand up for meself," she says. "I learned. It taught me a lot of things, like Greenham peace movement - I'd never had anything to do with them.

"It learned me all about that. I learned a lot."

Gwen loved picketing. The leaky minibus they commandeered meant that the women sat under umbrellas when it rained.

They couldn't wear their WAPC T-shirts in case the police stopped them. Gwen recalls: "They used to ask us 'where are you going?' and we'd say: 'Strawberry picking'.

"They'd go: 'You're not.' They used to wait until they saw women and they would take the keys off the driver.

"They used to photograph number plates." Women felt intimidated, but they carried on.

Grace originally came from Swansea at the age of 22, one of three Welsh girls who married into a Yorkshire mining family.

She's 82 now. During the strike she would come home from work, get tea on the table and tell her daughter to wash up while she went to meetings.

At first her husband was riled. "I'm telling you now, you're going to get bloody locked up," he told her.

Grace wasn't bothered. She carried a book to read in case she was.

Her children would whisper to her: "Don't listen to me dad, get on with it."

Eventually her husband came round and would say: "Go, go, go." After the strike he told her: "You've done something there I didn't think you'd ever do."

Many women felt their partners had more respect for them as a result of the strike. But other marriages fell apart.

"They said it was because of the strike," Gwen observes, "but I said the marriages couldn't have been solid before the strike. Everybody went through the same thing so why blame the strike?

"They must not have been strong enough."

All the women feel that those who got involved in WAPC changed for the better.

Gwen's husband told her she was not the woman he married. She said that was down to her, not the strike. They remain happily married.

"Jean, it's opened my eyes," Gwen told Miller after the strike.

"Before this strike I could never find a pen to write anything down. Now I've got me own pen and I use it.

"We weren't really what you'd call educated. But we realised that we were just as important as them that had gone to universities and that."