The Changing Face of the Working Class
Core ‘reading’ for this week includes watching at least one of the below films/TV programmes. This is in addition to the two specified core readings.
When watching, you must take notes on the following questions (see further seminar questions below):
- What kinds of people are being depicted as ‘the working class’?
- How is the working class depicted? Does the narrative of the films/TV resonate with or challenge some of the historical narratives about the working class that you have encountered?
- When is the film/TV made? Who made it? Who watched it? Where? Why do you think the film, TV, was made when it was? How does it bear the imprint of its own time?
- Boys from the Blackstuff [the library has several copies of DVDs of this series, or available on Box of Broadcasts]
- Made in Dagenham [The library has copies, or available on Box of Broadcasts]
- Days of Hope [Lots of episodes available on YouTube]
- Upstairs, Downstairs [The library has several copies of DVDs of this series, or available on Box of Broadcasts - please watch the 1970s series, not the 2000s sequel]
- Pride [The library doesn’t hold a copy yet, but it is available on Box of Broadcasts - this is the fictionalised account of the events discussed in the Diarmaid Kelliher core reading]
- One in Five (1972) [can view it on the Modern Records Centre website here: http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/services/library/mrc/explorefurther/filmvideo/oneinfive/]
Questions to prepare for seminar:
- What accounts for the level of strikes in the 1970s?
- What was the wider significance of the defeat of the miners in 1985?
- Did the identity of the working class change between 1950 and 1980? If so, how?
Core Reading:
- Diarmaid Kelliher, ‘Solidarity and Sexuality: Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners’, History Workshop Journal , 77:1 (2014), 240-62.
- Jack McGowan ‘Dispute’, ‘Battle’, ‘Siege’, ‘Farce’?—Grunwick 30 Years On’, Contemporary British History, 22:3 (2008), 383-406.
Further Reading:
- Jon Lawrence and Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite, ‘Margaret Thatcher and the Decline of Class Politics’ in Ben Jackson and Robert Saunders, Making Thatcher’s Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 132-47.
- Ben Jones, ‘The Uses of Nostalgia: Autobiography, Community Publishing, and Working-Class Neighbourhoods in Postwar England’, Cultural and Social History, 7 (2010), 355-74.
- Jon Lawrence, ‘The British Sense of Class’, Journal of Contemporary History, 35 (2000), 307-18.
- Mike Savage, ‘Working-Class Identities in the 1960s. Rewriting the Affluent Worker Study’, Sociology, 39 (5), 429-46.
- Richard Whiting, ‘Affluence and Industrial Relations in Post-War Britain’, Contemporary British History, 22, 4 (2008), 519-36.
- Jean Spence and Carol Stephenson, ‘Pies and Essays: Women Writing Through the 1984-1985 Miners Strike’, Gender, Place and Culture 20:2 (March 2013), 218-235.
- Hugh Pemberton, ‘The Winter of Discontent 30 Years On’, Political Quarterly, 80 (2009), 553-61.
- Eric Hobsbawm, ‘The Forward March of Labour Halted?’, Marxism Today, September 1978, 279-286 [those of you who did Making History will already have read this. If you didn’t read it first time round read it now!]