Just days into the miners'' strike of 1984-1985, a few women in coalfield communities around Britain began to meet to consider how they could support the strike, a clash with the Thatcher government over the future of the coal industry. Women ultimately formed a national network of groups that some observers saw as an ''alternative welfare state'', helping to keep the strike going for just under a year. This book is the first study of this national movement,illuminating its achievements, but also telling the less well-known story of arguments and divisions with men in the National Union of Mineworkers and feminists in the women''s liberation movement. Many women in the movement, despite their activism, resolutely denied that they were ''political'' at all, definingthemselves as ''ordinary'' women, housewives, mothers, and workers; and, despite some claims that women activists had been transformed for ever by their experiences, most of those involved felt they had been changed only in m
