There’s a line in the anthem of Women Against Pit Closures (WAPC) We Are Women, We Are Strong by Mal Finch that states: “Where women’s liberation failed to move, this strike has mobilised.” 

The veracity of that statement is certainly evident in Anne-Marie Sweeney’s film Going Through the Change, made for WAPC, which brilliantly shows a sassy, fearless movement that has reverberated throughout the struggles of working-class women over the past 30 years. 

Perhaps, most significantly, it was not confined to the year of 1984-5 or to resistance in their own communities. 

With songs, cracking wit and unswerving principles, members of WAPC have never stopped supporting other women in solidarity and campaigning for justice for the strike’s sacked and injured miners.

As Bridget Bell, joint national secretary of WAPC, says: “It was the experience of collective strength that mattered. The film’s power is that it celebrates the uncompromising spirit of women and our political role both in the miners’ strike and in subsequent struggles. 

“It is a timeless film, not one restricted to the strike’s anniversary, but one that captures the breadth of working-class socialist feminism that is truly important and international. 

“We were so proud when Hanan Bannouram, the first woman trade union leader in Palestine and the delegation from the Ramallah Al-Amari refugee camp, said that they were not leaving England without a copy as it spoke their language.”

The film also focuses on 2004, when WAPC held an unforgettable weekend — a heady mix of politics, poetry, theatre, song, more politics, film, drinking, dancing and discussion. 

It was literally explosive, with fireworks from FBU Region No 7 lighting up the sky in celebration of the 20th anniversary of the strike. No-one remained unmoved by it.

Brenda Procter, national chair of WAPC, was one of the organisers and chaired the event. “It wasn’t about nostalgia for ’84-85,” she recalls. “We had to focus on now, not then, and we had lessons to share. 

“This was 2004 with Thatcher’s offspring Blair in charge, attacking the working class, privatising and warmongering. We brought together women, the voices we hear in our film, who were some of the most front-line and experienced campaigners in the last 30 years and we were there to get our heads together.” 

Many of the mothers and grandmothers present had been classified as enemies of the state, harassed by police, imprisoned, suffered strip searches and endured detention under the Prevention of Terrorism Act. They survived, with an extraordinary biting humour and a refusal to be intimidated.

Among the stellar cast of activists in the film are Shirley Winters from the Magnet Strike and Unshackle the Unions, whose fan base included the late Bob Crow and Malkiat Bilkhu of the five-year-long strike of Asian NHS cleaners in Hillingdon, filmed celebrating their victory against the multinationals with bhangra dance and Tony Benn.

Anne Scargill, a pit camp veteran, talks of being strip searched in a cell by an officer saying: “I’m only doing my job.” First national chair of WAPC Ann Lilburn movingly recounts, before her death, how essential international solidarity is, underlined by a Cuban women’s delegation urging support to break the US blockade.

Veteran peace campaigner Helen John from Disarming Grandmothers, Menwith and Greenham Peace camps came to warn, with terrifying foresight pre-Snowden, about state surveillance.

The effectiveness of how women organised during the strike was very much informed by feminism, as was the campaign for reproductive rights. Celebrating that axiom of the women’s movement that the personal is political, Dr Sheila Abdullah told of the battle to access to free and safe contraception and abortion for all women.

The film’s power to move lies not only in the speakers and its powerful archive footage but in the intimate engagement with the audience. It focuses on the faces of older women, so rarely studied in close-up, that express such a wealth of political experience, humour and compassion. Their response intensifies the feeling of being there, sharing the moment. 

Young women from a local high school performed a play, developed with Royston WAPC, which shows the terrible cost to striking families of injuries sustained from brutal policing at Orgreave. Passing on the torch to younger women was a major theme of the weekend and this involvement of younger women adds to the film’s optimism as does the account by Sue Mitchell from Women on the Waterfront of how her children got educated during the years of the Liverpool dock strike. 

Bernadette McAliskey, formerly Bernadette Devlin MP, was hit by seven bullets in an assassination attempt and imprisoned in her struggle for Irish civil rights. 

“We should not make the mistake of thinking that younger women will learn by osmosis because they won’t,” she says. “The WAPC are a receptacle of some of the most important knowledge about struggle on this island. The lessons that were learnt will be needed in the days and years that are coming.”

McAliskey perfectly expresses why women are, of necessity, so strong in resistance: “We’ve had to fight alongside our men and with them at the same time. We’ve had to educate them in our equality while we’ve worked with them for the equality of the whole.” 

The film brilliantly shows how years of struggle honed their wit but did nothing to dampen the passion and anger that they felt against a system that shattered communities, pushed people to the brink of despair, trampled on humanity and tore countries apart by war and occupation. 

Film-maker Anne-Marie Sweeney and the national WAPC officers screened their film to female firefighters in the FBU and she explains that though many present were not even born at the time of the miners’ strike “it was so moving to see how they loved it, completely relating it to their struggles today.”

A film as analytical and political as this is sorely needed in times such as these. 

As the WAPC’s Rose Hunter says: “In it you can see how we as ordinary working-class women were moved to do extraordinary things. It’s our history and it is there for all to see. Gob-smackingly brilliant!”

Her words are echoed by Brenda Procter: “Watching it, through the laughter and the tears, makes us dead proud and shows why the strike changed our lives and for us there is no going back.”

Tracy Walsh is academic co-ordinator for international labour and trade union studies at Ruskin College, Oxford, where she is UCU branch secretary. Dr Fenella Porter tutors in the same Ruskin faculty and is also a lecturer in international development at Birbeck College, University of London.

For further info, screenings and sales please email NWAPC chair Brenda Procter at [email protected]